During my research I have encountered several sources which have mentioned the work of the Catalan Integral Cooperative and its philosophy of “Open Cooperativism”. Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation especially promote this organization and its approach, and even helped to fund and publish an in-depth study of it, authored by George Dafermos in October 2017. Dafermos spent several months working alongside members of the CIC and conducting interviews with members. The aim of this report, “The Catalan Integral Cooperative: an organizational study of a post-capitalist cooperative”, which is the main source I am drawing from, was to answer the questions “What is the CIC?” and “How does it work?”. As I will show, the answers to both of these questions are rather more complex than you might think, and after reading the report, left me with more questions than I started with.

What Is It?

To understand the CIC and what supposedly makes it a “post-capitalist” cooperative in more than ambition, Dafermos says that the “revolutionary activist” character of the cooperative is essential, as is an understanding of its “Open Cooperativism” philosophy, which distinguishes it from both conventional businesses and mainstream cooperatives. According to Dafermos, “the main objective of the CIC is nothing less than to build an alternative economy in Catalonia capable of satisfying the needs of the local community more effectively than the existing system, thereby creating the conditions for the transition to a post-capitalist mode of organization of social and economic life.”(Dafermos, 2017). This mission is what, in my opinion, has lead to the complex organizational structure of various committees, self-employed members, exchange networks and autonomous initiatives, as members experiment with different facets of the economic and social transition from capitalism.

A traditional business-oriented worker cooperative would look at a market, search for a good or service that they could provide and build their business up from there, eventually expanding into other markets if possible. This is the “lean-startup” approach which currently dominates entrepreneurial circles in North America and elsewhere. The CIC takes this supposedly conventional wisdom, and does something entirely different, instead rapidly prototyping and supporting multiple, often wildly dissimilar business models (from hackerspaces to organic farms) and projects at the same time, with the goal of experimenting with and disrupting as many industries as possible and promoting open cooperativism within their sphere of influence.

The main work of the CIC core membership is to facilitate and fund the expansion of these projects through the system of democratic committees and assemblies the CIC uses to govern itself via consensus processes. These committees are

• Coordination – General administration and internal organization of CIC. Closest thing you’re going to find to an “executive” anything with the CIC
• Reception – Onboarding and training of new members
• Communication – outgoing comms, promotion, handling information requests, inter-cooperative networking
• IT – manages CIC servers, website and software development & support for all members
• Common Spaces – Facilities management for the AureaSocial building in Barcelona which CIC uses as its headquarters
• Productive Projects – facilitates connecting members to jobs and promoting cooperative projects
• Economic Management – provides support to self-employed members as well as manages the finances of CIC as a whole.
• Legal – Legal support to the CIC committees and its many at-large members
• Catalan Supply Center – a regional food and craft industry distribution network made up of “rebosts” or local pantries managed autonomously by various groups. The committee mostly focuses on managing the supply chain for this network as a cooperative public service.
• Network of Science, Technique and Technology (XCTIT) – develops, prototypes and licenses machines and softwares use by CIC projects and affiliated cooperatives.

Basic Income

The members of these committees, according to Dafermos, see themselves less as business-owners and more as activists. So that they have adequate free time to effectively participate, the cooperative supports members financially with a limited “basic-income” salary, paid both in Euros and a local electronic currency called “ecos”. The basic income is meant to be distributed on a basis of need for members to participate fully, and is adjusted accordingly. The highest reported amount for a member’s basic income was 765 Euros + 135 ecos per month. I did not find in the report a breakdown of how many members receive basic income, but based on the participant numbers for each committee, as of late 2017 at least 45 people recieve a good deal of their income through the program. And that is just for management. Many more people are supported by the cooperative’s many projects and programs, either in self-employment or one of many “Autonomous Projects of Collective Initiative”. The basic income program was launched after the start of CIC. Previously all members were volunteers.

Auto-Ocupados

Being self-employed, operating a private practice or a small business in Spain can be prohibitively expensive or otherwise unavailable to those without legal status or financial means to pay the fees on registration and invoicing (the minimum fee is 250 Euros per month). One of CIC’s main services is to manage legal entities that self-employed individuals and collective autonomos in Catalonia can use to surmount these barriers. All of their invoices are processed through the cooperative system, which uses membership fees of 75 Euros (adjusted for income) every three months to sustain itself. There are around 600 self-employed members, but few of them choose to be closely involved with the organizational work of CIC.

Territorial Economic Network

This component of the CIC includes some 2,500 members engaged in various kinds of work connected to the economic system managed by the CIC. The primary unit of this network is the local exchange network and its various nodes, including the consumer-run rebosts (pantries) of the Catalan Supply Center, assemblies who manage the production and distribution of ecos digital currency and the “autonomous projects of collective initiative”, independent projects and businesses that the CIC is involved in through active membership, collaboration and financial/material/legal support. These include

• A cooperative office building, AureaSocial used by CIC as its headquarters and shared with various other cooperative ventures within the CIC’s network
• CASX, a financial cooperative dedicated to providing support and interest-free financing to cooperative ventures, and ultimately aimed at attracting widespread consumer investment through a cooperative savings program
• SOM Pujarnol, a rural bed-and-breakfast and housing cooperative
• Calafou, a settlement occupying an abandoned industrial village which now produces machine fabrication, professional music recording, handmade soap, lodging and software and event hosting for concerts, festivals and conferences
• MaCUS, a collaborative machine shop which supports artists, traditional and modern craftspeople and livelihoods by allowing access to a wide range of industrial machines, including everything from a woodshop to a music studio and 3-D printers.

Aerial View of Barcelona

Inside one of the workshops of Calafou

Monthly transactions within the alternative economic network

Cooperative Public System

The CIC ultimately aims to promote the development of a “Cooperative Public System” outside the official control of the Spanish and Catalan governments as well as the capitalist market. It seeks to transition systems such as Food, R&D, Education, Housing, Health Transportation and more to a commons-based management and ownership system. Currently, the Catalan Supply Center and XCTIT are the most fully-realized aspects of this goal.

There is No Catalan Integral Cooperative

One of the most interesting facts that turned up in Dafermos’ report is the fact that although the CIC has developed a highly diverse network of legal entities to aid its projects, the CIC itself has no legal status and does not officially exist. Dafermos claims the reason for this is so that the core members have more flexibility when it comes to dealing with the state and its various bureaucratic requirements.

How Does It Work?

According to the Dafermos report, the rough financial breakdown goes like so:

Income Sources

• Member fees (50%)
• Tax refunds from self-employment loophole (50%)
• Donations (minimal)
• Revenue (Unclear in the report how much this accounts for)

Expenses

• Basic Income to CIC members
• Funding for various projects

Most of the economic activity is carried out in a decentralized fashion by the CIC’s various projects and legal entities it manages, leaving an extremely minimal financial burden for the cooperative itself, which may explain why it is able to sustain itself while supporting so many other projects. It relies on reciprocal support and benefits from the diverse cooperative institutions it collaborates with to reproduce itself. As a cooperative, it emphasizes the need for “cooperation among cooperatives” and proves that with a robust enough network, highly experimental forms can be developed into viable organizations.

Decisions are arrived at within the committees through consensus-based democratic processes, and the general membership is organized through assemblies for coordination, which operate on similar principles. Assemblies are organized for individual projects, as well as for coordination between projects. Some committees and assemblies have limited authority over others, such as the financial committee and CASX, which make decisions about funding and have a direct say in each other’s operations, while others are completely autonomous from the main cooperative.

Why Does the CIC Work?

By most conventional standards among cooperative businesses, it shouldn’t. And yet it does, and even appears to be growing through its own organizing and support from the governments of Barcelona and Catalonia. Why is the CIC succeeding where many other politically-motivated cooperatives have failed?

Open Cooperativism

The CIC is founded on the principle of Open Cooperativism, which states that in order to counter isomorphic tendencies (isolation, commodification and protection of intellectual property, exploitation of non-members and the environment) in cooperatives bound to the market system Co-ops must agree to

• “work for the common good” rather than just their membership
• Utilize multi-stakeholder governance
• Use and produce “commons”-based goods in their production and licensing (rather than proprietary means of production)
• Collaborate globally with the intention of leading an economic transition away from capitalism while focusing on local production and development.

Without this framework, it would be hard to imagine an organization like the CIC existing. Intense focus on collaboration and inter-cooperative reciprocity is what keeps something as decentralized as the CIC afloat.

Clever Exploitation of Tax Loopholes

Apparently, a significant portion of the income comes from tax refunds earned through the self-employment program on each member’s invoices when processed by the state.This is part of the CIC’s larger principal of Economic Disobedience. One of the CIC’s founding members, Enric Duran, became famous for taking out nearly a half-million euros in collateral-free loans from 39 banks and giving it all away in donations to anti-capitalist organizations. After announcing what he had done, Duran fled the country and went on to found FairCoop, an organization based on open cooperativism that focused on promoting global initiatives through legal, financial and technological tools.

Organizing the Self-Employed

Many have talked about organizing the self-employed and so-called independent contractors, but few have succeeded. CIC’s model proves that an extremely broad cross-industrial cooperativism may have some important updates to older models of industrial unionism, which have had a very difficult time organizing the increasing numbers of precariously employed workers in formal and informal jobs.

Diversity of Institutions

The strength of CIC comes from its widely diverse reciprocal networks of exchange. By not relying on any single income source tied to revenue, they are able to exist and experiment with relative freedom compared to more business-oriented cooperatives. Many post-capitalist and mainstream economic transition theories assume that a shift towards less and less formal employment is likely, and a further decentralization of formal employment is already occurring with video-conferencing and telecommuting becoming popular. Many worker cooperatives and labor unions are struggling to adapt to this new paradigm of labor atomization. The CIC’s response is to optimize the countervailing tendency to labor atomization, which is the general growth of the social network across industrial and shop-floor bonds and using that as its primary tool for developing the forms of a future fair and sustainable economy.

• Dafermos, George.The Catalan Integral Cooperative: an organizational study of a post-capitalist cooperative. P2P Foundation, 2017. http://commonstransition.org/the-catalan-integral-cooperative-an-organizational-study-of-a-post-capitalist-cooperative/
• Catalan Integral Cooperative (website) https://cooperativa.cat/en
• International Cooperative Alliance Co-operative identity, values & principles. https://ica.coop/en/whats-co-op/co-operative-identity-values-principles
• Kassam, Ashifa Spain’s ‘Robin Hood’ swindled banks to help fight capitalism. The Guardian, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/20/spain-robin-hood-banks-capitalism-enric-duran
• FairCoop (Website) https://fair.coop/
• Faber, Sebastiaan and Seguín, Bécquer. Welcome to Sunny Barcelona, Where the Government Is Embracing Coops, Citizen Activism, and Solar Energy.
  The Nation, 2016. https://www.thenation.com/article/welcome-to-sunny-barcelona-where-the-government-is-embracing-coops-citizen-activism-and-solar-energy/

Photo by debora elyasy

The post What on earth is the Catalan Integral Cooperative appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We talk to Brett Scott the alternative financial activist about the opportunities and challenges of transforming the economy.

Your work can be described as economic anthropology, an attempt to explore the historical origins and current approaches to economics. How cultural is our economic system?

I come from an anthropology background and one of the main ways anthropologists try to understand systems is by immersing themselves in them to understand the perspective of those involved. Sometimes that is called participant observation – participating in something while observing it. You can blend those elements in different ways: Hardcore anthropology can be weighted towards extreme participation with less structured observation, really immersing yourself. Some old-school anthropology is more weighted towards observation than participation, making it more prone to a ‘judging’ outlook.

The discipline of Economics has traditionally tried to fit economic activity into universal theories. The attempt to fit all societies over time into a single theory requires a level of abstraction that is often quite disconnected from actual practice, or how people experience themselves in economies. Anthropology, on the other hand, is more attuned to describing the differences between people – the specificities and variations – and more interested in showing the ways people have provisioned themselves over time, rather than just asserting that people have always traded as ‘self-interested agents’ on markets. In essence, Economics takes one form of economic activity, forged in a particular historical and political context, and implies that this is the only form of economic activity.

Also, economics as a discipline tends to make a strange distinction between economics and politics, as if the political sphere and economic sphere can be meaningfully separated from each other. Holistic forms of anthropology, though, would explore how different economic systems are formed in or imply different political or cultural systems – how they are all interlinked.

One of the insights that came out of anthropology and historical studies is that states cannot be meaningfully separated from our modern concept of markets. That is to say, market-based thinking was enabled by, or expanded by, modern states. Within traditional Economics, self-interest is presented as natural, timeless, and inevitable. If you look at the economist Adam Smith, he makes this assumption that people have always traded with each other since the beginning of time. Whereas, history and anthropology point out many instances of societies that do not rely on trade, or do not even have private property regimes, and that have completely alternative ways to provision themselves.

It is only in the context of modern state formations that you see the emergence of the modern conception of ‘markets’. In the time of Adam Smith, modern states had already formed and he was blind to the fact that many features of economies he was observing couldn’t really exist outside of that context. So economic anthropology and history will try to situate the economy within specific political and cultural epochs.

Modern academia has attempted to create discrete disciplines to describe and understand reality, such as politics, economics, psychology, and so on. But in your everyday life no-one experiences these things as separate from each other. You don’t experience your psychology as distinct from a decision to participate in a particular form of economic activity. They are all fused into one experience. So all economic activity is intensely cultural and political. It is concerned with the distribution of resources, your ability to act in a society. The idea that there is some realm of economic activity that is separate from culture is, frankly, bullshit.

If we change our culture, can we then transform the economy?

If you come from a strict Marxist background, you’d probably tend to say the material world conditions culture, or that the underlying relations of production support a ‘superstructure’ of beliefs and institutions. So the tendency – more or less – is to see cultural systems as being a reflection of the underlying economic situation. The question then is, “Can you change your underlying economic situation by altering your culture?” And yes, it probably is possible. But it is a complex process and I’m not sure I have a coherent answer. Within economic reform movements you have some people who say things like ‘all we need to do is make people think differently to effect change’, but that jars against the reality that every single day people need to enter an economy that has a particular structure, regardless of what they think. It’s not obvious what the link between changing people’s worldviews and changing economic structure is.

Take a look at small credit unions or local currencies. People are trying to think and behave differently – act out a different culture – but in reality they remain stuck within the vortex of a much more powerful economy. Sure, if everyone, at once, changed the way they behaved, you could probably change an economic system, but there is a huge coordination problem there. It seems more likely that change is a messy and contradictory process, driven by some things we consciously choose – like small changes in behaviour – and others that we do not, such as technological changes. It’s unpredictable. The Internet, for instance, has opened up new possibilities, but also created opportunities for new monopolies of power.

To shift the question slightly, we could ask, “How do you shift culture within a large financial institution, such as Goldman Sachs?” These institutions are huge, with like 35,000 employees. They have to go into work every day and keep doing the same thing. Even if individuals within the institution want to change their own personal behaviour, the day to day pressures and requirements won’t allow it. So if you wanted to change the culture you would have to press pause on the organisation for, say, three weeks, and then go around and convince everyone in it to behave differently. But there’s no way in hell that they can press pause, so any attempt to change culture has to happen on the fly, incrementally. But these cultures get locked into these institutions, and when it gets toxic they find it very hard to change it. Here’s an analogy: imagine you have a computer that has a load of viruses, but to get rid of them  will require a complete time-consuming reformatting. Now imagine you need to use it every day, and it’s not an option to be without it for a week, so you just keep using it. Likewise, we need to reformat financial institutions, but often we’re just superficially patching them up.

Access to capital is probably the most powerful dimension of our financial system. How can communities have more control over the circulation of capital at this stage?

The financial system as it stands, in most countries, operates at a large scale. It has centralising tendencies that give financial institutions lots of market power, and these large banks are also closely connected to government. In general, these banks find it easier and more profitable to deal with other large-scale players, directing capital to large corporations or large infrastructure projects, for example. Or else they invest in large numbers of standardised financial products that can be sold at scale, such as mortgages. They don’t have much ability, or desire, to sensitively respond to the niche needs of small-scale communities.

So how do you change that? Short of restructuring the entire system so such power does not exist, there are interim approaches such as banking regulation and reform. For example, you might lobby for quotas on banks to get them to support the real economy and smaller businesses.

Then there are attempts to bypass or augment the mainstream banks. This includes, for example, building community banking systems or municipal banks. Local banking advocates will insist that if you have a small financial institution rooted in an area, it is far more likely to serve local interests. In this debate, countries like Germany are often mentioned, as they have an older and more established system of local and regional banking. Co-operative banks are another approach. The idea is to change the ownership structure of banks to produce better outcomes, bearing in mind that co-operative banks often work at large scales and need not be local in orientation.

Then there are the local currency movements. This approach is not necessarily about accessing or raising capital, but creating economic exchange between people. This is different to raising money for a business. That said, mutual credit systems are currency systems, but they also provide access to short-term small-scale credit. They don’t solve the problem of accessing large-scale investment, but they can be very effective at allowing small businesses to trade on credit. Sardex in Sardinia is a good example.

A mutual credit system is when a network of people create an economic network and then set up a system to record when members give energy, labour or goods to another member of the network. The member who receives the labour goes negative, and the person who gave it goes positive. It’s essentially a ledger system for recording obligations between people. Members go in and out of credit and debt with each other. Over time, this is basically what a monetary system is: I contribute things, but I also needs things. When I contribute to the system I get positive credit, when I need things I am using up my credits or going into debt. This creates a cycle between members.You can create these networks with, say, 150 people, and I think they are one of the most undervalued approaches within local currency movements.

So there is local banking, local currencies, mutual credit, but there are also systems like community shares, which allow you to raise equity finance by offering shares to your local community. These have been relatively successful on a small scale.

You also have to bear in mind that is has been quite a while since there have been coherent communities in the UK. We often talk about ‘community’, but in London people often don’t know each other in their own neighbourhoods. There is a whole raft of work around community cohesion that is required before we even start to develop ways for communities to finance themselves.

I think with all of these things you have to have serious commitment. There are a lot of people trying to design local economic strategies that are volunteer-led or part-time. I’m not against small timebanks or other volunteer-led schemes, but they are not a serious challenges to the economic system. In the case of Sardex, it is a serious attempt to build a parallel currency system, and one that also integrates into the normal system. Recently I’ve become interested in the Greater London Mutual, and the network of new regional banks supported by the Community Savings Bank Association, which look like serious attempts to build local and co-operative banking.

If you can combine these alternatives with banking reform and policy changes, putting pressure on the existing banking system, you can then start to make a difference.

More recently you’ve been exploring what you call the ‘dash to a cashless society’. Could you explain how this offers new surveillance opportunities to private companies and governments, and how you understand the social consequences?

The term cashless society is a euphemistic way of saying the ‘bank payment society’. Within this system you need a bank account and you have to ask banks to facilitate payments. In a cashless society you always have to go through a financial institution.

Think about the traditional story given in any Economics course. A market is made up by two basic players – a buyer and a seller. The buyer gives money tokens to the seller who hands over tangible goods or services. In a cashless society, however, there is the introduction of a third player between every transaction – the money-passer, who moves money between the buyer and the seller in exchange for a fee. These payments intermediaries include the card companies and banks, who run the underlying infrastructure to allow this. So the ‘cashless society’ is an economic system that is predicated on every transaction passing through the banking system and groups like Visa and Mastercard.

There are a lot of institutions lobbying for this system – the banks themselves and digital payment companies who facilitate the movement of money between bank accounts. Then there is the state that can see many advantages to this. In particular it allows them to monitor all transactions. If you’re forced to use digital payment systems, all of your transactions are recorded and leave a data trail. This data can then be analysed. They are interested in this for anti-terrorism and crime detection, but also to monitor tax. There are also monetary policy interests, in particular the ability to introduce negative interest rates.

So the implications are far more than data about transactions, and it’s not just states that find this useful, but corporations, too. Large technology companies, like Google and Amazon, are trying to build payment infrastructure to expand their data monopolies and gain ever deeper insights into people’s economic behaviour. For example, big web platforms often are in the advertising business, but struggle to prove whether adverts convert into sales. So one endgame for some of these large technology companies is to discover the correlation between the adverts you see and how much you spend. So they have an obvious interest in receiving and analysing that data, and if they can track what you spend, they can also develop more efficient advertising.

Another endgame is machine learning and predictive analytics that try to predict, and ultimately steer, people’s behaviours. Banks themselves are interested in this approach, using data to influence behaviour.

There is no cashless society at present, but there is a big political push for it. In this context, it is interesting to explore crypto-currencies that create some form of counter power.

Blockchain technology has been offered up as one of the most recent transformative technologies, with use in supply chains, payment exchange, and its ability to decentralise the control of data. How do you see the political implications of this technology?

Blockchain is multi-layered. At its base, the original version, blockchain technology is essentially a means for a network of strangers to keep track of their positions relative to each other, without a central intermediary. In the case of Bitcoin, it is about keeping track of money tokens. The concept can be applied more broadly though.

Why is blockchain seen as a profound shift in technology? If you walk out in the street, right now, wherever you are, you are going to see a group of people you do not know – strangers. You don’t necessarily distrust them, but there is no easy way to extend your trust. Traditionally, the way we would deal with this is through state law – such as consumer protection laws – and big third-party institutions and corporations who mediate between these interactions. I can walk into a shop and buy something without needing to know the seller personally.

Then blockchain emerged as a technology that could facilitate transactions between people without requiring intermediary institutions. People have historically been able to do that in small-scale situations, but blockchain tech enables this at large scale. The first version of this was Bitcoin, which is a system that enables people to move tokens between each other without relying upon banks. Unlike the banking system, where transactions are recorded on private ledgers controlled by an oligopoly of banks, whose permission you require to move money around, Bitcoin is based on a public ledger that is updated by special players in a peer to peer network.

The second wave of blockchain – such as the Ethereum system – took the same concept, but moved towards developing more complex interactions between people beyond the exchange of money tokens. In particular they added the ability to deploy automated agents onto the network, which they – somewhat misleadingly – refer to as ‘smart contracts’. In Bitcoin you assume all players on the network are humans who make their own decisions about whether to send tokens. The automated ‘smart contract’ agents of Ethereum though, are like robots, forced to do certain things when members of the network interact with them. For example, if you want to raise money for a company, you can programme a smart contract to automatically send a share to someone who sends it money. To understand this, imagine a vending machine. It is an automated agent. You give it money and it gives you a drink. It has no choice. Now imagine this kind of thing in digital form. If you start to link these ‘smart contract’ entities together you can automate all sorts of interactions.

The third wave of blockchain tech – which is being hyped right now – is the corporate use of the technology. The first two waves were open systems in which anyone could join and, theoretically, everyone had the same rights. In wave three, which is known as private, closed or ‘permissioned’ blockchains, institutions or groups of institutions control who is able to join the system, and can give users different rights and powers within the system. This fundamentally changes the entire ethos. They’re just trying to make more efficient versions of business as usual. Banks, for example, already collectively run certain shared systems for things like payments, and they currently see private blockchain systems – or ‘distributed ledger technology’ – as just a more efficient way to do the same thing. So if American Express says it’s ‘using blockchain’, they’re going to be building a closed system, and this makes it confusing for the public, who often don’t know there is a difference between the open systems and closed systems.

So, to give an example, when I was working within the derivatives market, two traders would agree a deal – let’s say a trader at Goldman Sachs would do a deal with a trader at Barclays – but once they’d done that they report it to their separate back office staff, who would do all the dirty work of having to make the transfers and make sure both traders had recorded the same details about the deal. This takes time, and each bank has different systems that don’t necessarily jive with each other. So the interest for large banks is in finding ways to automate the coordination between themselves, so that they can fire all their back office staff who do the reconciliation work.

What is important here is the distinction between open public and closed private blockchain systems. That said, you could also use closed systems to launch co-operatives. If you were trying to create a co-operative version of Uber, a closed blockchain system could be very useful. So drivers could get together to coordinate themselves. So there is interesting potential.

With the Paradise Papers we are reminded again how tax policy and legislation is often written by the legal teams of large companies who are offshoring their assets and profits. This is a clear example of big finance’s political power. What are the opportunities for us to transform the policy and legal environment?

We are used to this tacky distinction between ‘states vs markets’, but I start from the assumption that there has always been a symbiosis between states and markets. The state creates the underlying structures that enable large-scale markets to operate. If you accept that, you can then think about which market players the state prioritises. Do they favour the large corporate players or the small players and ordinary citizens? This is kind of the historical battle between conservatives and labour: is the state there to facilitate the owners of capital, the CEOs, the elite entrepreneurs, or is it there to protect those with less market power, the employees and marginalised? The state is always going to be captured – the question really is who has captured it? Is it a corporate state, or a citizen’s state? This is a dynamic that goes back and forth.

I do think there are opportunities to transform the policy and legal landscape, and it has happened over the years. It is a fickle system, though. A positive policy change can be reversed by a new government, like a law to separate safe banking to risky banking that then gets repealed. In the long-term the ideal is to try build systems that do not rely on external regulation, but that have positive principles built into their DNA. I’d not give up on financial reform, but it’s difficult. I’ve just come back from spending time with Finance Watch in Brussels: they lobby for the public interest in finance, but they are outnumbered by highly paid private lobbyists that the financial industry deploys. They have to fight day to day against the odds.

In terms of the Paradise Papers, I feel there has been a political turn in the tax avoidance debate. I think there have been gains for tax justice groups. At the same time, there has also been a fatigue among the general public. We hear about new scandals frequently, but there is only so much outrage people can express. This is a long-term fight, not something you can win in quickly. So stick in there and enjoy the ride.

Alternative financial activists, such as the Robin Hood Co-operative and Debt Jubilee, use ‘traditional’ financial tools to challenge the system. How do you understand the strategic relationship between financial protest, financial reform, and the creation of new financial institutions, tools, and services?

Finance activism, financial reform, and alternative financial should, like you say, align with each other. I think they do, but those within these groups do not often attempt to overtly work together. Partially because of funding structures. If you are a critical artist exploring finance, like Paolo Cirio, his funding stream will come from arts funding bodies. And then if you’re FinanceWatch, your funding comes from NGOs and EU sources. This means they’re often having to play into different institutional spheres that don’t allow much overlap.

Also the energy required to work towards different campaigns means focusing obsessively on certain priorities. If your whole world is lobbying in Brussels or Westminster, you may become dismissive or intolerant of the direct action strategies of activists scaling the Houses of Parliament. There are cultural differences within financial reform and they don’t always recognise each other’s value. Sometimes because they are competing for media attention, funding and legitimacy.

But when I zoom out and think about how we will create financial change, I see all of these approaches playing a role. Financial activism and protest is very effective at getting media attention – Occupy Movement, Move your Money campaign, UK Uncut were very good at getting headlines and asking for extreme changes. This then creates space for more centrist organisations to draw up more technical proposals for financial reform. They come through with more palatable demands, which can create change.

The same with climate change movements. Earth First or Greenpeace open space for less overtly activist sustainable finance groups – like CarbonTracker – to come and make technical proposals. You have to zoom out to see the politics – take alternative finance platforms like peer-to-peer lending. Mainstream policymakers struggle to directly attack big banks, and may find it easier to support the alternative finance sector as a way to indirectly weaken banks. The alternative finance sector in the UK has actually been quite good at ‘playing the state’, presenting themselves as a useful alternative to address the shortcomings of the traditional finance giants.

On the extreme end of financial activism, there is little crossover with more ‘respectable’ alternative finance entrepreneurs. If you take Enric Duran, or the Robin Hood Co-op, they have no interest in reforming finance. They are trying to create parallel systems that do not rely on the current system. It’s not like the divestment campaigns, or ethical banking system, which are trying to reform the current system, and that’s an important distinction.

The divestment campaigns are an interesting case study. These campaigners are often criticised by those within more mainstream sustainable finance circles as lacking nuance or being counterproductive. But the divestment organisations have been great at driving the debate on unsustainable investment in a more public way. They actually indirectly support the work done by the technical sustainable finance community. The student activists are creating a space for more technical changes to be introduced.

Since I specialise in not specialising, it makes it easier for me to to see the points of intersection. There needs to be more people who hop between different approaches, overtly spending more time in different communities. The technology community, the localist community, the policy community, the artistic community, and so on. Hybrid approaches are often the most interesting.

Brett Scott is a journalist, campaigner and the author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money (Pluto, 2013). He writes for publications such as the Guardian, New Scientist, Wired Magazine and CNN. He is a Senior Fellow of the Finance Innovation Lab, and helps facilitate a course on power and design at the University of the Arts London.

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Follow Brett on Twitter at @suitpossum

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Published in STIR magazine no.20, Winter 2018

Illustration by Nick Taylor

The post Brett Scott on the opportunities and challenges of transforming the economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is a remarkable and inspiring movement in Spain, now involving hundreds of people in what I regard as an example of The Simpler Way transition strategy… which is primarily about going underneath the conventional economy to build our own new collective economy to meet community needs, turning our backs on and deliberately undermining and eventually replacing both the capitalist system and control by the state.

The context.

It is now abundantly clear that a just and sustainable world cannot be achieved unless consumer-capitalist society is basically scrapped. It involves levels of resource use and environmental impact that are already grossly unsustainable, yet growth is the supreme goal. The basic form the alternative must take is not difficult to imagine. (For the detail see TSW: Summary Case.) The essential concept must be mostly small, highly self-sufficient and self-governing communities in which we can live frugally but well putting local resources directly into producing to meet local needs … without allowing market forces or the profit motive or the global economy to determine what happens.

Unfortunately even many green and left people do not grasp the magnitude of the De-growth that is required. We will probably have to go down to around 10% of the present rich world per capita levels of resource use. This can only be done in the kind of settlements and systems we refer to as The Simpler Way. Most of the alarming global problems now threatening our survival, especially ecological damage, resource depletion, conflict over resources and markets, and deteriorating social cohesion, cannot be solved unless we achieve a global transition to a general settlement pattern of this kind.

For some time the Eco-village and Transition Towns movements have been developing elements of the alternative we need to build, and there are impressive radically alternative development initiatives in the Third World, notably the Zapatistas and the Kurdish PKK. But the Catalan Integral Cooperative provides us with an inspiring demonstration of what can be done and what we need to take up.

The CIC response.

Although only begun in 2010 the cooperative now involves many hundreds of people and many productive ventures, 400 of them involving growing or making things. Although there are far more things going on than those within the CIC its annual budget is now $480,000! (More on the scale later.)

It is not just about enabling people to collectively provide many things for themselves underneath and despite the market system — it is explicitly, deliberately, about the long term goal of replacing both capitalism and control by the state. These people have not waited for the government to save them, they are taking control over their own fate, setting up their own productive arrangements, food supply systems, warehouses and shops, basic income schemes, information and education functions, legal and tax advice, technical R and D, and even an investment bank. Best of all is the collectivist world view and spirit, the determination to prevent the market and profit from driving the economy and to establish cooperative arrangements that benefit all people, not just co-op members. The explicit intention is to develop systems which in time will “ … overcome the state and the capitalist system.” In other words the orientation differs fundamentally from the typical “socialist” assumption that the state has to run things.

We are in an era in which the conventional economy will increasingly fail to provide for people. What we urgently need are examples where “ordinary” people, not officials or governments, just start getting together to set set up the arrangements that gear the productive capacity they have around them to meeting their collective needs. The remarkable CIC shows that people everywhere could do this, especially in the many regions Neoliberalism has condemned to poverty, stagnation and “austerity”.

Stated principles and practices.

Note that this not just a wish list of future goals or ideals, it is mostly a list of the aims and values guiding practices that have already been implemented.

• Concern for social justice, equity, diversity, mutual support, cooperation, inclusion and solidarity, and for the common good.
• Social transformation here and now, informed by utopianism.
• Focusing on transformation of the whole of society, not just on securing benefits for members of the participating cooperatives.
• Applying resources directly to meeting the needs of people in the region, as distinct from enabling prosperity for individuals or co-op members, or stimulating economic growth.
• People contribute according to their capacity to do so.
• Getting rid of materialism. Aiming at satisfaction with “non-material living standards”. Sufficiency. “Not seeking accumulation as an end.”
• …and above all, getting rid of capitalism. Dafermos (2017) says, “The main objective of the CIC is nothing less than to build an alternative economy in Catalonia capable of satisfying the needs of the local community more effectively than the existing system, thereby creating the conditions for the transition to a post-capitalist mode of organization of social and economic life.” The long term objective is “ … to be an organizational platform for the development of a self-sufficient economy that is autonomous from the State and the capitalist market.”

The CIC is not a central agency running everything; it is an umbrella organisation facilitating, supporting and advising re the activities of many and varied cooperatives. Thus it is not like typical cooperatives wherein members focus on a single mutual interest, and work only for the benefit of members.

It is important to recognise the significance of the concept ”integral”. The word “integral” refers to the concern with, “ … the radical transformation of all facets of social and economic life.” That is, they are out to eventually bring about comprehensive social revolution. Simpler Way thinking about settlement design emphasises integration, i.e., the way interconnections between functions that small scale makes possible enables synergism and huge reductions in resource use. For instance backyard and cooperative poultry production enables “wastes” to go straight to gardens, imperfect fruit to be used, chickens to clean up garden beds, and elimination of almost all energy intensive inputs such as fertilizer, trucking and super-marketing.

The CIC is establishing projects which benefit all people in the region whether or not they are members of the CIC or associated cooperatives. “Unlike most cooperatives, the CIC develops structures and tools which are not reserved just for its members, but are accessible to everyone.” For instance non-members can use the arrangements that have been set up for providing legal advice, they can use the technologies developed, and they can use the new local currency. There are about six hundred people who are not in cooperatives but are self-employed and are able to use the services the CIC has created. Similarly the machines and agricultural tools developed for small scale producers are “…freely reproducible”, i.e., their design information is available to all free, giving anyone the ability to build them on their own and customize them according to their needs.

Thus the concern is to prevent goods being treated as commodities produced to make a profit, but to see them as things that are produced to meet needs; “… basic needs like food and health care are not commodities but social goods everyone has access to.”

To be part of the CIC cooperative projects need to practise consensus decision making and to follow certain basic principles including transparency and sustainability. Once the assembly embraces a new project it enjoys legal and other provisions and its income is managed via the CIC accounting office, where a portion goes toward funding the shared infrastructure.

The huge significance of all this could be easily overlooked. In a world where capital, profit and market forces dump large numbers into “exclusion” and poverty, and governments will not deal properly with the resulting problems, these people have decided to do the job themselves. They are literally building an alternative society, not just organising the provision of basic goods and services, but moving into providing free public services like health and transport. Note again the noble and radically subversive world view and values here; people are working to meet the needs of their community, driven not by self-interest or profit but by the desire to build good social systems. This ridicules the dominant capitalist ideology that is conventional economic theory!

The Scale.

Many people in different groups participate in varying degrees. There are about six hundred self-employed members, mostly independent professionals and small producers, who use the legal and economic services made available by the cooperative, such as insurance at less than the normal rate in Spain. There are more than 2,500 who use the LETS system. Many are involved in the Catalan Supply Center (CAC), which is the CIC committee coordinating the transportation and delivery of food and other items from the producers to the “pantries”, i.e., distribution points. In addition there are several co-ops associated with the CIC.

The headquarters of the CIC is in their 1,400 square metre building, which includes space for a library and for rent. The “eco-network” has 2,634 members. The scale and numbers are also indicated by the food distribution system described below.

Economics.

As noted above the project involves creating an economic system which contradicts and rejects the mainstream economy. It is an economy that is not driven by profit, self interest or what will maximise the wealth of those with capital to invest. There is social control over their economy, that is, there are collective decisions and planning in order to set up systems to meet community needs. People work to build and run good systems, not to get rich.

Non-monetary forms of exchange are encouraged, including free goods and services, barter, direct connections between producers and consumers, and mutual giving. The CIC regulates the estimation of fair prices, and informs producers of consumers’ needs.

There is a LETS-type currency, the ECO, which cannot be converted into euros, and cannot be invested or yield interest. About 2,600 people have accounts. Anyone can see the balance in another’s account. “The currency is not just a medium of exchange; it’s a measure of the CIC’s independence from capitalism.” There is a “Social Currency Monitoring Commission whose job it is to contact members not making many transactions and to help them figure out how they can meet more of their needs using the currency.”

The CIC’s financial operations do not involve any interest payments. No interest is paid on loans made by the cooperative. In this radically subversive economy finance is about enabling the creation of socially-necessary production, not providing lucrative profits to the rich few who have capital to lend. (The US finance industry was recently making about 40% of all corporate income.) The committee entitled ‘Cooperative of Social and Network Self-financing’ deals with savings, donations and project funding in order to “ … finance self-managed individual or collective projects aiming at the common good”. It has 155 members. Contributions to this agency earn no interest, so “… it is truly remarkable that the total amount of deposits made in the last four years exceeds €250.000.”

It is especially noteworthy that emphasis is put on the sustainability of activities, Permaculture, localism, and De-growth. National and global systems are avoided as much as possible and local arrangements are set up. As advocates of the Simpler Way emphasise, unless rich world per capita levels of resource use can be cut enormously sustainability cannot be achieved, and this requires local economies and happy acceptance of frugal lifestyles. Frugality is an explicit goal of the CIC.

The creation of commons is of central importance. There is “Collective ownership of resources to generate common goods.” That is, they seek to develop common properties for the benefit of whole communities. Some lands have been purchased by cooperatives, and some donated by individuals. Included in the category of commons are non-material “assets” such as the LETS system, the software for accounting purposes, and other services made available. Each of these is managed by a committee. “We promote forms of communal property and of cooperative property as formulas that … enhance … self-management and self-organization …” Again the intent is to develop systems run entirely by citizens and that do not involve either capitalism or the state.

One participant says, “I cultivate a garden and I hardly buy any food in euros: I acquire everything I need in the eco-network and through the CIC with the ecos I earn by selling my vegetables.” Fairs and market days are organised. “Going to the markets and the fairs is like recreation, it’s meeting up with friends and family in a spiritual sense.”

Note again the remarkable anti-capitalist element that loans are extended to assist the establishment of new ventures enabling people to begin producing … but no interest is charged. (Kennedy, 1995, estimated that in the normal economy interest charges make up 40% of all prices paid.) Another radical element is the refusal to regard things like food as commodities, that is to be produced and sold to make a profit. In seeing the point of economics as producing to meet needs they are contradicting a central taken-for granted premise of the conventional mentality.

Income.

The CIC has two main expenses: the ‘basic income’ paid to the members of its committees and the funding it provides for projects. It pays half of these expenses with fees levied on the 600 member individuals, firms and co-ops (e.g., E25/month from the self employed businesses). Most of the remaining 50% of income comes from tax refunds the CIC’s legal people are able to engineer. In addition donations are received.

“Shops”: The distribution outlets.

Many goods are distributed through the “Catalan Supply Centre”, one of the most active CIC committees. It is a network for the transportation and delivery of the products of many small producers across the entire Catalonia region. These are brought to “… the self-managed pantries that the CIC has set up all over Catalonia – twenty of them … Each one of them is run autonomously by a local consumer group that wishes to have access to local products as well as products made (by producers associated with the CIC) in other parts of Catalonia. “This system cuts out middlemen, reducing costs. The CIC currently lists more than a thousand products. “The Supply Centre provides the markets throughout the region with about 4,500 pounds of goods each month, most of which come from the cooperative’s farmers and producers.”

“Of all the initiatives, by far the most successful is the one focused on food.”

Again note the scale of operations.

The technology R and D committee.

There is a technology committee responsible for the development of tools and machines adapted to the needs of member producers. They often find that devices on sale are not appropriate for the needs of small scale or commons-oriented projects. They develop machines mostly for agriculture and small firms. These devices, “…exemplify the principles of open design, appropriate technology and the integral revolution – geared to the needs of small cooperative projects.” This committee also organizes training workshops to share knowledge. The agency occupies a 4,000 square metre site, and no longer needs financial assistance from the CIC.

Example projects.

Dafermos sketches several of the settlements and projects whereby people are coming together to set up arrangements to enable communities to apply their productive capacities to providing a wide range of things for each other.

For instance the Calafou village of twenty-two people has a housing cooperative managing twenty-seven small houses. Tenants pay €175 per month for each house. The aim is to become “… a collectivist model for living and organizing the productive activities of a small self managed community.” It has “ … a multitude of productive activities and community infrastructures, including a carpentry, a mechanical workshop, a botanical garden, a community kitchen, a biolab, a hacklab, a soap production lab, a professional music studio, a guest-house for visitors, a social centre …, as well as a plethora of other productive projects.” There is a general assembly each Sunday, operating on the consensus principle.

Members of the AureaSocial cooperative can choose to live in an affiliated block of apartments in Barcelona or at a farming commune with teepees, yurts and horses, where residents organize themselves into “families”.

Macus is a group occupying a 600 square metre space hosting a close-knit group of modern as well as traditional craft producers of wooden furniture, clothes and herbal medicine, photography, sculpture and digital music, as well as fixing bicycles and repairing home electronics.

Government.

Their form of government is a direct deliberative, participatory democracy involving decentralization, self-management, voluntary committees, “town assemblies” … and no bureaucracy and no top-down ruling or domination. Note that “direct” means more than “participatory”; all individual members meet to make (or ratify) the decisions. “Each cooperative project, working commission, eco-network or local group makes its own decisions.” Committees and fortnightly general assemblies work out mutually agreed solutions, decisions are not handed down by executives, CEOs or political parties.

In all meetings the goal is consensus decision making; there is no voting. “ In case of a predicament, the proposal is reformulated until the consensus is reached, thus eliminating the minorities and the majorities. All previous agreements are revocable.” “…the quality of the agreements is a great success, and there hasn’t been any major decision-making conflict in all these years.”

All issues are handled at the lowest level possible, as distinct from being taken by higher or central agencies. This is the basic Anarchist principle of “subsidiarity.”

There are about a dozen main committees, including Reception to handle inquiries from groups wishing to join, an Economic Management Committee, a Legal Committee, an IT Committee, and one managing Common Spaces. The Productive Projects Committee facilitates ‘self-employment’ and the exchange of knowledge and skills and helps job seekers to match their skills to jobs, using an online directory of self-managed and cooperative projects in Catalonia. That is, they have set up their own employment agency, independent of the state, and its focus is on helping people to find opportunities to get into socially useful productive activity.

“CIC committee members receive a kind of salary from the cooperative, known as ‘basic income’, which has the purpose of freeing them from having to work somewhere else, thus allowing them to commit themselves full-time to their work at the CIC.”

Creating public services.

No aspect is more remarkable than the concern to set up public services. The intention is “… to displace the centrally-managed state apparatus of public services with a truly cooperative model for organizing the provision of social goods such as health, food, education, energy, housing and transport.” The legal services, the technology contribution and the currency are also in this category. Again these are projects that are not designed by or for the members of specific cooperatives; they are services for the benefit of people in general.

One of these service operations, organized by the “Productive Projects Committee” is the employment facilitation agency mentioned above. It helps people to become “self-employed, and to share knowledge and skills enabling people to increase their earning capacity.” It makes it possible for “ … job seekers to match their skills to jobs posted by productive projects associated with the CIC …” There is “…. an online directory of self-managed and cooperative projects in Catalonia…” in which people can function using the ECO currency. Thus this committee assists people who are unemployed, without many skills and likely to be poor, to find some socially useful activity they can take up in order to earn an income. “…anyone has some abilities that they can offer to people and with that acquire what they need.”

The activities of the above mentioned supply centre constitute another public service. It enables small producers to sell their produce and many to buy what they need, without having to earn normal money.

This public service providing realm is only developing slowly, which Dafermos thinks is because Spain’s service sector is relatively satisfactory.

Problems, questions, doubts?

It is important to look for problems and faults in alternative initiatives because we urgently need to clarify what the best options are. Although I have little information apart from the Dafermos report, I am not aware of any serious problems or criticisms that might detract from its potential. However, following are some of the concerns I have come across.

Does the underlying “theory of transition” lack depth? Does the rationale derive from a comprehensive global analysis of the many alarming and terminal problems consumer-capitalism is generating, (including environmental destruction, Third World poverty, resource wars…) and is the CIC seen as the solution to them all (… I firmly believe it is the beginning of the solution.) The Simpler Way analysis of our situation includes detailed argument on the global scene; does the CIC vision extend far enough beyond setting up coops?

This involves the question of long term strategy for getting rid of capitalism. This question is studiously ignored by the Transition Towns movement …at least my attempts to get them to deal with it have failed. Their strategy is just do something, anything alternative in your town and eventually it will all add up to the existence of a beautiful, sustainable and just world. The red left rightly scathes at this; they want to know how precisely are your community gardens and clothing swaps going to lead to us taking state power and eliminating the capitalist class? Simpler Way analysis has an answer to this question; whether it’s satisfactory is another issue. It could be that CIC people also have an answer but if so it’s important that they should make it clear to us.

This leads to the need for a manual. One would hope that we can all soon benefit from a document designed to assist us to set up similar projects, especially suggesting mistakes to avoid.

Some people believe the CIC was established using funds acquired via questionable financial activities. I am not able to pronounce on this but I think it is irrelevant. What I want to focus on is the fact that the CIC now seems to be an extremely effective movement and model, one that I think could be followed with little or no funds, and that I can see no reason why it cannot thrive in the wreckage neoliberalism has wrought.

There is however an associated issue that I think requires careful thought, i.e., the role and nature of alternative currencies. The CIC uses a basic LETS system and this seems to me to be the ideal. However much effort is going into establishing another system, “FairCoin”, intended to enable new alternative economies. I am uneasy about this; it seems complex, costly to set up, a “substitution” currency (requiring normal money to purchase), and not easily capable of enabling the amount of economic activity that would occur in a whole economy. It seems to be geared to longer distance trade and in the coming world of intense scarcity and localism we won’t need much of that. It seems similar to Bitcoin in being a commodity open to speculative investment and price rises. But a sacred principle on the left is that money, labour and land should not be commodities. Above all it seems to me to be unnecessary; a kind of LETS will do.

I am also uneasy about any focus on currency; I would rather see most attention being given to getting people to understand the goals and to join the co-ops.

It is not clear to me the extent to which the success of the CIC has been due to an initial access to capital. (It is said to be self funding now.) What we want are strategies that require little or no money to set up, and I believe these are available.

Spreading the revolution.

Considerable effort is being put into “spreading the model.” “The members give talks about eco-networks, the cooperative, and social currency in various parts of the country. As a result there are seeds of integrated cooperatives in Basque Country, Madrid and other regions of Spain and France.” In 2017 the Athens Integral Cooperative began.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the significance of the CIC achievement. The scale of its activities and the good that is being done are now huge. But what is most remarkable is its subversive focus and power, and potential. To repeat, the CIC is “…an activism for the construction of alternatives to capitalism.” In my view it is one of the leading initiatives in a movement that constitutes by far the greatest threat that capitalism has ever confronted. Along with the Zapatistas, the Kurdish PKK, the Senegalese Eco-villages, and many others it is demonstrating that there is a marvellous alternative way, that it can be built by ordinary people, quickly, and without overt conflict or violence (at least not yet.). It is shredding the taken for granted TINA legitimacy and inevitability of allowing capital, market forces and profit to determine what happens to us. Above all it is showing that ordinary people can and must come together to collectively take control of their own economic and political situation, without having to depend on capital or the state.

Consider the implications for Third World development. The conventional view takes it for granted that “Development” can only mean investment of capital to crank up more business activity, more production for sale into the global economy in order to earn money to enable purchasing from it, and to create jobs. It is taken for granted that profit and the market must drive the process, meaning that it enriches the already rich and the rest must wait for trickle down…while their national resources are shipped out to rich world supermarkets. Thus about four billion are very poor and will remain so for a long time … yet the CIC is showing how quickly and easily they could implement a totally different model of development, a different path to different goals, without approval or assistance from existing state governments. Obviously even a little state assistance would make a huge difference to what could be done. In Senegal thousands of villages are moving in the Eco-village direction, assisted by the government. (St Onge, 2015.)

It is not surprising that the CIC has originated in the Catalan region. That’s where the Spanish Anarchists In the 1930’s performed miracles, establishing an entire economy on worker-cooperative lines. In the Barcelona region containing up to a million people voluntary committees of citizens ran factories, transport systems, hospitals, health clinics etc., strenuously rejecting any role for paid bureaucrats or politicians. The CIC seems to be a text book example of Anarchism … at least the variety I’m in favour of. Consider again the themes noted above; citizens coming together to turn their backs on the market system, the capitalist class and central government, and on any form of top-down rule, and resolving to govern themselves, setting up arrangements for collective benefit, using thoroughly direct and participatory processes that do not involve bureaucrats or politicians of superior authorities, striving for consensus decisions, subsidiarity and spontaneity, thereby “prefiguring” ways they want to become the norm in the new society. This is precisely what The Simper Way vision has been about for decades, and it is the only way the required revolution can come about.

Consider the built-in but easily overlooked wisdom. The inclusiveness and empowerment of all and the prioritising of arrangements that attend to the needs of all generate community morale, public spirit, enthusiasm and willingness to contribute. Thus synergism is increased; for instance giving is appreciated and generates further generosity. Motivation is positive: doing good things like joining a working bee or giving away surpluses is enjoyable, not a burdensome duty. Contrast this with present competitive, individualistic, winner-take-all society which often forces us into situations that do not bring out the best in us.

The power to release resources and spiritual energy is also easily overlooked. My study of an outer Sydney dormitory suburb (TSW: Remaking Settlements) found that by reorganising space and use of time the suburb might be able to produce a high proportion of its own food and other needs, while dramatically reducing resource and environmental impacts. Consider the fact that if people in the suburb gave only two hours a week to community working bees, rather to watching trivia on a screen, the equivalent input of 150 full time council workers would be going into community gardens etc. And they would be much more happy, conscientious and productive workers than council employees, and community familiarity and solidarity would be generated.

And then there are the consequences for the personal development of citizens. Bookchin pointed out the profound educational benefits the Ancient Greeks saw when every individual had the responsibility of participating directly in the process of government. This means that there is no government up there to do it for us and we had better take responsibility for thinking carefully, discussing ideas, considering the good of all, being well informed, …or w might make the wrong decisions and have to live with the consequences. If we take a long historical perspective it is evident that accepting being governed, ruled over, represents an immature stage of political development; we will not have grown up until we all take part in governing ourselves, in direct and participatory ways.

Also easily overlooked is the significance of empowerment. Ivan Illich stressed the passivity and lack of responsibility characteristic of consumer society. Your role is to obey the rules set by others. If something goes wrong it’s up to some official or professional to fix it. As I see it the crucial turning point in the Transition Towns process is the shift from being a passive acceptor of the system designed and run by unseen others, to seeing it as your system and if its not working well it’s a problem you worry about and want to do something about. Good citizens have the sense of owning their communities, of knowing that they share control over what’s going on and willingly sharing responsibility for making things work well. In other words they feel empowered. “This is this my town. I’m proud of it. If there’s a problem that’s my/our problem, let’s get at it.” This seems to be a strongly held orientation among CIC participants.

All this clarifies the distinction between Eco-socialist and Eco-Anarchist perspectives. Both recognise the need to transcend capitalism but the former assumes the transition must come through the taking of state power and then “leadership” by the state. But fundamental to Simpler Way analysis is the fact that when the realities of limits and scarcity are grasped it is clear that the alternative society must be extremely localised, not centralised, that it cannot be established or run by the state, and that it can only work satisfactorily if it is run by communities via participatory means. Although there will always be a role for some central agencies it will be a relatively minor one as most of the decisions and administration will (have to) be handled down at the small community level. Note again that the CIC emphatically rejects the state as a means for achieving or running the new society.

The Simpler Way vision of a workable and attractive alternative society (See TSW: The Alternative) is sometimes criticised as unachievable because it is unrealistically utopian. The existence of the CIC demolishes that criticism. Its significance cannot be exaggerated; it and related movements are showing that the path that has to be taken if we are to get to a sustainable and just world can easily be taken.

——–

• CIC website. https://cooperativa.cat/en/
• Dafermos, G., (2017), The Catalan Integral Cooperative: an organizational study of a post-capitalist cooperative”, Commons Transition, 19th Oct. https://cooperativa.cat/en/george-dafermos-publishes-his-report-about-catalan-integral-cooperative/
• Kennedy, M., (1995), Interest and Inflation Free Money: Creating an Exchange Medium That Works for Everybody and Protects the Earth, Seva International.
• St Onge, E., (2015), “Senegal Transforming 14,000 Villages Into Ecovillages!” Collective Evolution, http://www.collective-evolution.com/2015/06/17/senegal-transforming-14000-villages-into-ecovillages/
• TSW: Remaking Settlements. thesimplerway.info/RemakingSettlements.htm
• TSW: Summary Case. thesimplerway.info/main.htm
• TSW: The Alternative. thesimplerway.info/THEALTSOCLong.htm

Photo by Rototom Sunsplash

The post The Catalan Integral Cooperative – The Simpler Way Revolution is Well Underway! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Ruby Irene Pratka: An intriguing blueprint for a post-capitalist world is gradually being built in a converted spa in Barcelona, Spain. Founded by the Catalan dissenter Enric Duran, who made headlines in 2008 after “borrowing” thousands of Euros from Spanish banks and donating it to social causes, the Catalan Integral Cooperative is a wide-ranging operation which encompasses diverse services: a financial co-op, a food pantry, a legal-aid desk, an open-source tool workshop, and a bed-and-breakfast for tourists in a medieval watchtower. It has developed its own local exchange currency — the eco — and launched a cooperative credit mechanism for funding social projects. A readable and eye-opening new report commissioned by the P2P Foundation and the Robin Hood Coop for Commons Transition summarizes the co-op’s numerous projects and wide-ranging ambitions.

The goal of the Catalan Integral Cooperative (“Integral” is a Spanish word best translated as “holistic”) is to build an anti-capitalist cooperative structure not just for the benefit of its own fee-paying members, but for the Commons as a whole. “The main objective of the CIC is nothing less than to build an alternative economy in Catalonia capable of satisfying the needs of the local community more effectively than the existing system, thereby creating the conditions for the transition to a post-capitalist mode of organization of social and economic life. … It is the conviction of the CIC that the goods required for satisfying the basic needs of society should be freely accessible social goods, rather than commodities,” the author George Dafermos writes.

Like many co-ops, the CIC resists hierarchical organization; about a dozen committees manage its day-to-day activities. The co-op itself has more than 2,000 members, whose levels of involvement vary from paid committee members to freelancers (auto-ocupados), to the many subscribers to the CIC’s local product exchange networks. The product exchanges provide local farmers and other producers with a market and allow the cooperative to fund its operations with a small percentage from each sale.

The cooperative was formed seven years ago and since then has enjoyed rapid growth. Dafermos spent two months in 2016 studying the CIC, its projects and its aspirations. “It’s an amazing and crazy thing, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before,” he says. “On paper, it doesn’t really exist, but at the same time, it creates legal entities which allow people, mostly young professionals, to do their own thing. It’s a highly ideological co-op meeting practical needs.” In other words, the CIC thinks globally and acts locally.

The nerve center of the CIC is AureaSocial, a converted spa in downtown Barcelona which serves as a co-working and workshop space and houses a CIC-run library and food pantry in addition to headquarters. Its daughter projects, including the bed-and-breakfast (called SOM Pujarnol), a tool lab (maCUS), and a self-managed cooperative community, are spread across Catalonia, attracting the interest of increasing numbers of potential members at a key time in history. The report describes it as a “network of projects” that has a long-term aim of creating a fairer world.

“Young people are seeing less hope now than in the past…if you do get a job in the corporate structure, it’s not appealing,” Dafermos says. “People want to experiment, and that’s why we’re seeing the re-emergence of co-ops in general, and of this one in particular.”

To learn more about the CIC’s activities, read the report here.

Photo by Don Meliton

The post New Report Shines Light on Groundbreaking Catalan Cooperative appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Niko Georgiades: Athens, Greece – Tools born from the internet, applied across autonomous networks and movements seeking alternatives to capitalism, are providing the infrastructure of alternative societies. In the last of our specials on community currencies and alternative economies, we showcase FairCoop, a self-organized and self-managed global cooperative created through the internet outside the domain of the nation-state.

During a conference on alternatives to capitalism inside of the self-organized and squatted Embros Theater in Athens, Greece in the summer of 2017, a Catalan speaker (who remained anonymous for safety purposes) gave a presentation on FairCoop, which informed much of this reporting.

Alternative economies are typically separate economic structures operating outside of the traditional economy and based on the common principles of a community. FairCoop is a function of an alternative economy and was built out of the necessity to provide an “alternative system outside of capitalism” and merge many autonomous movements and networks together to form a society based on each community’s values.

FairCoop was created a few years after a nearly half a billion euro banking system expropriation action from 2006-2008, generally attributed to Enric Duran. The expropriation of monetary value from the banks was used to fund social movements and as a way to jump-start alternatives to the capitalist system.

Watch the video below for an introduction to FairCoop:

During the presentation on FairCoop, the speaker inside of Embros Theater said that in Catalonia, Spain, around 2009, 2010, the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) was created, to “build another society by self-organizing” and to provide the needs of the people, “from food, housing, education, and health, etc.”

Since the creation of the Integral networks in Spain seven years ago, “a lot of people [have been] working for the commons” as there are more than 1,000 projects that are autonomously self-organizing to create cooperative networks of sharing.

Watch the video below, or see our full report here, for more information on the CIC [also see The Catalan Integral Cooperative: An Organizational Study of a Post-Capitalist Cooperative by George Dafermos]:

The idea for FairCoop was brought to an assembly in 2014 as a proposal by Enric Duran and was created by people within the movement to serve as economic infrastructure for a new society.

The Catalan speaker described FairCoop as “an open global cooperative, self-organized via the Internet and remaining outside nation-state control,” but one “that is controlled by a global assembly.” The speaker explained, “We don’t say cooperative in the traditional way, we say cooperative because we work with economy and we work in a participatory way and in a equal way.”

The steps taken to get to the point of the creation of FairCoop were explained by the speaker as followed:

“The first action was hacking the banks [expropriation of money through the internet], the second action was hacking the state [creating a taxing system to fund the creation of autonomous alternative systems], and the third one was hacking the money markets.“

“Usually the powerful money markets attack the weak economies and they get their resources with inflation and things like that. So, for centuries people have lost a lot of resources, a lot of capital” from those in control of the money – the speaker continued, “with FairCoin we are, like, revenging on that, let’s say, and we are recovering value.” They are growing that value to “use it for the commons” and assist in building their self-managed alternative society, said the presenter.

“They’re are many people in more than 30 countries” that have combined their local currencies and communities into autonomous local nodes and are connected in a network of cooperatives, said the speaker, who gave examples in the presentation about a Guatemalan and Greek sharing network.

“Local nodes acts as decentralized local assemblies of FairCoop, and meeting point between global projects of FairCoop and the various projects developed locally, creating links, synergies, knowledge development and growth of the entire ecosystem we are creating together. Autonomously, they serve as a point to spread, help and welcome people in FairCoop, as well as an exchange point of FairCoin.” – Description of a local node, FairCoop website

To build “a society without money, takes money,” and also requires having a plan to fight against capitalism by empowering the “local, regional, and global level,” so, the speaker said FairCoop created a “global assembly” to determine the value of the currency in a way of “self-management in the political process, not in the market“.

Listen to the fifteen minute presentation on FairCoop (full presentation with Q&A session is further down the post):

Audio Player

FairCoop was described as “a political movement building an alternative” that operates with many open decentralized working groups and assemblies deciding by consensus what actions to take in the FairCoop.

“FairCoop understands that the transformation to a fairer monetary system is a key element. Therefore, FairCoin was proposed as the cryptocurrency upon which to base its resource-redistribution actions and building of a new global economic system.” – FairCoop website

FairCoop utilizes FairCoin cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies, the most famous being Bitcoin, are digitally created on the internet, decentralized, and out of the control of central governments.

The difference between FairCoin and Bitcoin, said the speaker, is that “in Bitcoin, they are not one community, there are many different interests fighting each other, like what’s happening in the capitalist world is happening in the Bitcoin.”

They utilize FairCoin to the “benefit of the self-management of the alternative economy, not in the benefit of decentralizing capitalism that is around Bitcoin,” and to economically sustain the process of building the network of FairCoop.

For a bit of an explanation on what FairCoin is, watch this excerpt of an interview with Theodore, from the Athens Integral Cooperative, below:

Cryptocurrencies are block-chain transactions tracked through public ledgers, however, FairCoin has recently created the world’s first ever “co-operative blockchain … by creating an algorithm based on mining processes that rely on a proof of co-operation.”

FairCoin was developed “as a transition tool for building that eco-system at the global level that can be useful for supporting the building of autonomy and the building of self-organizement” around the world, said the speaker.

The speaker said that with the self-management of FairCoin, they are recovering value instead of extracting it from the people as the current banking system with its money markets does.

Faircoin governance image

In efforts to control all of the FairCoin, 80 to 90 percent of the FairCoin is now in the hands of the “movement“, said the speaker. With FairCoin, the value of funds is over 2 million euros and the speaker said, “this is just the beginning of the way how we are creating value by this hacking.”

When asked for a practical example of how FairCoop could be put to use in the self-managed Embros Theater, the speaker said that the first step would be to start accepting FairCoin for the transactions of economy inside the theater, such as beer. The next step would be to share that you accept FairCoin, which will then be seen in the FairCoop network and when more people start exchanging FairCoin, local nodes create assemblies focusing on different qualities that branch out to the global networks.

The speaker touched on Freedom Coop, which according to their website, is a “European Cooperative Society (SCE) that creates toolkits for self-management, self-employment, economic autonomy and financial disobedience for individuals and groups striving for fairer social and economic relationships.”

On the larger scale of building “a new way of life,” newly created Bank of the Commons is “a project for bringing on an alternative banking system to the world“, said the speaker, who explained it’s a way to bring different movements, cooperatives, and different groups the “capacities for doing their activities without the control of the normal banks.”

See the 2017 FairCoop Structure Chart for a visual learning experience of how the networks connect to each other:

After the presentation by the Catalan speaker, dozens of audience members asked many clarifying questions as to how this system of an alternative economy works. The presentation lasted a bit over two hours. Listen to the full presentation below:

With the building of these networks of social economy and solidarity, people are rethinking their ideas of how society could be more equitable. Creating alternative economies using the internet and autonomous working groups to decentralize the power has many people in Europe and across the world very excited at the prospects of a new society outside of capitalism and nation-states. In the words of the speaker, the future of mass movements providing real change are based in being able to have economic power, “As a movement, we need to be stronger economically to be stronger politically.”

The post Greece: Alternative Economies & Community Currencies Pt. 3 – FairCoop appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Founded by an assembly of activists in Catalonia in 2010, the CIC’s revolutionary aspiration is to antagonize Capital by building cooperative structures in the Catalan economy. Its commitment to the principles of the Commons, Open Cooperativism and P2P, make it a prototypical example of a new generation of co-ops connecting the Commons and cooperative movements. Their position is that a truly collaborative economy can only develop when it’s commons-based.

This report is a joint publication between the P2P Foundation and Robin Hood Coop. You can download the PDF or read the full text in the sections below.  You can also consult the different sections and comment on the document in the Commons Transition Wiki.

Contents

Introduction

Studying the CIC: A note on our methodology

The CIC in a nutshell

The historical, ideological and political context

Committees

Self-employed members

Territorial and economic network

The organizational core: The CIC Committees

Coordination Committee

Reception Committee

Communication Committee

IT Committee

Common Spaces Committee

Productive Projects Committee

Economic Management Committee

Legal Committee

The Catalan Supply Centre

Network of Science, Technique and Technology

Autonomous projects of collective initiative

AureaSocial

CASX

SOM Ρujarnol

Calafou

MaCUS

Concluding remarks: A project with a network or a network of projects?

CIC’s economic ecosystem: Local exchange networks and social currencies

The development of a cooperative public system

Open cooperativism

Summing up

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

The Cooperativa Integral Catalana (CIC) is one of the most interesting cooperative projects which have sprung up during the age of crisis in Europe. First of all, it is notable on account of its revolutionary character: the main objective of the CIC is nothing less than to build an alternative economy in Catalonia capable of satisfying the needs of the local community more effectively than the existing system, thereby creating the conditions for the transition to a post-capitalist mode of organization of social and economic life.

To fulfil the purpose it has set itself, the CIC is engaged in an impressive spectrum of activities: although it was formed just seven years ago, it has already been actively involved in developing infrastructures as diverse as barter markets, a network of common stores, an alternative currency called ‘eco’, a ‘Cooperative Social Fund’ for financing community projects and a ‘basic income programme’ for remunerating its members for their work. By setting up such structures, the CIC aspires to be an organizational platform for the development of a self-sufficient economy that is autonomous from the State and the capitalist market.

The CIC moto: ‘social transformation from below through self-management, self-organization and networking’

In view of its radical character, it is not surprising that the CIC has attracted the attention of the popular and radical press, which praise it as a promising prototype of the counter-structures that the so-called milieu of the social and solidarity economy is building in order to antagonize the dominant economic system.[2] Unfortunately, these reports, though interesting, have a serious limitation: they do not go into much depth in their description of the CIC and therefore do not provide a thorough overview of its activities and mode of organization. In consideration, however, of the possibility that CIC’s cooperative model holds lessons that extend well beyond the Catalan context, my colleagues from the P2P Foundation/Commons Transition and I could not help feeling that the case of the CIC merits further study to elucidate the way it is organized. With that in mind, we decided to contact the CIC with the purpose of organizing a ‘field-trip’ in Catalonia in order to study the cooperative close up. In this way, a few months later in March 2016 we came to Catalonia to carry out a field-study, whose findings are documented in the pages of this report.

2. Studying the CIC: A note on our methodology

This report is based on a field-research of an ethnographic character, using the method of participant observation from March until May 2016.

For the purpose of this research project, I arrived in Barcelona on March 2016, following consultation with some core members of the CIC with whom my colleague from the P2P Foundation, Stacco Troncoso and I had discussed, in general terms, the rationale and the aims of the research during the previous three months.

For the entire period of my stay in Barcelona, I had the luck to be hosted at the building of AureaSocial, which is in a way the headquarters of the CIC in the city. Being there was extremely helpful for the research, as I was in daily contact with the many members of the cooperative who work at the building, practically living with them for two months.

As the cooperative is organized in committees, the first thing I did to collect information was to interview members of all its committees. I talked to people from all the committees that are currently active, who willingly provided me with whatever information I needed to understand what they do and how their activities are organized. Luckily for me, it was equally easy to observe some of them at work – such as the Reception Committee or the Committee of Economic Management, as their workplace is based at AureaSocial where many of their members come on a daily basis. Others I had the opportunity to follow in the ‘field’, as when I followed the CAC team with its van in order to see with my own eyes the network of self-managed pantries that the CIC has linked together across the entire Catalonia.

Naturally, as the activities of the cooperative are not confined to Barcelona, but extend across the entire Catalonia, the field-research included several visits to various places in Catalonia: I attended several assemblies and meetings of local exchange groups and visited the autonomous projects related to the CIC (the so-called ‘autonomous projects of collective initiative’) in various cities and towns in Catalonia, where I had extensive discussions with their members.

Last, though I do not believe that such a thing as an ‘objective observer’ exists, I feel obliged to confess my deep sympathy for the CIC. One of my strongest motivations for carrying out this field-research was to find out more about the work of the CIC in Catalonia and explore how that experience could be fruitfully transferred to other places.[3] I hope this report will be useful to those who are interested in learning more about what the CIC does and how it is organized, encouraging them to reflect critically upon how a new generation of cooperative projects like the CIC might change the world for the better.

3. The CIC in a nutshell

The historical, ideological and political context

Τhe Catalan Integral Cooperative was founded in Catalonia in May 2010 at an assembly of local activists. It is, as its name implies, a cooperative project focused on Catalonia.[4] It has a strongly activist and anti-capitalist character, as it is animated by the principles of the ‘integral revolution’, which means it aspires to the radical transformation of all facets of social and economic life.[5] With this goal in mind, it has launched a series of initiatives and projects around the development (at the local level) of a cooperative economy and a cooperative public system, in which basic needs like food and health care are not commodities but social goods everyone has access to.

Enric Duran (Source: Wikipedia.org)

The first time one hears the name of the CIC is usually in connection with the exploits of its charismatic leader, Enric Duran. Duran, a Catalan hacktivist involved in the local anti-globalization movement, entered the public spotlight in 2008 when he went public with his story of how he had tricked the spanish banks into giving him loans of about half a million euros, which he gave away to various activist projects. For Duran, who never had any intention of returning that money, it was a conscious act of expropriation that he planned with the aim of inspiring others to join the struggle against the capitalist banking system. As was to be expected, his story attracted a lot of media attention and Duran, who earned the sympathy of many fellow activists, soon became known as the ‘Robin Hood of the banks’. Emboldened by the success of this action, he and some like-minded activists soon began to work on a new project around the creation of cooperative structures for the transition to post-capitalism. The idea was outlined in a newspaper they distributed in 350,000 copies all over Spain in March 2009, which propagandized the development of ‘integral cooperatives’.[6] This call resonated with the feelings of many Catalan activists, triggering a wave of molecular processes in the milieu of social movements, which led to the collective founding of the CIC in May 2010.

A year later the ‘indignados’ began to occupy the squares in Spain. The emergence of the 15M movement in Catalonia found the CIC ‘prepared to battle’ and so many of its members threw themselves into the struggle against the ‘politics of austerity’. At the same time, because of the active participation of its activists in the collective processes of the movement, the CIC emerged much stronger through it, attracting a lot of new members. As Nathan Schneider says, “when the 15M movement, a precursor to Occupy Wall Street, installed itself in city squares across Spain to rail against austerity and corruption, protesters swelled the CIC’s ranks”.[7] As a result, although the ‘Movement of the Squares’ subsided, CIC’s participation in it left an important legacy, as many of the defining characteristics of the movement live through the cooperative, such as the activist character, the aim of building an alternative economic system and the primacy of the principles of self-management, inclusivity and direct-democracy in the decision-making process.

During all this time, Duran played a leading role in shaping the CIC: not only was he the one who, more decisively than anyone else, defined its vision, but he also recruited new members, organized its committees and spearheaded the development of new CIC initiatives and projects. However, in 2013 in order not to go to prison, he was forced to go underground and leave the country.[8] Since then, he has concentrated his efforts on a new project called ‘FairCoop’,[9] thus placing the responsibility for the organization and operation of the cooperative in the hands of the committees it is made up of.

Committees

The easiest way one could describe the internal organization of the CIC is as a collection of about a dozen committees, each one with its own field of responsibility. For example, the Economic Management Committee, as its name implies, is responsible for the economic management of the cooperative, the Legal Committee is entrusted with legal matters, the IT Committee deals with the IT infrastructure and so on. In consequence of this division of labour, committees work largely autonomously from each other. To coordinate their activities, the cooperative holds assemblies (the so-called ‘permanent assemblies’ which are held once a month), where committee members make decisions collectively based on consensus. In line with the principles of cooperativist and anti-authoritarian organization, these assemblies serve to collectivize the managerial process, thereby ensuring its participative and inclusive character.[10] That is, in a nutshell, the way the CIC is organized: the ‘core’ of the organization is made up of a dozen committees which coordinate their activities collectively and anti-hierarchically through frequently-held assemblies.

From close up, the first thing that stands out about committee members is how they are not motivated by reasons of financial or professional advancement. On the contrary, the character of participation in the committees is clearly activist: committee members do not consider themselves to be working members of a conventional cooperative. For them, the CIC is not just a cooperative, but an activist project in which they are heavily involved. However, in contrast to activist projects manned by unwaged volunteers, the activists of CIC committees receive a kind of salary from the cooperative, known as ‘basic income’, which has the purpose of liberating them from the need to make a living by working somewhere else, thus allowing them to commit themselves full-time to their work at the CIC.[11] An interesting feature of that form of remuneration is that it is made up of both euros and ‘ecos’, that is, the alternative currency used by the forty or so local exchange networks that exist in Catalonia (we will discuss the eco and the local exchange networks in more detail in the context of CIC’s economic ecosystem in chapter 6).[12]

Self-employed members

The CIC has a plethora of members outside its ‘core’. First of all, it has about six hundred ‘self-employed members’ (the so-called ‘auto-ocupados’), who use the legal and economic ‘tools’ of the cooperative.[13] They are mostly independent professionals and small producers (both individuals and collectives) who operate informally without having any legal hypostasis. In Spain, as a general rule, people who start a small business or set themselves up in private practice register with the Tax and Social Security Office as ‘autónomos’. The cost of becoming an ‘autónomo’, however, is prohibitive for a large number of people, given that they have to pay a minimum of around €250 a month.[14] Consequently, for many, the cost of this system precludes the possibility of operating formally. To them, the CIC offers a practical solution: the CIC has set up a series of legal entities, whose legal form its self-employed members can use in order to issue invoices. Legally speaking, therefore, auto-ocupados are not members of the CIC, but members of those organizations. In exchange for this service, auto-ocupados have to pay a (minimum) membership fee of €75 every three months.[15] Unlike ‘core members’, however, few of them tend to get involved in CIC’s organizational matters. In that sense, auto-ocupados are peripheral members, who do not participate in the collective processes of the CIC.

Oddly enough, although it has legally set up several other companies to accommodate the needs of its self-employed members, the CIC itself does not have a legal form, which means that “officially, there’s no such thing as the CIC”.[16] The advantage of operating in this way is that it makes the CIC more flexible vis-à-vis the State and its control mechanisms.

Territorial and economic network

Aside from self-employed members, the CIC has more than two and a half thousand members through the ‘local exchange network’ (which will be discussed extensively in the context of CIC’s economic ecosystem in chapter 6) that it launched in 2010. This, together with the rest of the local exchange networks operating in Catalonia, forms a crucial component of CIC’s territorial network and of the economic system that it proposes as an alternative to the dominant market.

Alongside this ecosystem of local exchange groups, CIC’s territorial and economic network encompasses the consumer groups that are responsible for the daily operation and management of twenty ‘pantries’ (the so-called ‘rebosts’) across Catalonia. These local consumer groups are connected to each other through CIC’s Catalan Supply Center (CAC), which is the CIC committee coordinating the transportation and delivery of products from the producers to the pantries. We will discuss how this network of pantries is organized in more detail in the next chapter.

Last, CIC’s territorial network includes several so-called ‘autonomous projects of collective initiative’. These are basically projects in which the CIC has been involved or is collaborating with. To better understand their organization and and how they are related to the CIC, we will look at the most prominent of them in chapter 5.

But first, let us take a closer look at the ‘core’ of CIC to explore in more detail what its committees do.

4. The organizational core: The CIC Committees

At the present time, the organizational core of the CIC consists of ten committees. In order to understand the breadth of the activities they perform and how they are organized, we shall now look at them in more detail.

Coordination Committee

The Coordination Committee deals with the internal organization of the cooperative, focusing on the coordination and evaluation of the work of its committees and working groups. An important part of its work is the formulation of the agenda of the so-called ‘permanent assemblies’ (which are held once a month and constitute the main decision-making organ of the cooperative) based on the topics for discussion submitted by the members of the other committees.

The committee is made up of three main members and two collaborators (a facilitator and a psychologist), who meet once a week at the building of AureaSocial in Barcelona (which is discussed in the context of the so-called Autonomous Projects of Collective Initiative in the next chapter). For its economic sustainability, the committee relies on the ‘basic income’ its members receive from the CIC.

Reception Committee

The Reception Committee is responsible for the induction process of new CIC members. Τhis process consists, in the first place, in providing guidance and advice to people who contact the CIC asking for information about the cooperative and the services it offers its members. For that purpose, they are invited to attend an info-event (known as ‘acollida’) organized by the committee once a week (usually every Friday) at the building of AureaSocial in Barcelona, where they are familiarized with the activities of the cooperative as well as with the legal and economic tools it provides to its members. Those who are still interested in becoming members of the cooperative are invited to a personal interview where they can discuss more extensively their needs with committee members and the way in which they wish to participate in the cooperative.

In addition to the guiding role it performs through the aforementioned ‘acollida process’, the committee’s activities include the capacitation of CIC members, the promotion and networking of affiliated projects in Catalonia as well as the development of relations of collaboration and mutual aid with collectives and projects in other countries.

The committee is made up of eight members, six of whom are based in Barcelona. For the purpose of work coordination, its members meet once or twice a week (usually at AureaSocial), whereas decisions are made collectively (based on consensus) at the committee’s assembly, which takes place once a month. For its economic sustainability, the committee relies on the ‘basic income’ received by its members.

Communication Committee

The Communication Committee is responsible for managing matters of communication related to the cooperative. In specific, it is responsible for the public promotion of CIC’s activities as well as for handling the requests for information submitted by its network and the broader community. In parallel, (like the Reception Committee) it serves as a channel of communication between the cooperative and other collectivities. In the context of its priorities, the committee emphasizes the importance of empowering actors in the CIC network and enriching their skills, so that communication-related activities (such as filming events and developing promotional material) can be performed by any member of the cooperative without the direct involvement of the committee’s core members.

Presently, the committee is made up of three members, who meet once a month at the building of AureaSocial. For its sustainability, the committee relies on the ‘basic income’ received by its members.

IT Committee

The IT Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of CIC’s information-technology infrastructure, including its mail server, its websites and social networks as well as specialized IT tools, such as the GestioCI invoice processing software used by the Committee of Economic Management and ‘self-employed members’ of the cooperative for the purpose of managing invoices and bills.[17]

The committee is made up of seven persons, four of whom are currently very active. Email is the primary means of communication among committee members, who meet twice a week at the building of AureaSocial in Barcelona in order to coordinate their work. For its sustainability, the committee relies on the ‘basic income’ received by its members.

Common Spaces Committee

The Common Spaces Committee, which is made up of five people, is responsible for the so-called ‘common spaces’ of the cooperative, that is, buildings and houses used by the cooperative and its members as a shared resource. For its sustainability, the committee relies on the ‘basic income’ its members receive from the cooperative. Presently, the only infrastructure the committee is responsible for is the building of AureaSocial in Barcelona (which is discussed in the next chapter on Autonomous Projects of Collective Initiative).

Productive Projects Committee

The activities of the Productive Projects Committee, which has two members, centre on facilitating the process of ‘self-employment’ and the exchange of knowledge and skills. To this end, the committee is responsible for the operation of CIC’s ‘jobs portal’ (called Feina Cooperativa) aimed at facilitating job seekers to match their skills to jobs posted by productive projects associated with the CIC.[18] In parallel, it runs Mercat Cooperatiu, an online directory of self-managed and cooperative projects in Catalonia, which accept ‘social currency’ (i.e. ecos) in exchange for the products and services they offer.[19]

Economic Management Committee

As its name implies, the Comissió de Gestió Econòmica is entrusted with the economic management of the cooperative. At the same time, it is the CIC committee which is responsible for the induction process of new ‘self-employed members’ (the so-called ‘auto-ocupados’), familiarizing them with the legal and economic tools that the CIC provides them with and helping them circumnavigate the social and economic structure of CIC’s cooperative network. The committee is made up of six core members (five of whom are occupied on a full-time basis) headquartered at the building of AureaSocial in Barcelona and four more members based in other parts of Catalonia.

The Office of the Committee of Economic Management at AureaSocial. Photo by Daniel Molina (Source: Schneider 2015)

CIC has two main sources of expenses: the ‘basic income’ received by the members of its committees and the funding it provides for affiliated projects. In order to cover these expenses, like any other cooperative, CIC relies on members’ fees: the fees collected from the six hundred active ‘auto-ocupados’ (who are required to pay a fee of a minimum of €75 every three months) account for about 50% of CIC’s income. The remaining 50% of its income comes from the so-called practice of ‘economic disobedience’: that is, the tax refunds received by the cooperative for every invoice self-employed members make (using one of the legal forms through which the CIC operates). Donations from sympathizers represent an additional  – though presently insignificant – income stream.

Legal Committee

The Legal Committee is responsible for managing legal matters related to the cooperative. In parallel, it provides CIC members with legal assistance, which they can pay for by using either social currency (i.e. ecos) or euros. Crucially, the committee places a great deal of importance on delivering this legal service in such a way as to empower recipients, helping them understand the legal process and the technicalities involved in their cases.

The committee is currently made up of two lawyers based at the building of AureaSocial in Barcelona. For its sustainability, the committee relies (a) on the fees it collects from its clients, that is, CIC members to whom it provides legal assistance and (b) on the ‘basic income’ its members receive from the cooperative.

The Catalan Supply Centre

The Central d’Abastiment Catalana (CAC), which means ‘Catalan Supply Centre’, is one of the most active CIC committees.[20] It was formed in 2012 with the aim of creating a logistics network for the transportation and delivery of the products of small producers, who are ‘self-employed’ CIC members, across the entire Catalonia. In effect, it is a ‘public service’ that CIC offers to small producers and consumer-prosumer groups in Catalonia.

The main infrastructure of the network are the so-called ‘rebosts’, that is, the self-managed pantries that the CIC has set up all over Catalonia – twenty of them, to be exact – which constitute the ‘cell’ of the organizational structure of the network. Each one of them is run autonomously by a local consumer group that wishes to have access to local products as well as products made (by producers associated with the CIC) in other parts of Catalonia through the list of products provided by the CAC (which currently includes more than a thousand products). The way in which the supply chain is organized is as follows: the products go from the seventy producers that currently supply the network to the two principal rebosts in L’Arn and Villafranca and then are distributed by the CAC vans to the local rebosts, where from the local consumer groups collect them.

CAC member Vadó and the CAC van

The CAC is made up of a team of four persons, half of whom are working full-time. This team is responsible for coordinating the network of rebosts through CAC’s online platform, which the rebosts use in order to choose the products they want and submit their orders.[21] The payment for the orders can be made in euros or by using the social currency eco. In this way, the CAC platform servers as the ‘instrument’ that enables the coordination of consumption and production in such a distributed environment.

In addition to performing a coordinating role through its online platform, the CAC is also responsible for the transportation and delivery of products from the producers to the local rebosts. In this task, it is assisted by five-six more persons, who use their own vehicles to transport and deliver products to some areas of the network. To cover their expenses, these collaborators receive 21 cents for every kilometre they make.

For its sustainability, the CAC relies on income from two main sources: first, it collects 5% of the price of every product, as well as 18 cents for every kilo it delivers. At the same time, the CAC members receive a ‘basic income’ from the CIC.

For organizational matters, the CAC team has three meetings per month, which often have the character of an assembly. However, the place where they are held is not fixed: each meeting is held in a different rebost in order to facilitate the interaction between the ‘coordinating organ’ and the ‘nuclei of local self-management’, as the CIC calls the consumer groups that are responsible for the operation of each rebost. For the future, CAC’s plans focus on strengthening the links between rebosts and producers so that payments can be made directly by the rebosts to the producers without the intermediation of the CAC.

Network of Science, Technique and Technology

The Xarxa de Ciència, Tècnica i Tecnologia (XCTIT), which means ‘Network of Science, Technique and Technology’, is the committee responsible for the development of tools and machines adapted to the needs of productive projects in CIC’s cooperative network.[22] The driving force of XCTIT is its conviction that the machines developed by the industry are not appropriate for the needs of commons-oriented projects, which they imprison into a relation of dependence with capitalist firms. By contrast, XCTIT develops solutions – which exemplify the principles of open design, appropriate technology and the integral revolution – geared to the needs of small cooperative projects. In this way, XCTIT serves as a ‘vehicle’ for the re-appropriation of science, technique and technology by the new cooperative movement.

Presently, XCTIT’s activities focus on the development of various prototypes – mostly of agricultural tools and machines – and the organization of training workshops for the purpose of knowledge sharing. XCTIT is also engaged in the licensing of the technology artefacts developed by the committee and its collaborators. Its last undertaking is an open design license called ‘XCTIT-GPL’,[23] which gives end-users the right to modify and redistribute XCTIT-GPL-licensed technologies, thereby protecting legally the free sharing of knowledge.

The committee is made up of five core members (working full-time) and about twenty collaborators who are actively involved in its activities. For the coordination of the group and decision-making, XCTIT has an assembly once a week at Can Fugarolas, where its workshop has been hosted since 2014.

Can Fugarolas[24] is not just a building. It is a collectively-managed space of 4.000m2 in the seaside town of Mataró (near Barcelona) in Catalonia, which is host to the activities of about a dozen collectivities like XCTIT. For the payment of the rent, which is a thousand euros per month, each collectivity contributes according to how much space it occupies inside the building as well as based on the character of its activities – whether or nor they are profit-oriented and ‘eco-friendly’. For XCTIT, in specific, the rent of the space occupied by its workshop is a hundred euros per month.

Until recently, the activity of the committee was supported by the ‘basic income’ of four hundred ‘monetary units’ received by each of its members. However, in the context of CIC’s strategy of decentralization, the permanent assembly which was held in Barcelona in May 2016 decided to discontinue the provision of basic income to the XCTIT, thereby turning it from a committee into a financially autonomous project. Consequently, in order to ensure its sustainability, from now on XCTIT plans to rely on the following two sources of income: first, it collects 20% of the revenue from the workshops organized by other groups and collectivities at XCTIT’s space inside Can Fugarolas.[25] Furthermore, it aspires to complement its income through replicat.net, which it recently launched as an e-shop for the prototypes developed by XCTIT and its collaborators.[26]

XCTIT’s workshop at Can Fugarolas (Source: Replicat.net)

5. Autonomous projects of collective initiative

An interesting element in the organizational canvas of the CIC are the so-called ‘autonomous projects of collective initiative’ (PAICs).[27] These are cooperative projects the CIC is connected with through a relation of collaboration, solidarity and mutual aid on the basis of common values and principles. In most cases, they are projects in which CIC members have been actively involved from the early stages, thereby creating a bond between them and the CIC. As Enric Duran explains, “there’s an ongoing reciprocity [between PAICs and the CIC] as the efforts taken by the whole [CIC] are key to making these PAICs possible, allocating various kinds of resources to make them a reality. PAICs normally also respond to the strategic objectives of the CIC itself”.[28] However, even though the term PAIC itself implies that they are autonomous (from CIC in terms of their management), in fact some of these projects are embedded into the organizational structure of the CIC. In order to understand how these projects are organized and how they are related to CIC, we will look at the five most prominent of them: AureaSocial, CASX, SOM Pujarnol, Calafou and MaCUS. The former two (AureaSocial and CASX) are run by the CIC, whereas the others (Calafou, MaCUS and SOM Pujarnol) are fully autonomous with regard to their management and daily operation.

AureaSocial

AureaSocial is the informal ‘headquarters’ of the CIC in Barcelona, a 1400m2 building at the heart of the city, whose daily operation is entrusted to the Common Spaces Committee.[29]

The AureaSocial reception dimly illuminated, a few minutes before closing down for the night

The story of the building is quite interesting: the building belongs to a company, which resorted to leasing it to the CIC (in exchange for a symbolic rent) when it went bankrupt six years ago, thereby obstructing the legal process of seizure and foreclosure by the bank. This is, in short, the ‘strategy’ that has allowed the CIC to appropriate this space. Launched in 2010 as one of CIC’s so-called ‘autonomous projects of collective intiative’, AureaSocial is now a space used for a multitude of activities: such as for many of the work meetings and assemblies of the CIC committees; for public talks, seminars, conferences and films as well as for all sorts of workshops (anything from workshops about how to improve one’s humour to vegan cooking).[30] The space hosts the office of the Committee of Economic Management, a free public library, a gift shop for clothes and the central pantry of the CAC in Barcelona. Furthermore, it operates as a co-op working space: the rooms on the 1^st floor are used during the day by psychologists and physiotherapists for their professional activities, generating a monthly income of about two thousand so-called ‘monetary units’, which means that users can pay for the rooms they use either in euros or ‘ecos’. This income is then used by the Committee of Economic Management to cover various needs of the cooperative, such as the provision of the ‘basic income’ received by committee members or the payment of utility bills for AureaSocial. To ensure that nobody is excluded from making use of the working spaces, an alternative way by which users can pay for the rooms is by contributing their labour: for example, by working at the reception or helping to clean up the building.

AureaSocial’s entrance

CASX

The Cooperativa d’Autofinançament Social en Xarxa (CASX)[31] – which means ‘Cooperative of Social and Network Self-financing’ – is a savings, donations and project funding cooperative, which was set up with the purpose of providing funding for projects that are aligned with the principles of the CIC and the integral revolution, as “the deposits made to CASX are used to finance self-managed individual or collective projects aiming at the common good”.[32] To this end, since 2013 CASX has provided €59.329 of funding to eighteen projects.

The CASX logo

Launched by CIC in 2012 as an ‘autonomous project of collective initiative’, CASX has been operating legally as a co-op since 2013, using the legal form of Xarxa d’Autogestio Social SCCL, which is one of the ‘legal tools’ the CIC offers to its member-projects. Presently, CASX has 155 members, of which many represent other cooperatives and collectivities. The membership fee for individual projects is €15 and €51 for collective projects. Taking into account the activist character of the project as well as the fact that deposits to CASX are interest-free, it is truly remarkable that the total amount of deposits made in the last four years exceeds €250.000 (for a more detailed analysis, see graph below).

CASX deposits over time (Source: CASX presentation at the permanent assembly of the CIC, 2015)

The members of CASX make decisions based on consensus through its assembly, which takes place once a month at AureaSocial.[33] However, the CASX assembly is not fully autonomous, as many of its decisions must be approved by the permanent assembly of the CIC before they can be implemented. Close, for obvious reasons, is also the collaboration between CASX and the Committee of Economic Management. For its daily operation, CASX relies on two CIC members, who receive a basic income of 140 ‘monetary units’ (which, in their case, amount to 120 euros and 20 ecos) per month.

The operation of CASX has been suspended since the beginning of 2016 in order to re-engineer its organization around a deposits and funding model based exclusively on ecos, which is slated to roll out when CASX resumes its operation in the coming months. Alongside the implementation of the new business model, CASX’s main goal for the future is the decentralization of its model through its local reproduction “so that every neighborhood, town or city can start generating their own CASX assembly, redirecting the resources of their local members to local projects”.[34]

SOM  Ρujarnol

SOM Ρujarnol[35] is a group of people animated by the principles of the integral revolution and agro-ecology, who live and work in a thousand-year-old tower (known as the tower of  Ρujarnol in Banyoles) in the Catalan province of Pla de l’Estany. It was launched about four years ago as an ‘autonomous project of collective initiative’ of the CIC, with the aim of exemplifying a humane and environmentally sustainable model of living in the Catalan countryside.

The tower of Ρujarnol at night (Source: SOM Pujarnol)

The tower and the seventy acres of land surrounding it belong to a Foundation, which has leased it to the CIC for a period of fifteen years in exchange for a thousand euros per month, with the proviso that the cooperativa will repair those parts of the tower which have suffered the wear and tear of time. That is, besides, the main reason why the rent of a 600 m2 tower is that low, as the ones responsible for its restoration are the members of the group living here, which is presently made up of nine persons, including two children.

For the purpose of decision-making, the group has an assembly once a week, in which its members make decisions about the management of the project based on consensus. As for routine tasks, such as cooking and cleaning up common spaces, they are assigned through a system of job rotation, so that all members participate equally in carrying them out.

The ‘wheel’ used by SOM Ρujarnol members for the purpose of job rotation (Photo by Luis David Arias Castaño)

SOM Ρujarnol’s relationship with the CIC is not a relation of economic dependency, but one of collaboration based on common principles,[36] as SOM Ρujarnol no longer receives any financial support from the cooperative. Thus, for the economic viability of the project, SOM Ρujarnol depends on income from three main sources: it produces and sells products – such as falafel, sauces (e.g. ketchup), veggie burgers and humus – through the local eco-network in Girona and CIC’s Catalan Supply Center (CAC); it organizes events, such as jam sessions on Fridays; and it provides ‘bed & breakfast’ accommodation for travellers who wish to spend a few days at the tower.

Music night at SOM Ρujarnol (Source: SOM Pujarnol)

Calafou

One of CIC’s most emblematic ‘autonomous projects of collective initiative’ is Calafou,[37] the self-proclaimed ‘post-capitalist colony’ which settled in 2011 in the ruins of an abandoned industrial village in the Catalan county of l’Anoia, about 65km away from Barcelona.

Τhe entrance to the Calafou colony (Source: calafou.org)

The colony was set up with the participation of several heavily-involved CIC members with the aim of becoming a collectivist model for living and organizing the productive activities of a small community based on the principles of self-management, ecology and sustainability. At the same time, it represents an example of the form that former industrial villages could assume in a post-capitalist era.

Calafou’s post-apocalyptic aesthetics (Source: calafou.org)

The first thing one is struck by when visiting Calafou is the aesthetics of the space, which gives the impression of a Mad Max-like post-apocalyptic scene, as many of the buildings of the village remain abandoned and half-dilapidated. In reality, however, Calafou is anything but abandoned: at the moment, the colony accommodates a multitude of productive activities and community infrastructures, including a carpentry, a mechanical workshop, a botanical garden, a community kitchen, a biolab, a hacklab, a soap production lab, a professional music studio, a guest-house for visitors, a social centre with a free shop, as well as a plethora of other productive projects.[38]

The Calafou hacklab (Source: calafou.org)

As far as its property regime is concerned, the village was handed over by its owner to Calafou members based on the following agreement: the ‘colonists’ gave him a security deposit of €70.000 and committed themselves to paying a monthly rent of €2.500 for the next ten years. Presently, the colony, which has twenty-seven houses (of 60m2 each), is inhabited by twenty-two people. For the collective management of housing, Calafou members have set up a housing cooperative, which grants them as tenants only the right to use the space they inhabit. In that way, as tenants do not have the right to re-sell or lease their rights of use to others, the land and the houses of the village remain the unalienable property of the housing cooperative. Thus, based on the above agreement, tenants pay €175 per month for each house.

A bird’s-eye view of the village (Source: calafou.org)

According to some of its members, one of Calafou’s most significant accomplishments is its consensus-oriented assembly, which is held every Sunday for the purpose of making decisions as well as for the coordination of daily tasks like cleaning up common spaces, which are self-selected on a voluntary basis by ‘Calafou-ers’. However, the assembly character is not always the same, as its thematology alternates between ‘political’ (for discussion of political issues), ‘managerial’ (for management issues) and ‘monographic’ based on presentations made by Calafou’s working groups.[39]

For its economic sustainability, Calafou depends on three main sources of income: first, the revenues of the housing cooperative (based on the rent paid by residents); second, the contribution made by Calafou’s productive projects;[40] and third, the significant income generated by the various cultural events taking place at the village (like conferences, concerts and festivals).

MaCUS

MaCUS[41] (which stands for ‘Màquines collectivitzades d’us social’, that is, ‘machines collectivized for social use’) is another ‘autonomous project of collective initiative’, which began in 2012 with the aim of becoming a cooperative lab in Barcelona where both traditional machines and new technologies are used for collaborative research, development and production. The two-floor building in the area of Sant Martí, where MaCUS is based, occupies 600m2 and is host to the activities of a close-knit group of modern as well as traditional craftsmen engaged in making wooden furniture, clothes and herbal medicine, fixing bicycles and repairing home electronics as well as photography, sculpture and digital music production.

MaCUS members having a break in the carpentry (Source: MaCUS)

The business model of MaCUS is based on renting out space inside the building to collectivity members where they can set up their workshop. The rent is €10 per square metre and is inclusive of water, electricity, internet and telephone. This income is then used to pay for the building’s utility bills (about €200-300 per month) and its rent, which amounts to €1.833  per month. To strengthen the project’s economic viability, a business model that MaCUS members are currently experimenting with focuses on the development of prototypes with the aim of selling them to third parties, providing thus the collectivity with an additional revenue stream.

For managerial issues, MaCUS members have a monthly assembly where they make decisions in a direct-democratic fashion (based on consensus). Within the collectivity, organization is horizontal and anti-hierarchical: the equality of the members is ensured by the fact that those who rent space inside the building are at the same time members of the collectivity managing MaCUS and as such they can participate fully as equals in decision making.

A 3D-printer developed by one of the members (Source: MaCUS)

The MaCUS basement (Source: MaCUS)

The relationship between CIC and MaCUS is also quite interesting. MaCUS was launched upon the initiative of the CIC and initially depended upon its financial support for the payment of its rent. However, the income generated by renting out space inside the building to collectivity members has allowed MaCUS to evolve into an economically self-sustainable project, which has no need of any external financial aid. Besides, that is the goal of all ‘autonomous projects of collective initiative’: to become economically self-sustainable so that they don’t need the financial support of the CIC.

Concluding remarks: A project with a network or a network of projects?

As we have seen, PAICs differ from one another with regard to their degree of managerial autonomy: projects like CASX and AureaSocial are run by the organizational core of the CIC, whereas others, like Calafou and MaCUS, operate entirely autonomously from it. Their only common characteristic is they are all cooperative projects connected with the CIC. In fact, from the point of view of administratively autonomous PAICs like Calafou and MaCUS, the CIC is but one of the projects making up a broader cooperative network based on common values and principles. That actually is more in line with the vision of the CIC for the development of a network of self-managed projects in Catalonia, in which its role is that of providing support services and tools, akin to traditional service cooperatives. And that is very important: the CIC never tried to create a centrally controlled network of projects; on the contrary, its goal has always been the creation of an organizationally decentralized network of projects connected by the same principles, which support each other by sharing resources and capabilities. It makes, then, more sense to view PAICS as autonomous projects in a cooperative network which the CIC reinforces with support tools and services, rather than as projects run by the CIC.

6. CIC’s economic ecosystem: Local exchange networks and social currencies

A characteristic of healthy social movements is that they create the structures and the tools that are most appropriate to their needs and goals. The economic model of the CIC, which aspires to “bring together all the basic elements of an economy such as production, consumption, funding and a local currency”,[42] is paradigmatic of this empirical axiom.

The ‘kernel’ of this economic model are the so-called local exchange networks (or local exchange groups), which are usually made up of tens or hundreds of members who exchange products and services by using their own digital currencies. In essence, each exchange network constitutes a self-organized marketplace for the local community in which its members can buy and sell locally-available products and services. The payment can take the form of barter exchange or if that is not possible, it can be made by means of the local currency used by each exchange network. Transactions made by using these local currencies are based on the principle of mutual credit, which means that when a transaction between two parties occurs, one’s account is credited, the other’s debited. From a technical point of view, keeping track of transactions and of members’ credit and debit balances is done through online platforms known as community exchange systems. These constitute the tool with which the members of exchange networks manage their accounts, as well as a marketplace for buying and selling locally-available products and services.

In Catalonia, in specific, there are more than forty local exchange networks known as ‘eco-networks’ (‘ecoxarxes’ in Catalan) because of the local Catalan currency ‘eco’, some variant of which they all use.[43] Eco’s ‘birth’ in Catalonia can be traced back to 2009 – about a year before the formation of the CIC in 2010 – when the eco-networks of Tarragona and Montseny introduced their own alternative currency (CIC 2015, Flores 2015).

Total amount of transactions per month in CIC’s eco-network (Source: IntegralCES)

Although their size differs substantially, some eco-networks have thousands of members: indicatively, the eco-network launched by CIC in 2010 has 2.634 members.[44] From a technical point of view, the operation of about half of the eco-networks is based on the Community Exchange System (CES),[45] while the rest have ‘migrated’ to the IntegralCES platform,[46] which was developed upon the initiative of the CIC and several eco-networks as a modified version of CES that is adapted to their local needs.

The IntegralCES website

Despite the fact that eco-networks represent an autonomous local structure, they are not cut off from each other: first of all, the software platforms they rely on for their operation make it possible for members of different eco-networks to engage in transactions. Secondly, though each eco-network has its own autonomous assembly, they are all connected through the institutions of meta-governance evolved by the community of eco-networks, such as the ‘Space for the coordination of social currencies’ (‘Espai de coordinació de monedes socials’)[47] and the so-called ‘Bioregional assemblies’ of the South and the North of Catalonia,[48] which serve as an informally-organized coordinating organ for eco-networks across the Catalan territory.

Bioregional assembly in Ultramort in May 2016. Photo by Luis Camargo (https://bioregionalnordcic.blogspot.gr/2016/04/album-de-fotos-de-lassemblea-duitramort.html)

These are the outlines of the economic ecosystem in which the CIC is embedded and which it proposes as a tool for the transition to the post-capitalist society it envisions: a horizontally organized network of self-managed exchange networks with their own community currencies.

7. The development of a cooperative public system

In the context of its strategic aim for the development of a cooperative economy, it is the conviction of the CIC that the goods required for satisfying the basic needs of society should be freely accessible social goods, rather than commodities. For that reason, since its formation in 2010 the CIC has launched several initiatives aimed at the development of a cooperative public system, proposing to displace the centrally-managed state apparatus of public services with a truly cooperative model for organizing the provision of social goods such as health, food, education, energy, housing and transport.[49] In specific, it has set up initiatives encompassing the fields of alimentation, education,[50] health,[51] housing,[52] science & technology and transport.[53]

Of all those initiatives, by far the most successful is the one focused on food. Through the Catalan Supply Center (CAC) it set up in 2012, the CIC has successfully created a fully-functional logistics network for the transportation and delivery of (organic and biological) food produced by small producers all over Catalonia. Another important ‘public service’ that the CIC provides to small productive projects in its locality is that performed by CIC’s Network of Science, Technique and Technology (XCTIT) in the field of science and technology: by developing technologies and machines adapted to the particular needs of small producers and distributing them under ‘copyleft’ licenses which ensure that anyone can freely use and replicate them, the XCTIT practically democratizes access to tools which would have been otherwise beyond the reach of most small projects.

However, with the exception of the CAC and the XCTIT, most of the ‘components’ of the ‘cooperative public system’ envisioned by the CIC are still at an embryonic stage of development. The reason why these have not been further developed is manifold: in some cases, that is because the provision of public services by the State is, to a large degree, satisfactory for most people – as in the case of the health system in Catalonia – thus rendering the local self-organization of alternative services and infrastructures less imperative. Similarly, it is reasonable to assume that a factor holding back the development of CIC’s efforts in the field of transport is the huge success of various online ‘car sharing’ platforms, which apparently constitute a functional alternative for covering the needs of people without their own means of transport. The most important, however, of all the factors that account for the existing scale of development of CIC’s ‘cooperative public system’ has to do with the practice of self-organization itself. We should not forget that the CIC is, above all, an activist project based on the principle of self-organization: by contrast to traditional organizations which expand and scale-up their productive activities by employing more personnel, the CIC relies on the voluntary participation of the community. That means that the degree to which its strategic goals are actively pursued does not depend on managerial initiative, but on the extent of community participation. From that point of view, one should not hold the CIC accountable for the hitherto limited implementation of the ‘cooperative public system’. To achieve its goals, what the CIC does – much like any other activist project – is expend a continuous effort to communicate its strategic vision and goals with the local community in order to mobilize community actors to participate in the project and take it upon themselves to implement those goals.

8. Open cooperativism

One of the most constructive critiques levelled against the cooperative movement in recent years focuses on the parsimonious participation of cooperative organizations in the production of the so-called ‘Commons’, that is, goods that are accessible to all members of society.[54] The problem is that “cooperatives that work within the capitalist marketplace tend to gradually adopt competitive mentalities, and even when they do not, they chiefly operate for the benefit of their own members. They usually have to rely on the patent and copyright system to protect their collective ownership and may often self-enclose around their local or national membership”.[55] The CIC is exactly the opposite of such cooperatives: in fact, one of the reasons setting the CIC apart from traditional cooperatives is its commitment to the Commons. Unlike most cooperatives, the CIC develops structures and tools, which are not reserved just for its members, but are accessible to everyone. For example, the alternative currency ‘eco’ (in its various forms) is used not only by the local exchange groups in Catalonia, but even in countries like Argentina, Brazil, France and Greece. The same applies to the IntegralCES platform, which can be used freely by any local exchange group around the world. Even more specialized tools, such as the ‘GestioGI’ invoice processing software which the CIC developed for its own internal use, are freely available on the Internet as free/open source software. That means anyone can download them and use them, without any obligation to become a member of the CIC. Similarly, the machines and agricultural tools developed by CIC’s XCTIT for the needs of the productive projects in CIC’s network in Catalonia are freely reproducible: their design information is freely available, giving anyone the ability to build them on their own and customize them according to their needs. In fact, even the model of CIC’s organization and operation is ‘open-source’ in the sense that the CIC actively encourages the development of autonomous projects aimed at reproducing its model in other places.

The same commitment to the Commons is reflected in CIC’s strategic goal for the development of a cooperative public system, in which health, food, education and housing are social goods that everyone has access to. Its efforts in that direction might have been partially fruitful so far, but this does not belittle their importance. Above all, it offers an example as well as a vision for the development of cooperatives which aim to benefit not only their fee-paying members, but the broader local community as well by providing it with free access to public benefit infrastructures.

However, this call for engagement with common goods should not be interpreted as a moral imperative or obligation. The motivation of cooperatives should not be philanthropy or altruism alone. As the Brazilian activist and philosopher Euclides Mance argues, common goods constitute strategic tools for the autonomy of cooperatives. A well-known example is how free software (like the Linux operating system) and open design technologies (like the agricultural machines for small producers developed by CIC’s XCTIT) can be used by cooperatives as ‘instruments of liberation’ to extricate themselves from a relationship of dependence on capitalist firms like Microsoft.[56] In fact, that is precisely the reason why the CIC places such importance on the use and development of free and open technology tools, as they ensure the technological sovereignty of the cooperative economy movement.

9. Summing up…

The CIC is without doubt an unconventional cooperative. It was created in the age of crisis by Catalan activists as an antisystemic strategy for the development of counter-structures from the bottom up. One would have to look very hard to find another cooperative, whose primary goal is not the provision of some service to its members, but the ‘creative destruction’ of the capitalist system.

As we have seen in chapter 4, the organizational core of the CIC is made up of ten committees, which cover a wide spectrum of activities. About half of them deal with the internal management and operation of the cooperative, while the rest focus on the provision of services and ‘tools’ as diverse as (a) legal assistance, (b) organizing the logistics in a Catalan-wide network of pantries run by local consumer groups, (c) providing funding (through CASX) to projects animated by the same ideological principles and (d) making tools and machines adapted to the needs of the productive projects in CIC’s network (like the agricultural tools for small farmers that have been developed by the XCTIT).

An interesting element in the organizational canvas of the CIC are the autonomous projects it collaborates with. As we remarked in chapter 5, although they are characterized by varying degrees of managerial autonomy, what is particularly important about them is the fact that they form a local network of productive projects animated by the same principles and values as the CIC, with which they collaborate in the context of the empowerment of the local cooperative economy.

Alongside these autonomous projects, the economic and territorial network of the CIC (which we discussed in chapter 6) encompasses a vibrant ecosystem of local exchange groups which are active in Catalonia. Based on direct exchange and the use of alternative community currencies, the way in which this ecosystem operates represents the model of the autonomous public market envisioned by the CIC as a means of satisfying the needs of the local community. That is, in short, the model proposed by the CIC for the transition to a post-capitalist economy: a local cooperative economy made up of a network of autonomous productive projects with common principles, which, in collaboration with local consumer groups and exchange networks, is able to provide the members of the community with the goods they need.

Acknowledgements

There are no words to adequately express my gratitude to the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) for its cooperation. From the very first moment I arrived in Catalonia, I was warmly received by the members of the cooperative, who did everything they could to help me in the research process. I shall not forget their hospitality and solidarity.

For the interviews they gave me, I would like to thank (in no particular order) Joel, Piquete and Xavier B. of the Communication Committee; Rakel B. and Jordi F. of the Coordination Committee; Dani N. and Luis David of the Reception Committee; Mai of the Economic Management Committee; Claudio and Mabel of the Legal Committee; Efkin and Pablo of the IT Committee; Marta S. and Hèctor M. from CASX and ΜaCUS; Miguel of the Common Spaces Committee; Αle F. of the Office of Housing and FairCoop; Elleflane from the XCTIT; Vadó of the CAC; Efkin and Maxigas from Calafou; Rosa from SOM Pujarnol and Sergio of the Productive Projects Committee.

Of the above persons, I am especially indebted to Joel of the Communication Committee. Joel organized several visits to projects related to the CIC (like SOM Pujarnol and Can Fugarolas) so that I could see them close up and devoted more time than any other CIC member to helping me understand the organizational structure of the CIC and its network. I am also hugely indebted to Luis Davis Arias Castaño for assisting me with the interviews in which I needed an interpreter. However, Luis David was not just my interpeter, but also an invaluable research collaborator. We jointly worked out the questions for the interviews we did and we thoroughly discussed the information we collected in that way.

A huge thanks is also due to my colleague from the P2P Foundation, Stacco Troncoso. Stacco’s contribution was decisive: in addition to finding funding for this research project, he was the colleague with whom I jointly worked out the ‘action plan’ for the research. I was also extremely lucky that he was in Barcelona during my first days in the city, putting me in touch with many useful contacts. I would like to thank him for everything he did for me and this project and hope he forgives me for being sometimes a rather difficult person to work with. Lastly, I would like to thank the Robin Hood Cooperative for funding this research.

Lead image by Alexandre Perotto on Unsplash

Footnotes

[1]URL: http://www.robinhoodcoop.org

[2]See, for example, Schneider, N. (2015) ‘On the Lam with Bank Robber Enric Duran’. Vice (Apr. 7), at https://www.vice.com/read/be-the-bank-you-want-to-see-in-the-world-0000626-v22n4

[3]Inspired by the CIC and its principles, initiatives to set up ‘integral cooperatives’ have been formed in countries as far away as Argentina, attempting to adapt the ‘CIC model’ to their local context: an indicative example is the ‘Heraklion Integral Cooperative’ in the author’s home-town of Heraklion in Greece (see http://cooperativas.gr).

[4]Catalonia is well-known for its strong independence movement. We should not forget that most Catalans consider Catalonia a distinct national entity, with its own language, history and national identity. They are characterized by a culture of resistance, considering themselves an enslaved nation. To put it bluntly, they view the spanish state and its government as an apparatus of domination and oppression. Thus, not expecting any assistance from the official spanish state, they are firm in their conviction that they need to rely on their own strength for the development of their local economy. That is why Catalonia has such a long history of self-organization, which, to a large extent, accounts for the rich tradition this place has in cooperative projects. In this sense, CIC is a characteristically Catalan project: it is animated by the principle of self-organization, combined with a strong anti-statist sentiment and a cooperative culture with deep local roots.

[5]URL: http://integrarevolucio.net/en/

[6]The spanish version is accessible online at https://cooperativa.cat/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/02podemos_cast.pdf

[7]Schneider, op. cit.

[8]For those who wish to delve more deeply into the story of Duran, a very interesting ‘portrait’ can be found in Schneider, op. cit.

[9]FairCoop (http://fair.coop) is animated by the same ideological principles and values as the CIC. Most importantly, it provides services and ‘tools’ that are very similar to those offered by the CIC in Catalonia. For example, like the CIC, it has developed an electronic marketplace where FairCoop members can sell the products they make (https://fair.coop/fairmarket/). What, however, clearly differentiates FairCoop from the CIC is its ‘focus’: whereas the geographical epicentre of CIC’s activities is Catalonia, FairCoop is an international project with members from all over the world, rather than from Catalonia alone.

[10]In addition to the ‘permanent assemblies’, the CIC organizes ‘assembly days’ (the so-called ‘jornades assembleàries’) in the Catalan countryside, where its members have the opportunity to discuss important issues in a more relaxed and natural environment.

[11]That was not however the case during the first years of the CIC. In the beginning all committee members were strictly volunteers: the ‘basic income programme’ was launched a few years later.

[12]Interestingly enough, the amount of basic income received by committee members is not the same for everyone, but is determined in agreement between each member and the Committee of Coordination and Economic Management. To put it simply, members can ask for whatever amount of basic income they think they need to be able to work full-time. However, none of them currently receives more than 765 euros and 135 ecos per month.

[13]See CIC (undated) ‘Self Employment’, at https://cooperativa.cat/en/economic-system/social-currency/

[14]As Sebastián Reyna, the President of the Union of Professional and Working Self-employed People (UPTA) in Spain, explains: “autónomos pay a minimum flat rate of around €250 a month…these costs can appear prohibitive given that they have to be paid every month, no matter what you earn…even if you don’t have any work” (Reyna quoted in Mills, G. (2013) ‘Think hard before going self-employed in Spain’, The Local, Jun. 24, at https://www.thelocal.es/20130624/think-carefully-before-you-register-as-self-employed)

[15]The exact amount of the fee depends on the sum total of all the invoices issued (every three months) by a member, which means that the cost of the fee may rise considerably.

[16]Schneider, op. cit.

[17]The committee’s work is characterized by a strong commitment to the (digital) commons, as all the tools it develops are freely available as free/open source software.

[18]URL: http://feina.cooperativa.cat

[19]URL: http://mercat.cooperativa.cat

[20]URL: http://cooperativa.cat/en/catalan-supply-center/

[21]URL: https://cac.cooperativa.cat

[22]URL: http://xctit.replicat.net

[23]URL: http://xctit.replicat.net/licencia-xctit-gpl/

[24]URL: https://www.canfugarolas.org

[25]So far this income has been used to fund projects in XCTIT’s network, such as Faboratory and Can Cuadres.

[26]XCTIT collects 2% of the revenue from the sales of prototypes developed by its collaborators.

[27]http://cooperativa.cat/en/territorial-network/autonomous-projects-of-collective-initiative-apci/

[28]Shareable (2014) ‘Spanish Robin Hood Enric Duran on Capitalism and “Integral Revolution”’, at http://www.shareable.net/blog/spanish-robin-hood-enric-duran-on-capitalism-and-integral-revolution

[29]URL: http://www.aureasocial.org

[30]The calendar of public activities at AureaSocial is accessible online at https://teamup.com/ks2721d89e700255bc

[31]URL: http://www.casx.cat

[32]CIC (undated) ‘Auto-financing’, at http://cooperativa.cat/en/economic-system/auto-financing/

[33]In case that consensus is not possible among CASX members as to whether a project should be funded or not, the members supporting the funding proposal can do so by using their personal CASX deposits.

[34]CIC (undated) ‘Auto-financing’, at http://cooperativa.cat/en/economic-system/auto-financing/

[35]URL: https://www.facebook.com/people/Som-Pujarnol/100010861595073

[36]As a characteristic example of that relationship, SOM Pujarnol performs the function of the CIC committee that is responsible for the recruitment and induction of new CIC members (the so-called ‘Acollida Comisión’) in the province of Garrotxa.

[37]URL: https://calafou.org

[38]For an overview of the productive projects hosted by Calafou, see https://calafou.org/en/content/projects-0

[39]Although Calafou has quite a few working groups, all of which have direct input into the assembly process, the presentations at ‘monographic’ assemblies are made only by the four most important ones (i.e. the working groups on economics, communication, renovation-restoration and productive projects).

[40]Productive projects have to pay a monthly rent of €1 for every square metre of space they occupy at Calafou.

[41]URL: https://www.facebook.com/MaCUS-527463237312344/

[42]CIC (undated) ‘What’s CIC?’, at http://cooperativa.cat/en/4390-2/

[43]URL: http://ecoxarxes.cat/ecoxarxes/

[44]URL: https://integralces.net/el/ces/bank/exchange/otherexchanges/COOP/statistics (accessed on April 24, 2017)

[45]URL: https://www.community-exchange.org

[46]URL: http://integralces.net

[47]URL: http://www.monedasocial.cat

[48]URL: https://bioregionalnordcic.blogspot.gr and http://bioregiosud.cooperativa.cat

[49]CIC (undated) ‘Cooperative public system’, at http://cooperativa.cat/en/cooperative-public-system/

[50]For CIC’s ‘Office of Education’, see https://cooperativa.cat/en/cooperative-public-system/6014-2/

[51]For CIC’s ‘Cooperative Public Health System’, see https://cooperativa.cat/en/cooperative-public-system/health/

[52]For CIC’s ‘Office of Housing’, see http://www.habitatgesocial.cat and https://cooperativa.cat/en/cooperative-public-system/housing/

[53]For CIC’s ‘Office of Transport’, see https://cooperativa.cat/sistema-public-cooperatiu-2/oficina-de-transport/

[54]See, for example, Bauwens, M. & Kostakis, V. (2014)  ‘From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons: Towards an Open Co-operativism’. TripleC 12(1), at http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/561

[55]Pazaitis, A., Kostakis, V. & Bauwens, M. (2017). ‘Digital Economy and the Rise of Open Cooperativism: The Case of the Enspiral Network’. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research 23(2), at http://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/cQtJrUauKHrIGGYmMZtq/full

[56]Mance, E. & Stallman, R. (2013) Personal Declaration of Richard Stallman and Euclides Mance, at https://stallman.org/solidarity-economy.html

The post The Catalan Integral Cooperative: an organizational study of a post-capitalist cooperative appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The CIC moto: ‘social transformation from below through self-management, self-organization and networking’

My colleagues at the P2P Foundation and I have long been interested in exploring the ‘CIC model’ as an organizational template for the transition to a commons-oriented economy: with that purpose in mind, Michel Bauwens and some colleagues from the P2PF had visited the CIC for two weeks in 2015. This experience prove to be very fruitful, convincing them that the case of the CIC merits further study. So, when the opportunity arose, the P2PF asked me to travel to Catalonia in order to study the CIC more extensively, with the aim of documenting its organizational model.

Doing fieldwork in the CIC means I lived with CIC activists for about two months so as to familiarize myself with their activities. Using the building of AureaSocial – the unofficial headquarters of the CIC in Barcelona, where I had the luck to be hosted – as my ‘base’, I embedded myself in the cooperativa, taking part in its daily life and visited many exciting projects which are connected to the CIC, like the Calafou post-capitalist colony and the MaCUS makerspace.

Chatting with CIC members at the ‘Bioregional’ assembly in Ultramort in May 2016. Photo by Luis Camargo (https://bioregionalnordcic.blogspot.gr/2016/04/album-de-fotos-de-lassemblea-duitramort.html)

The result of this research experience is this special report, which has just been published by the P2P Foundation and the Robin Hood Coop on the Commons Transition website. I hope that fellow commoners and co-operators will find it interesting!

Photo by cuboctahedron

The post Exploring the Catalan Integral Cooperative in the Age of Crisis appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This year however, the project is in a different league. Instead of Enric’s periodically announcing the price on an obscure FairCoop noticeboard like a sovereign, there is now a lively chat group with 80 members. Their objective is twofold, 1) to propose the ‘official’ price of FairCoin to the FairCoop monthly assembly, and 2) to manage the free market price.

The price should increase slowly and steadily, in contrast to other cryptocurrencies which fail as money because they are volatile. They aim to build confidence attract long term investors who want their money to do social good. FairCoop is selling FairCoin at the official price and building a pile of Euros. Those Euros are not for spending but remain available to buy back FairCoins from members who accepted them but cannot spend them. They do not guarantee to redeem all FairCoin ever issued, why should they? They are just a private institution in a free market trading a commodity.

Insofar as coins are circulating they don’t need to be redeemed and only then can the pile of Euros be LENT (not spent) on something else. They are building their own bank, capitalised by the FairCoin in our wallets.

It is this manipulation for a purpose, within the free market, that makes FairCoin so interesting. Cryptocurrencies by their nature allow anyone to participate, but a motivated team with some resources should be able to ‘own’ or at least take control of a market for their own ends. They need to keep as many coins as possible in friendly hands, and of course to grow the list of vendors who accept FAIR, who can be reassured of a cash price from FairCoop.

Two years ago the ‘official’ FairCoop price had been 5x of the Bittrex price, and a few people kept the faith, but it was really only a handful of activist business who accepted it. But something, whether Enric’s persistence, or the whims of the free market, or a handful of self appointed market-managers, lifted the price, then in in May this year, there was a rush of money into crypto-markets, and FairCoin, with its low volume of trade benefited more than most.

Suddenly the free-market price was above the official price. FairCoop had to restrict its sales to prevent arbitrageurs eating the money pile.

This has been the situation for some weeks. The new price should be decided by the assembly. If (and when) the volatility can’t be managed and the official price drops, FairCoin holders will weather the storm, especially after having enjoyed a 20 fold increase in the free-market price.

This all means that suddenly there is a lot more money behind Faircoin. The team can more confidently offer cash redemption to more vendors and has more reserves with which to smooth the free market volatility. The official list of vendors is much improved on two years ago, though still rather weak. So saying, I was able to go to a wholefood store in Athens and buy more than I could carry!

FairCoop activists are also innovating on payment technologies possible in few other cryptocurrencies. They are able, with a Spanish partner, ChipChap, to convert FAIR into Euros and withdraw them from the ATM in one smooth action! The Bank of the Commons initiative aims to provide a multi-wallet solution for holding and moving between Euros, Bitcoin, FairCoin, and balances from local exchange systems.

So why not show some support by at least getting yourself a FairCoin wallet, proudly displaying this badge, and listing your trade on the Fairmarket.

The post Paying attention to FairCoin! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Community currency engineer, Matthew Slater, reconsiders his opinion of FairCoop.

Having kept an eye on the altcoins for a good while I wasn’t initially impressed by the claims of Faircoin.

There have been several coins issued attached to good causes but without a clear monetary function. The idea is usually to set up a cryptocurrency, premine some, market the brand and sell the premines for a good cause. In this, there is no consideration of what makes the coin a desirable purchase, and the coin is so useless i.e. unused and therefore unusable, that its purchase constitutes little more than a straight donation.

It seemed to me that Faircoin was something similar, but making spurious claims about being more fair in its configuration. It was premined and distributed initially with an airdrop to everyone who had registered. Proof-of-stake is fairer and less energy intensive than proof of work. The undistributed premined coins were allocated for different areas of development. FairCoop activists were easily able to send the coins between themselves and convert them to Euros using Chip Chap.

As I probed I learned that Enric Duran, the mastermind of FairCoop who is famous for borrowing EUR500K and giving it to charity and who is now in hiding, was behind the scenes manipulating the Faircoin price to make it more stable. Clever perhaps, but also a cause for concern. Did he know what he was doing? With activists selling Faircoin for Euros, how long could Duran keep the price up before he ran out of resources and the price crashed?

When I visited activists in Barcelona a fuller picture emerged. It turns out that since wide publicity has lead to a strong demand for Faircoin, Duran containing the price for the sake of stability rather than inflating it. By constant buying and selling, he is cushioning users from the usual cryptocurrency volatility. Also he is not doing so only with his own resources but with a group of Faircoin holders. In a normal crypto this collective power would be extremely concerning but since Faircoin holders trust this group, it is extremely reassuring.

That’s what makes the difference in any financial system. Trust. The cryptocurrencies have attempted to remove trust from money, and in so doing have created dark and dangerous marketplaces. Faircoin is overlayed by the users’ trust in an outlaw “Robin Hood” character, and a pervasive ethic of solidarity.

Furthermore Faircoin is only part of a larger financial system that Duran is building. It is the part that provides a way to move hard value around and withdraw Euros when needed. Alongside that
Faircredit, a mutual credit system (planned)
Fairsavings, a faircoin savings fund which gives a yield while the coins are used elsewhere in the coop
FairMarket, a directory of goods and services for exchange
Fairstarts, an incubator for small enterprises
Fairfund, a way of donating to various organs of Faircoop
Coop Shares, equity crowdfunding

Duran’s achievements in building a financial system outside existing structures are remarkable, and this templates and tools deserve more attention and more support from like-minded movements.

I think Faircoin would be more fit for purpose if Duran and his team were able to calm the price by issuing new coins, rather than using a preprogrammed release schedule. Publishing a target price for the coin and having the tools to maintin it, would deter speculators and reassure serious users.

The post Financial hacking with Faircoin appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Coopshares is an emerging example of a ‘cryptoequity’ platform, launching during the Ouishare Fest (where FairCoop was nominated for the Collaborative Finance award).

I have been in touch with Enric Duran, the founder of FairCoop, and he has explained to me the intention behind the project: basically the idea is that each investment (which can be made in a combination of Faircoins (the FairCoop’s own cryptocurrency) and Euros, or Faircoins alone), will be rewarded with P2P Equity Tokens, designed to pay a dividend based on both the predicted rise in the Faircoin value, and any profits made by the Fairstarts cooperative projects. If a project is for the commons and will not produce any financial profit, reputation points will be awarded instead.

The overall plan is to attract investment to secure both the long-term future of FairCoop, add liquidity to the financial ecosystem within the FairCoop, and help kickstart individual cooperative projects which will be launched under its FairStarts incubator programme.

From the Coopshares website:

Coopshares will be a P2P equity crowdfunding platform focused on cooperatives, social enterprises, and P2P production projects. It will be endorsed by FairCoop and based on Faircoin.

Coopshares will facilitate investments in cooperative projects without the gambling component of asset trading that usually exists in the wider cryptocurrency environment and in the equities markets

The stakes in CoopShares are tied to the Faircoin price, which allows investors to obtain profits with the growth both of Faircoin, and of the entire ecosystem of cooperatives linked to FairCoop, without compromising cooperative values and principles.

Also, Coopshares will use blockchain technology to provide tools to cooperatives for decentralized organizing so that they can encourage the participation of all stakeholders, from workers to investors.

There is some overlap between this Coopshares initiative and another ‘cryptoequity’ platform, Swarm, launched by Joel Dietz and friends recently, and in fact Coopshares is also one of the projects features on the Swarm website.

After the Occulus Rift affair (let’s call it), where the crowdfunders who literally kickstarted the virtual reality project failed to see any sort of return (other than their reward from the original crowdfunding campaign) after the company was sold to Facebook for two billion dollars, there has been an awareness that while ‘traditional’ crowdfunding is fine in the case of a one-off project like a book or music album, where the project is an enterprise which is likely to generate ongoing profits, ‘crowdinvesting’ would be preferable, rather than leaving the venture capitalists to clean up on the back of the community’s well-intentioned original investment. And also, with cooperative projects, very often it is simply not acceptable to receive VC funding and submit oneself to the accompanying difficult moment when large returns on investments are demanded, often at the cost of warping the principles which inspired the cooperative in the first place.

Both Swarm and Coopshares are hoping to avoid this situation by allowing smaller investors to get involved and by putting cooperative principles before pure profit. Thus it becomes a combination of a crowdfund where the investors merely wish to support worthwhile projects, and a traditional equity investment which pays a dividend.

The proposed addition of voting rights and reputation systems, both based on blockchain technology, within what are called DCOs or ‘Distributed Collaborative Organizations’ could turn this sort of cryptoequity system into something genuinely innovative, potentially allowing a cooperative to give many many stakeholders a voice in its running, and possibly outperforming traditional hierarchical companies in the process.

Right now both Coopshares and Swarm are in the early stages and need investment and participation to get started. If they are successful, it could be an exciting new development in the way in which cooperative projects are initiated and funded.

(Disclaimer: I am an unpaid volunteer member of the Ecosystem Council of FairCoop – addition to the disclaimer: it’s open to everyone so come and get involved!).

The post FairCoop, Swarm, and “Cryptoequity” Funding appeared first on P2P Foundation.