Labour market trends that assess who is most impacted by precarious work all show up the same patterns; these folks are black and brown, often women, and often working class. Precarious work includes digital apps such as Uber, abuse of zero-hour contracts, or those most at risk from losing a job due to automation. As this ‘new economy’ thrives, we need to be aware that race inequality will worsen because white supremacy is a systemic feature of neoliberal capitalism. This article suggests seven concrete steps that progressives can take towards a genuinely new and transformative economy for all workers. 

Play the race card 

Our economic system inherently disadvantages marginalised groups, and this trend is consistent through history. To better understand why this happens, we need to consciously develop a deeper analysis of the problem we are trying to address. In this case, how are Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) workers impacted by the rise of precarious work practices? 

Research conducted by the Resolution Foundation think tank shows that ‘minority ethnic’ families currently earn nearly £9000 a year less than their white British counterparts. This is supported further by the tuc’s Insecure Work and Ethnicity report that identified one in every 13 BAME workers were in insecure employment, compared to one in 20 for white workers. The same report also identifies that of the 3.1 million BAME workers in the UK, nearly a quarter were in insecure work or were likely to be underemployed. Additionally, the number of BAME workers in insecure jobs rose by 2% in five years, whilst the number of white workers remained the same. 

Wages and earnings aren’t the only issues here. Precarious work is often not a choice, but a result of systemic racism in which BAME workers find it harder to access stable employment. In addition, expecting digital platforms to deliver some utopian democracy ignores the reality of white supremacy. When your customer base is largely white affluent middle class, this plays into the race and class power dynamic, sometimes influencing who gets chosen for work. And as independent contractors, these workers are also at risk of abuse or attacks with very little protection. And in a society where the new norms are xenophobic rhetoric and hate crime, this leaves many unsupported workers vulnerable to discrimination, hurt, and shame. 

If you need any more evidence on the broader systemic failures around employment and work, the Race Disparity Audit commissioned by the government offers a sobering and heartbreaking reality check on the lived experience of the BAME population in the workplace. What is important to take away from this evidence is that marginalisation of communities is active, not passive. There are multiple systems at play that are responsible for race inequality; white supremacy, elitism, and patriarchy to name but a few. 

Decolonise economics 

How is this data shaped by the characteristics of neoliberal capitalism? For this we need to look to the origins of capitalism as an economic model and, as a result, how deep white supremacy is embedded in the functions of our society – even today. 

Many people argue that the modern economy has brought us substantial material benefits, better rights for workers, and flexibility in work practices. Whilst this may be the case, these benefits have, by design, been disproportionately distributed amongst a privileged few. For the global majority (non-white people/people of colour), capitalism is a system that is historically tied to colonialism and racism. Colonialism is a project that led to the demolition of sacred land and cultures, extraction of natural resources, sale of black bodies as property, and sent brown bodies to war for the British Empire. 

The colonial mindset continues to this day and is justified by the pursuit of economic growth that is centred around white superiority. We can connect capitalism with white supremacy, and come to understand racism as the tool by which white European colonisers wielded economic power over large parts of the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Well known critical race theorist F.L. Ansley helps us understand the colonial mindset here:

By ‘white supremacy’ I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily re-enacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.”

500 years of colonial rule and settler colonialism has created an economy so entrenched in systems of oppression that we must connect this to the reality of inequality today. In Britain, a colonial mindset dominates the way institutions control our media, legal system, education, financing and policing, and the way we respond to them. As a result, white supremacy is normalised as an invisible force that is subtle and powerful. The evidence for structural racism is clear, and the only justification that is viable is the lasting legacy of white supremacy. Future alternatives to neoliberalism need to be informed by confronting our economic history of colonialism, mercantilism, and imperialism. 

How to centre race in the new economy

Neoliberalism is a particularly vicious form of capitalism that has destroyed so much of the fabric of our society, including public services, decent housing, and stable employment. No one should be surprised that BAME workers are the first to be impacted by precarious work. If anything, it is evidence that neoliberal capitalism is functioning as intended: through the exploitation of people of colour. In responding to this, however, we cannot escape the rapid development of technology and the way this is reshaping our work practices. Wage equality and workers rights can only be realised if we centre the BAME community at the heart of our efforts to build alternatives, so that we can truly challenge the foundations of neoliberal capitalism. We can do this in many ways. 

Stronger movements

In the past century, people of colour in Britain have fought for equal rights alongside white-centred movements, be it through the Suffragettes or labour strikes. They’ve done this in the margins, achieving part but not all of the rights that have been afforded to their white British counterparts. By centreing the lived experience of BAME workers in all our actions, be it labour strikes, protests, or workplace organising, we can be sure to attend to those that are feeling the impact of the gig-economy now, not just the fear of it hitting us in the future. Investigate which sectors are predominantly BAME in identity, and understand their concerns, and do this without essentialising or tokenism of any one identity. Use your time to follow groups such as Hotel Workers Branch and Justice for Domestic Workers, and interrogate campaigns that are whitewashed or lack depth and integrity. 

Intersectional analysis

In our work, we need to recognise the overlapping – or intersecting – nature of discrimination that plays a role in our understanding of wage inequality. In this article I’ve concentrated on ‘people of colour’ as one group without doing the necessary work of breaking this down into gender, ability, class, sexuality, migration status and the many other social factors that influence how society influences the workplace. Uncovering this evidence will open our eyes to the reality of inequality, and a deeper understanding of the structure of the economy. Be mindful that using intersectionality as a tool to better understand different lived experiences does not absolve us of our privilege and the work we need to do on ourselves. 

Challenging narratives

An intersectional analysis also allows us to challenge ideas that are designed to divide us. An example of this is the widespread use of the term ‘white working-class’, which routinely excludes the reality of black, brown and Asian working class communities in Britain. Evidence consistently shows that a higher percentage of the BAME community are working class when compared to the white British population. Let’s also challenge the narrative of ‘Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic’ that comes from a Eurocentric view of our globalised world. Whilst I have embraced this terminology in this article, a vision for a new economy should use terms such as people of global majority, people from formerly colonised nations, or people of colour in order to free us from our colonial mindset. 

Relevant alternatives

The progressive ‘new economy’ scene in the UK is full of ideas for alternative practices to neoliberalism when it comes to work and wages. Consider ‘new economy’ projects that build co-operatives or use the gift economy. They are often designed for a lived experience that is so disconnected from those who need it, it renders them inaccessible and irrelevant to the broader goal of economic systems change. The irony here is that many of the alternatives are rooted in a non-European indigenous history, and have been appropriated by those who already have social power. When designing alternatives, take inspiration from some excellent organisations who are decolonising these ideas to make them work for black and brown communities. Explore why Black Lives Matter adopted Universal Basic Income as a central demand in their manifesto, and how one black community in Jackson, Mississippi is using technology and data to reinvent their local economy. 

So, ask yourself now “where is this work happening in the UK, and who knows about it?” We all want to commit to building a new economy that works for everyone. To do so we need to get our analysis clear, and recognise that capitalism will always be one step ahead of us unless we are willing to centre people of colour in the solutions we build.

If we do so, we will have built the foundations for alternatives that are powerful enough to uproot neoliberal capitalism for good. If we don’t then the ‘new economy’ will be little more than the successor to what we already have.

Gurpreet Bola is an organiser, trainer, researcher, and writer. She is committed to political and social systems change. Her economic analysis has supported activists to identify the root cause of social inequalities and oppression.

This is a print first feature published in STIR magazine.

The post Race and Intersectionality in the New Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Jacobson discusses the history of the “wages for housework” movement, connecting it to the contemporary movement for unconditional basic income.

Republished from basicincome.org

The post Basic Income & Women’s Liberation appeared first on P2P Foundation.

When I first began thinking about ideas of subjectivity and emotion in relation to fisheries most people thought I was crazy. Talk to fishermen about their feelings? But it quickly became clear that I was on the right track. As one fishermen’s advocate said to me, laughing, “People are definitely not rational, especially fishermen. They make decisions based on other factors.”¹ I became fascinated by what some of these “other” factors might be.

My project begins with the excellent work done by Ostrom² and others on design principles for the commons. Design principles focus on the institutional rules and norms required for effective management of collective resources. This work has been done within a rational choice framework, however, which leaves little space for understanding alternative rationalities or “nonrational” behaviors. If we simply add in perspectives on gender, kinship relations, emotional attachments to resources and land- and seascapes to our understanding of design principles, it prevents us from exploring how design principles emerge in the first place. Rather, I suggest we need to explore how institutions, resources and societies are co-emergent. This starting point shows how the “design” of a commons is a product of personal interactions, histories and relationships that need to be continually renewed.³

Taking co-emergence as a starting point has major implications for how we understand the dynamics of the commons. It is not a question of explaining how resource use affects the commons, but rather a question of exploring how the commons, as an institution, a place and an ecosystem, is embedded within and productive of the communities that rely on commons. The two cannot be neatly separated, spatially, temporally or analytically.

My research has been on the Scottish inshore Nephrops norvegicus fishery, which is the largest fishery in Scotland in terms of landings and number of boats. Nephrops are also known as Norwegian lobster or prawns and are the main species marketed as scampi or langoustines. They are fished both by creel and by trawl net, although the creel fishery produces a higher value, live product. Skipper-owned boats, operated out of small ports on a daily basis, dominate the fishery.

The west coast is a mixed fishery with creelers (pots on the sea bed) and trawlers (nets towed across the sea bed) sharing the same fishing grounds. One community on the west coast has banned all trawl gear from its fishing grounds and operates a formal (although not legally binding) scheme to limit the number of creels fished per day per boat. They are an unusual case because the UK government sets and distributes prawn quotas, leaving limited opportunities for fishers to make their own rules for managing fish catches. The situation is rapidly changing as the government implemented inshore fisheries groups in 2009 to decentralize management. How much authority they have, however, is still quite restricted. It is in this context that I want to explore the “(non)rational commons.”

Design Principles and the (Non)rational

Much of the work done on the commons has centered on the institutions that make collective management of shared resources viable. Institutions (rules and norms) are vital to limiting and monitoring resource extraction. Yet I want to focus on the dynamics of institutions, the everyday practices through which institutions come into being and are reproduced over time and space. In particular, I want to add in a consideration of subjectivities, including gender, race, class and even identities such as “fishermen,” which I suggest are equally important to how a common-pool resource is managed. When we take into consideration alternative rationalities, then the reasons that some well-designed institutions fail becomes clearer. It is the ongoing enactment of institutions as well as their underlying rules and norms that are crucial to outcomes.

Subjectivities are important to the operation of institutions as they are integrally bound up with how people understand their relationship to others. In a fisheries context, I focus on the practices and interactions that are required for one to be considered a “fisherman” and the contradictory ways in which these interactions both promote and frustrate attempts at collaboration.

For example, when I tell inshore fishermen I am interested in how they cooperate, they laugh and say they do not. And yet, when I have been on boats with them, there is an almost constant stream of communication as skippers radio others about the sea conditions, alert them to a strange boat in their waters, or warn trawlers they are too close to someone’s creel line. When I point this out, they readily agree that they cooperate in these ways. In fact, I think most would agree that they must cooperate in order to ensure their safety and that of their gear and catch. The question then becomes whether or not these forms of cooperation help to build a foundation for more formal collaboration.⁴

The types of relationships driving cooperation can be considered “rational” in certain respects. Taking account of community obligations, the need to preserve kinship relationships and an emotive attachment to the sea can be seen as “rational,” particularly over long time scales. Kinship relationships, for example, can be vital to supporting people during times of crisis and therefore are logically considered important to maintain. This kind of rationality, however, is not the kind of “rational fisherman” that rational choice theorists have in mind. I am therefore interested in challenging the dominant idea of the greedy fisherman by highlighting the alternative or “(non)rational” relations and commitments that underpin cooperation.

Subjectivity and Cooperation

I suggest that subjectivity is an important component of the “(non)rational” relations that underpin informal and formal modes of cooperation. Subjectivity is often conflated with identity, but the two concepts are different in important ways. Subjectivity refers to the ways in which people are brought into relations of power, or subjected, as well as how they resist them. Power is at the heart of social interactions; it is impossible to conceptualize relationships that are not bound by power in some way. Power can operate in the commons in many different forms, from gender, caste, and ethnicity inequalities within commons user-groups, to the relations between fisheries policy or policy makers and fishermen, to more subtle dimensions of power such as those that arise from differences in experience and knowledge of commons resources – all of which produce different subjectivities. These serve to position people engaged in the commons differently in relation to each other and in relation to the commons itself.

In fisheries, to be “a fisherman” requires that one goes to sea and catches fish. This relationship between the resource and subjectivity is crucial for how fishers see themselves and integrate certain attitudes and behaviors into other aspects of their lives, including formal institutions to manage the fishery.

Subjectivities are not necessarily negative; they are a consequence of the multidimensional aspects of power, making it difficult to think of power as simply unidirectional or even bidirectional. Power is what gives the subject the ability to act, and any resistance to a dominating power will always have some contradictory outcomes. In order to resist power, one has to first accept that they are subject to that power.

In Scottish fisheries, the subject “fisherman” is dependent upon a large web of economic, political and social relationships wherein fishing as an historical, cultural, technological and legal activity is defined and policed. If we consider the operation of power in this context, fishers cannot contest fishing regulations without first accepting that they are subject to those regulations. This power over them also provides the power to act in a variety of ways. Similarly, fishermen cannot make claims about protecting their fishing grounds without simultaneously reinforcing the idea that fishermen exploit their fishery and that the fishing grounds belong to someone.

In most thinking on the commons, power is either something which might derail an otherwise well functioning community, or as something contained in individuals that they can use to maximize their profits by overexploiting the shared resources in defiance of the rest of the users.

For example, even though overfishing or violating quotas is a familiar phenomenon, recently some Scottish fishers have been at the forefront of voluntary schemes to create sustainable fisheries. One is a scheme for white fish boats to report and actively avoid areas where large concentrations of young cod are found. Another is the case, mentioned above, where mobile gear was banned from a creel fishery. (This is rather unusual in that part of the fishing ground is “protected” by a military zone on one side, and that combined with the topography of the coast lines serves to demarcate a relatively clear “local fishing ground” that is clearly identifiable on a map.) About fifteen years ago fishers in this area became concerned over the decline in their fishery. They engaged in a variety of legal and somewhat more dubious tactics in what is known as the “trawl wars” to exclude mobile gear from their area. One of the most notorious incidents was the sinking of a caravan to interfere with the trawl gear. This was successful in deterring the trawlers but the culprit was identified because, as one informant told me, “they forgot to take off the licence plate, so that wasn’t so smart.”

The group succeeded in getting a partial ban in the fishing ground that excludes mobile gear and limits the number of creels fished per day, per boat. They also use escape hatches to allow the smaller prawns to leave the creel before it is lifted. These agreements are voluntary, but the exclusion of mobile gear has been legally confirmed, although not permanently. The exclusion has to be renewed regularly (roughly every ten years, but it changes with changes in Scottish fisheries policy). Because this has helped produce excellent fishing ground, “there are more boats, especially in the south end of the area that aren’t signed up [to our agreement] and aren’t complying. Especially Max [pseudonym]… is not a fisherman, he’s just a businessman.” My respondent explains why some fishers are committed to limiting the fishery and others are not by invoking the difference between “fishermen” who respect the local customs and seek to limit their fishing, and a “businessman” who simply wants to catch as much profit as possible. In another area, a creeler contrasted the “businessmen” who trawl, with creeling which he described as, “days you’re out there and you’re barely making a living but you’re at sea…It’s a way of being.” He went on to complain that the large trawlers do not spend money in the village and have no commitment to the community. Not only is the trawl catch more indiscriminate, but he suggests that their emotional attachments to the sea and the community are dissimilar, and as a result, they do not have the same commitments to try to manage the fishery sustainably. Both of these schemes are constructive, pro-active attempts to protect their fishery.

Neither scheme provides short-term financial returns for the fishers although most people involved believe and hope that longer term it will ensure the viability of the fishery. Under a rational choice framework, however, these schemes are considered highly irrational. They are not seen as advancing the best interests of individual fishers because they often result in fishers earning less money from their days at sea. But my point here is that these schemes only appear as “unusual” or “innovative” because of the dominant view (fostered by rational-choice theory itself!) that fishers are only interested in self-improvement or profits. Schemes to limit the fishery are all based on the assumption that fishers will try to catch as many fish as they can when they are out on the sea. Yet the everyday practices of fishers generally do not reflect these assumptions. This is largely because the identity of being a “fisherman” emerges from the act of going to sea and living in a web of kinship, community and peer relationships that are crucial to supporting fishing as an activity and as an industry. Significantly, this identity persists regardless of the institutional rules and to a certain extent regardless of dominant theoretical paradigms. Thus attention to alternative rationalities and identities is crucial to understanding how cooperation or noncooperation emerges – and therefore how a commons can function so effectively.

Fishing produces particular kinds of bodies and emotions that are not insignificant when it comes to trying to draw up management agreements. Men who are used to coping with dangerous and physically demanding environments, find it literally uncomfortable, physically and subjectively, to situate their bodies in a meeting room. In other words, this experience changes what it means to be a fisherman. This change is as much an embodied experience as it is a political and emotional one. A fisherman working on his boat, providing food and income for his family, is often in a relatively powerful position. I have met few fishers in Scotland who are not proud of their occupation. And yet, that changes to a very different kind of subjectivity when they find themselves the target of decommissioning schemes, blamed personally for degradation of their fishing grounds, or forced to interact with policymakers. The exercise of power changes in profound ways and they end up in a more defensive position relative to their occupational identity.

Conceptualizing power and subjectivity in this way brings into focus the kinds of relationships and practices that shape how cooperation occurs within the commons, many of which are not “rational” as narrowly defined by rational choice theory.⁵ Every relationship linked to the commons – from that between policymakers and resource users, to internal user-group dynamics, to those between resource users and the larger community – contain the possibility for power to produce either a resistant, uncooperative subject or a variety of subjectivities that are more conducive to working collectively.

The spaces within which these interactions occur are also important in shaping power and relationships. Therefore, we need to shift the focus in commons work from institutional design (rules and norms) to the everyday spaces, experiences and practices wherein commons management occurs. It is those elements that shape whether management rules are accepted, who accepts them, who polices them and the kinds of social and environmental transformations they produce.

Working the Sea: Everyday Practices and the Operation of Power

This discussion, however, still seems remote from the pitching fishing boats and smelly piers wherein fishers spend most of their time. I think that attention needs to be paid to the embodied experiences of fishermen in the spaces wherein they interact: the pier, on boats, in meeting halls, and in the community.

In Scotland, the inshore fishery is often the lifeblood of small, coastal villages. Many places have few other job possibilities outside of tourism, which itself is dependent on selling the idealized “fishing village” image to guests. In response to a question about what had caused the biggest changes in her west coast community, an older woman said,

Well, mainly the fishing, the prawn fishing. Years ago now, I suppose ten or fifteen years ago, there weren’t that many boats out of here and most of the young ones were really going away from the place. But now a lot of the young ones are back… They are buying houses and they are building houses…

Fishing, then, is far more than an occupation. It is one of the activities that keeps the community viable and lively. As a result, fishers are embedded in a set of relationships that support fishing in symbolic and emotional ways, even if local people buy very little fish directly off the boats. Fishers do not financially gain from the community, but the relationships bind them together – which itself enacts an alternative rationality to profit maximization. The benefits of fishing flow from these relationships and from that particular place; they provide subconscious emotional support to fishers when they may not catch any fish. This kind of support is crucial to keeping fishers rooted in place and dissuades them from moving to more productive fishing grounds, as “rational” theory suggests they should.

As more “local” boats have appeared, many fishers are concerned that there are now too many fishers. Yet none of them suggests that people should be actively excluded. Rather they highlight the ways they cooperate, as one fisherman said,

Everyone is free to go where they want but I mean basically your [fishing ground] is marked and it’s…well, it’s more of a kind of gentleman’s agreement that you don’t go and shoot over the top of someone else’s creels…I mean it does happen…basically because people think maybe somebody else is getting something better but its generally put down to a mistake with tides…but if someone was blatantly doing it, moved in here and just plastered on top of everyone there would have to be something done that maybe you wouldn’t put down on paper. [laughter]

Here, the fisher suggests that the ability to exclude someone from your fishing ground is tied up in being a legitimate member of the community. He assumes that a blatant violator of the “gentlemen’s agreement” would be an outsider. Thus being a “fisherman” in a locally understood sense is also to be part of the community.

Another fisherman spoke about how it was unpleasant to have confrontations with people, indicating that relationships are often more important than the catch. In localities where two communities’ fishing grounds overlapped, they actively tried to avoid fishing in areas that might cause conflict. People aren’t willing to risk causing an altercation just to catch a few more prawns.

These “fishermen” are very different from the “fishermen” of fisheries policy. In many respects, they act “irrationally” in the face of competition in the fishery. One would expect fishers to try to exclude new boats or to capture as much catch as they can individually, even if it meant conflict with people they do not know. While certainly the local men involved in the fishery compete with each other in a variety of ways, they are also highly valued because of the jobs and prosperity they bring into the village. They need to live up to their reputations and feel bound by certain local etiquettes that supersede some of the more blatant forms of self-interested behavior. When I speculated on some of these ideas to a fisherman’s wife she immediately broke in, “They don’t have a choice. I don’t even think it’s conscious; they have to be a part of things here. It’s part of who they are. It’s how we do things here.”⁶

Similarly, in two other west coast fisheries, the creelers know that they would have bigger and more prolific prawns if trawlers were banned from their fishing grounds. But they are acutely aware that the fishing ground has to be shared and are against trying to ban the trawlers altogether. In one place, the brother of a successful creeler is physically disabled and while he can run a trawl boat, he would be physically unable to creel. Everyone agrees that he needs to have an opportunity to fish, too. It is also common for fishers to trade in their creels for a trawler when they get older and find the physical demands of creeling to be too difficult. It is these kinds of community obligations and alternative rationalities that make all fishers in those particular areas committed to a mixed gear (creel and trawl) fishery.

Interestingly, this commitment is rapidly changing as fuel prices increase and more trawlers are converting to creeling which uses significantly less fuel. The creel fishermen also federated in late 2012 and their organization is trying to provide an alternative lobbying voice to that of the trawlers. It is also promoting creeling as a clear commitment to conservation of the fishery for the short and long term. For example, the federation issued a public statement embracing the new marine-protected areas along the Scottish coast as a welcome development in marine spatial planning. Some of these areas will allow limited fishing while others will exclude fishers entirely. The trawl-dominated federations have been adamantly against marine protected areas.

Clearly, such relations of power can also lead to noncompliance and defiance of peer pressures to be a “good community (or federation) member.” Many fishing communities have at least one such person, and indeed, at one of my field sites I was told to stay away from one man because he is considered dangerous. Yet for the vast majority of the fishers I have worked with, they are consciously and unconsciously bound within relations that make them unwilling to resist the subject “good community member.”

Fishing in Scotland is very much a masculine activity, with the work and time demands deemed inappropriate for women raising children. With a few exceptions, women (wives) do most of the paperwork and onshore fisheries-related activities but rarely go on the boats themselves. This is important because the kinds of conflicts that emerge are linked to ideas of how men should behave in a west coast fishing village. One woman vividly described for me the priorities of the men in her village: “Oh, you know these West Highland men, it’s work, pub, wife.” She held her hands up in front of her and placed “work” right in front, “pub” right next to it, and then stretched her arms all the way to the side and placed “wife” there. She continued, “I’m sure in their heads they think it’s the opposite but it isn’t.” [laughter] The notion that “good men” work hard is emphasized along with the idea that men’s and women’s places are very different. Very few women hang out in the pubs. Maintaining your reputation, providing for your family, working hard and drinking in the pub are key ways in which males become “men,” and through their activities on the sea, become “fishermen.”⁷

What makes it so difficult to understand the relationships I’ve described is that attempting to identify patterns or to associate identities with particular motivations is inappropriate. Community obligations can just as easily lead to a ban on mobile gear as it can to a mixed gear fishery – as is the case in different places on the Scottish west coast. It is important to recognize that relationships are complex, contingent and changeable. If the commons is not successful, it is more likely due to problems with these relationships than it is with the institutional design. Therefore I propose the (non)rational commons, one which takes account of how power operates in the fishery, including the kinds of relationships I’ve described here.

Meetings, Emotion and Subjectivity

In order to understand more fully the relationships relevant for cooperation in the fishery, it is also necessary to consider the meeting room. A variety of meetings occur in relation to fisheries, ranging from informal chats on the pier between skippers and other users of the sea such as tourist boat operators or port authorities, to policy meetings in Edinburgh and Brussels attended by fishers’ representatives, policymakers and scientists. The shift from their boats to the meeting room subjects fishermen in radically different ways. Here I focus on the consultation meetings that usually involve policymakers and fisheries regulators with fishermen, fishermen’s advocates, and occasionally other stakeholders such as environmental groups or local development authorities. Most often, these meetings are held in larger west coast towns or areas central to the dispersed fishing villages.

In the interviews many fishers expressed a much stronger emotion and pragmatic connection with their resources than with policy meetings. One fisherman put it poignantly, “People sitting in their office, they are not even affected by the rain.” Another said, “They are so divorced from what it’s about. We have a lot of conversations about what it’s about to live here. We are surrounded by greens and blues [i.e., nature], [policy makers] coming from the city, they don’t have that, they do not understand what that means.”⁸” These men insist that managers do not understand the realities of the act of fishing and living in a remote coastal village, and this is seen by them as a major problem for collective solutions. In other words, the fishermen and the policymakers inhabit very different relationships with the resource and this is crucial for how relations of power are exercised.

The meeting room itself produces a very different subjectivity among fishermen than time on the boat. They are clear that the meeting room is not their place. One man said, “It’s the difference between standing on the landing and jumping in the sea.” Another said, “One’s real and the other is not. Well yeah, I’m happier for one [on the boat].” Equally importantly, many fishermen pointed out that policy makers are paid to attend meetings whereas they are not. Instead, they take time away from their boats or other activities in order to have their voices heard. The space of the meeting room itself produces particular kinds of subjects for both the fishermen and policymakers that sets them literally, on opposite sides of the room.

The fishermen are well aware of these relations and how the assumptions of fisheries regulators shape meeting dynamics. One man said about a recent meeting, “The guys come with their preconceptions, it’s almost like here we go again. We threw them a surprise [when we started talking about limiting the creel fishery in addition to banning trawling]. Someone talking about their own sector, they didn’t expect that.”⁹ Another man said, “You explain your point of view but they don’t want to hear it. They’ve made up their mind before they go in the meeting.”

These preconceptions emerge from the normative practices of fishing. Policymakers base their policies and their meeting agendas on ideas of “rational fishermen,” who by definition need to be policed and regulated. By this reckoning, the creel fishermen I have described here shift from being family providers, bound by “gentlemen’s agreements” and subjected by the “community,”to being an overexploiter of the sea who needs to be told about proper fisheries management. This shift in subjectivity is central to why there is so much antagonism between fishermen and policymakers.

Alternative rationalities or the “nonrational” are therefore key components of commons management. The relationships and places within which fishers interact are important components of their subjectivities, which in turn is integral to how power is exercised. My work suggests that these kinds of relations of power are central to whether fishers bond together to cooperate (sometimes to manage the fishery, sometimes to protest against rules) or fiercely resist any kind of collective action.

These embodied interactions create openings and close down others for particular kinds of cooperation. What emerges is an important difference between “managing a common-pool resource” as fisheries policy schemes try to do, and the “gentlemen’s agreements” that emerge out of community commitments and obligations I have described here. While the Scottish case shows that such gentlemen’s agreements are vulnerable to noncompliance and even to lack of support from state regulatory structures, they also point to the tremendous possibilities that arise when people bring their commitments to “commoning” into their everyday lives. Or as Silke Helfrich puts it, “If you consider yourself a commoner and if you realize and reflect upon what you’re doing in terms of commoning, then it’s likely to be a successful commons.” Emotional attachments to land and seascape and community subjectivities can help to foster such consciousness.

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

Andrea J. Nightingale (Sweden) is a Geographer by training and presently Chair of Rural Development in the Global South at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, Sweden. Her current research interests include climate change adaptation and transformation debates; public authority, collective action and state formation; and feminist work on emotion and subjectivity in relation to theories of development, collective action and cooperation. She previously worked at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and the University of Edinburgh, Geography, School of GeoSciences, Scotland.

I would like to give a special thanks to the people on the west coast who contributed their time, thoughts and patience to my project. They have shown a generosity in working with me that helped me to better understand the importance of the “community obligations” I discuss. I would also like to thank David Donan, Jim Atkinson, Jim Watson and Hamish Mair for discussions on the policy context and pressures facing the fishery and being open to thinking about the social science aspects of the science they do.

Photo by Chris Golightly

The post Patterns of Commoning: Commons and Alternative Rationalities: Subjectivity, Emotion and the (Non)rational Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

As we have painfully learned from the previous industrial and digital revolutions, technology is not entirely value-neutral, meaning neither good nor bad. Under the social and economic system of capitalism, most technological innovation has been driven by the desire to maximize profits, reduce space/time limitations (i.e. how long it takes to make and deliver a commodity or service), and eliminate labor costs. So, while it is true that the technology does not determine its own use (not yet anyway), its application and value have largely been determined by a small subset of humanity. We want to make sure that we change this equation with the Third Digital Revolution. How we structure the ownership, control, and use of the technologies of the Third Digital Revolution will either aid humanity in our collective quest for liberation, or deepen still our species’ inhumanity towards itself and our dear mother earth. One thing is painfully clear, and that is if these technologies remain the exclusive property of the capitalist class and the transnational corporations they control, these tools will not be used for the benefit of the overwhelming majority of humanity, but to expand the profits and further consolidate the power of the 1% that rule the world. Under their control, these technologies will lead to a crisis of global unemployment on a scale unseen in human history. The end result will be a global dystopia, a social nightmare predicated on massive poverty, lawlessness, state repression, and ever greater human disposability rather than the potential utopia these technologies could potentially enable.

Confronting the Challenges: Class, Race, Gender, and Ecological Limitations

GYASI WILLIAMS (LEFT) AND AMALYA LIVINGSTON OF THE COMMUNITY PRODUCTION INITIATIVE.

In order to make the future that we want, we have to openly confront the stark problems already at the heart of the Third Digital Revolution, and there are several glaring problems already in plain sight. Despite great efforts toward democratizing the Third Digital Revolution by making much of the technology “open source”, historically oppressed and disenfranchised communities remain excluded. The same access gulf seen in the current “digital divide” is being replicated and deepened. Instead of a ubiquitous transformation, with equal access and distribution, what in fact is emerging is a “fabrication divide”.

This divide is layered, multi-dimensional, and compounded. The first and obvious barrier to access is cost. Those who can afford the machines will eventually be able to produce whatever they want, while those who can’t will remain dependent on the inequitable market, the forces that manipulate it, and the increasingly antiquated methods of production they employ to produce their consumer goods. While this revolution is spurred on by the dropping cost and rapid development of fabrication technology, indigenous and working-class Black and Latin-x populations will still find themselves at least a step behind as the cost of early adoption will continue to advantage the already privileged.

The issues of cost and accessibility lead directly to a discussion of class. The working class is almost always alienated from the market mechanisms that enable people to take the best advantage of emerging technology. Further still, the dismantling of society by the neoliberal project has eroded the bonds of social solidarity and eradicated the safety nets created through working-class political victories. The emergence of the Third Digital Revolution within this socio-political context will only widen the inequality and access gaps that already exist. For example, the recent elimination of net neutrality combined with years of starving public schools of funding and eviscerating city services ensures that libraries and any other public services that once helped to counterbalance the technological gaps experienced by the working class during the latter half of the 20th century are becoming ineffective or altogether nonexistent.

While there has been a great deal of public discussion about the advance of the Third Digital Revolution and what benefits and threats it potentially poses, there has been little discussion about racial inequity within the Third Digital Revolution. Without a major structural intervention, the Third Digital Revolution will only exacerbate the existing digital divide. Again, here the problem is layered and compounded, for the advances in automation and artificial intelligence that the Third Digital Revolution will advance will disproportionately eliminate many of the low-skill, low-wage manual labor and service sector jobs that historically oppressed communities have been forced into over the last several years. Given some projections of massive job loss due to automation, there is a real question about whether the potential benefits this transformation could have will outweigh the severe pain and loss Indigenous, Black and Latinx working-class populations will face as this technology advances.

Even less discussed than the class and race-based impacts of the Third Digital Revolution are the gender disparities that are likely to deepen if there is no major intervention in the social advance of this development. Despite recent advances, it is no secret that women are grossly under-represented in the technological and scientific arenas[2]. The question is, how can and will the gender inequities be addressed in the midst of the social transformations stimulated by the Third Digital Revolution? Will the existing gender distribution patterns remain, be exasperated, or will they be eliminated?

The Third Digital Revolution, like its predecessors, will undoubtedly make fundamental shifts not only to human society but to the planet as well, many of which have yet to be anticipated. One likely shift that must be examined is the potential of accelerated environmental catastrophe. Currently, 3D printing is all the rage, and for good reason. It inspires the imagination and hints at a future where we are able to download or create a file that will allow us to fabricate just about anything that we can imagine. The key question that hasn’t been asked is how will humanity manage personal fabrication on a mass scale? The earth’s resources are finite. Nevertheless, capitalism has ingrained in us an infinite desire for commodities. While the methods of production under capitalism have been horrifically destructive to the environment, there is no guarantee that the appetites that have been programmed into us over the last several hundred years will suddenly accommodate themselves to ecological balance and sustainability if we are suddenly given the ability to fabricate what we want in the privacy of our own homes. There is a great deal of consciousness-raising and re-socialization about our ecological limits and responsibilities, accompanied by major policy shifts, that must be done to prevent the resource depletion and massive fabrication waste that is likely to result from this technology becoming broadly adopted.

All of these challenging facets of the coming Third Digital Revolution must be addressed, and quickly. The Third Digital Revolution is emerging in a society with immense inequality and imbalance with regard to the integration of existing technology from the previous Industrial and Digital Revolutions. As these historic developments converge into the Third Digital Revolution, the concern is that not only will this inherited inequity continue but will be drastically deepened for all of the reasons listed above. Those of us seeking to realize the potential of the Third Digital Revolution to help our species realize its full potential, must create the means to combat this deepening inequity, and democratize this transformation. If we can do that, we may very well be able to lay the foundation for a democratic and regenerative economic order, one that could potentially eliminate the extractive, exploitative, and utterly oppressive and undemocratic system that we are currently subjected to.

Those who seek to assist in democratizing the technology of the Third Digital Revolution must understand that any initial investment at this time is risky. The road ahead is not clear. What we do know is that we cannot afford to leave the development of this technological revolution solely up to actors like Amazon, Google, Walmart, or the US Department of Defense. In their hands, it will only serve to further extract profits from the majority of humanity and maintain the imperial dominance of the US government through force of arms. However, finding capital players willing to make “non-extractive” investments that center on tech justice, cooperative business innovation, and production driven to fulfill human need over profit realization are hard to find. There are many organizations experimenting with getting this technology out to vulnerable populations to aid us from falling further behind the technological access gap, but none of us really know what will work initially, nor when the technology will be at a significantly advanced stage to truly replace the existing mode of production. The stakes are high, as are the risks at this stage. Nevertheless, we must struggle, as all early adopters should, to not only avoid being left out in the cold but to help guide the development in a democratic and egalitarian manner.

Creating the Future, Taking Risks, Co-Constructing Solutions

Early adopter risk-taking is exactly what Cooperation Jackson is embarking upon with the launch of our Community Production Center and Community Production Cooperative[3]. Our aim is to make Jackson, Mississippi the “city of the future”, a Transition City anchored in part in the practices of a “Fab City”[4] that would transform our city into an international center of advanced, sustainable manufacturing utilizing 3D printing and other innovative tools of the Third Digital Revolution. The only way we are going to come anywhere close to attaining anything like the utopia these technologies promise is by democratizing them and subjecting them to social use and production for the benefit of all, rather than the control and appropriation by the few.

The democratization of the technologies of the Third Digital Revolution, both in their ownership and use, is one of the primary aims of Cooperation Jackson. To realize this aim we struggle for Tech Democracy[5] and Tech Justice first and foremost by educating our members and the general public about the promises and perils of the technology so that people can make informed decisions. We suggest this as a general framework of struggle. The next course of action we suggest is the pursuit of self-finance to acquire as much of this technology as we can, with the explicit intention of controlling these means of production and utilizing them for the direct benefit of our organization and our community.

Another course of action we suggest and are embarking upon is organizing our community for political and economic power to expand and reinforce our Community Production efforts. Our aim is to gradually make Community Production ubiquitous in our community, with the explicit intent of gradually replacing the exploitative and environmentally destructive methods of production in use at present. A related course of action is to utilize our political power to make demands on the government, the capitalist class, and the transnational corporations to remove the controls they have on the technology, like exclusive patents, in order to make these technologies publicly accessible. Another essential demand on the government is to make massive investments in these technologies to make them public utilities and/or commons[6]and to ensure that the corporations make restorative investments in these utilities for the public good.

We also think that public/community partnerships should be pursued on a municipal level to establish direct community ownership over these technologies to help ensure that vulnerable populations and historically oppressed communities gain direct access, with the prerequisite being where these communities are sufficiently organized and possess a degree of political power within the municipality. Public/community partnerships could also be essential towards capitalizing these democratic pursuits, by enabling the community to use both its tax wealth and various vehicles of self-finance to build out the necessary infrastructure in a manner that will ensure that it remains in the community commons or public domain. It is essential that these types of pursuits be public/community partnerships, with the community being organized in collective institutions like cooperatives, credit unions, community development corporations, etc., and not your typical public/private partnerships that will only remove this infrastructure from the commons or public domain as soon as possible in our neoliberal dominated world.

Further, given the steady decline in union membership, density, and overall social and political power, coupled with the ever-growing threats of automation, mechanization, big data, and artificial intelligence to the working class as a whole, we want to appeal to the various unions, in and out of the AFL-CIO, as the most organized sector of the working class in the US, to take the challenges of the Third Digital Revolution head on. In fact, we think organized labor should be leading the charge on the question of Community Production, as it is in the best position given its resources, skills and strategic location in society to steer the Third Digital Revolution in a democratic manner. In this vein, we want to encourage organized labor to utilize the tremendous investment resources it has at its disposal to start creating or investing in Community Production Cooperatives throughout the US to further the ubiquitous development and utilization of the technology to help us all realize the benefits of a “zero-marginal-cost society”[7] to combat climate change and eliminate the exploitation of the working class and the lingering social and material effects of racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, ableism, etc. It is time for the cooperative and union movements, as vehicles of working-class self-organization, to reunite again, and Community Production units could and should be a strategic means towards this end.

Finally, we have to keep pushing forward-thinking universities, particularly public colleges and universities, and philanthropists to also provide support to community production development efforts seeking to democratize control of this technology early on.

These are the core elements of what we think is a transformative program to utilize and participate in the development of the Third Digital Revolution for the benefit of our community and the liberation of the working class and all of humanity. We want and encourage other historically oppressed communities throughout the United States to follow this path, Jackson cannot and should not follow this path alone.

Supporting Cooperation Jackson and the Center for Community Production

If you agree with this analysis, in whole or in part, we need your help to bridge the Fabrication Divide. Cooperation Jackson is seeking broad public support for the development of our Community Production Center. We are aiming to raise $600,000 to complete the purchase of the facilities, build out them out, and equip them with all the utilities and equipment needed to create a dynamic Production Center. You can help build the Center for Community Production by becoming a National Donor or Investor and recruiting others to do the same. The $600,000 figure does not have to be daunting, if we can recruit 600 people to donate and/or invest $1,000 each, we can easily meet this goal. So, let us not be swayed, but moved to organize to turn this vision into a transformative reality.

[1] We draw our primary definition of the Third Digital Revolution from the work of Neil Gershenfeld, particularly his more recent work “Designing Reality: How to Survive and Thrive in the Third Digital Revolution”, co-written with Alan Gershenfeld and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld.

[2] For more detail on the gender gap in the science, technology, engineering, and math fields see, “Women still underrepresented in the STEM Fields”, https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/10/21/women-still-underrepresented-in-stem-fields.

[3] We derive our notion of Community Production from Blair Evans and INCITE FOCUS based in Detroit, Michigan. For more information see INCITE FOCUS https://www.incite-focus.org/ and “Green City Diaries: Fab Lab and the Language of Nature” http://www.modeldmedia.com/features/greencity1113.aspx.

[4] Fab City is a concept that grew out of the Fab Lab Network. For more information on this concept and emerging network see http://fab.city/about/.

[5] We are adopting the concept of Tech Justice from LabGov, which describes itself as the “laboratory for the governance of the city as a commons”. For more information see http://www.labgov.it/.

[6] We utilize the notion and definition of the Commons utilized within the Peer 2 Peer Network. For more details see “What it the Commons Transition?” at https://primer.commonstransition.org/1-short-articles/1-1-what-is-a-commons-transition.

[7] We have adopted the notion of a “Zero-Marginal Cost Society” from Jeremy Rifkin and his work, “The Zero-Marginal Cost Society: the Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism”.

The post Countering the Fabrication Divide: The Third Digital Revolution and Class, Race, Gender and Ecological Limitations appeared first on P2P Foundation.

 By Rachel O’Dwyer

Mayo Fuster Morell is the Dimmons director of research on collaborative economy at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open University of Catalonia. Additionally, she is faculty affiliated at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and at Institute of Govern and Public Policies at Autonomous University of Barcelona (IGOPnet). In 2010, she concluded her PhD thesis at the European University Institute in Florence on the governance of common-based peer production, and have numerous publications in the field. She is the principal investigator for the European project P2Pvalue: Techno-social platform for sustainable models and value generation in commons-based peer production. She is also responsible of the experts group BarCola on collaborative economy and commons production at the Barcelona City Council.”

ROD: What brought you to work in peer-to-peer?

MFM: The first time I heard the term peer-to-peer was from an “artivist” friend Leo Martin when we were travelling from the Geneva Contrast Summit to the World Summit of Information Society in Geneva in 2003. In other words, the Internet itself and its defense, and the network as a political metaphor for its decentralized character brought me to work on P2P. Commons appreciation came later.

ROD: What is ‘participative action research’? How have you used it? And what groups have you worked with?

MFM: ‘Participative action research’ refers to research that tends to inform a process in action or depart from explicit aims, and is developed in a participatory manner. This could refer to how the research questions are defined (they could emerge in the context of mobilization), the methodologies (more participative and egalitarian, positioning the researcher as facilitator more than owner of the process) and the distribution of the research outcomes (such as adopting open access and open data). There are different traditions and sensibilities. One of the first books and articles I wrote back in 2004 as part of the collective Investigaccio was on what at that time we called “activist” research and social movements. A later version of this article was published at: Interface: a journal for and about social movements Volume 1 (1): 21 – 45 (January 2009). Fuster Morell: Action research 21 Action research: mapping the nexus of research and political action http://www.interfacejournal.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/interface-issue-1-1-pp21-45-Fuster.pdf

My first action involvement was as part of the global justice movement with the Seattle and Praga mobilization against global institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and European Union. Through that experience I realized how we were generating useful data and how ICTs could contribute to systematizing the knowledge generated in social processes and democratizing access to that knowledge. This brought me to an action research framework.

ROD: You have developed some very interesting research on gender and the commons. In what ways can gender politics inhibit participation in commons-based peer production? And how can we become more aware of it?

MFM: I think it is not accurate to state that I developed research on the commons and gender. There are experts in gender, and gender studies is a specialized field, but I am not one. What happens is that commons theory and practice tend to be dominated by male voices (with the great exception of Ostrom), a lack of engagement with gender perspectives and feminist theories (see for example Bauwens’ work), and an emphasis on class as opposed to identity politics. Sometimes inequality dynamics are even worse than market dynamics (for example, only 1.5 % of FLOSS participants are women, while proprietary software has a 30% female involvement. So in that context, someone like me that has some gender sensibility and feminist appreciation – even if she is not an expert or very involved – becomes the ‘gender voice’ in the room. This makes me feel uncomfortable, because I do not know much and have not written much or made good contributions; my area of expertise is on governance of the commons and public policies for the commons.

ROD: At procomuns, an event that you helped to organize, there was an emphasis on the ways in which women’s contributions had been hidden from peer-to-peer practices. How can we challenge this?

MFM: Regarding how we can change the current gender inequality dynamic of the commons, I think the first step is to recognize that commons approaches have obfuscated reproductive work as much as capitalism. Commons is presented as a third mode of production distinct from the state and the market, but where is domestic work, families and reproductive work – mostly developed by women – in this equation? And where is nature? I really think commons can benefit a lot from engaging with ecofeminist perspectives – with authors like Cristina Carrasco or Yayo Herrero here in Spain for example. This connection can not only bring more justice to the commons but also be very powerful. I think one of the key insights which explains the rise of Barcelona en Comu is the combination of feminism and commons.

What is clear is that there is a lot to be done on gender. I contribute to a wiki for monitoring the inclusion of women in digital commons and ICT conferences, where there are also resources on commons and gender (see http://wiki.digital-commons.net). Conferences with less than at least 35% of women inclusion in the program are shame conferences. The lack of reference to women’s work in the academic literature and in the field literature is even more problematic.

ROD: What distinguishes the commons for you from other traditional hierarchical public and private forms of organization? And do we need a partner state to develop and protect the commons?

MFM: At this moment in time, yes. Neoliberal globalization has constituted an enclosure of global commons, and the expansion of the capitalist dynamic to new areas previously organized through commons and social logics. Digital commons were expanding with the Internet, but now certain layers of the Internet are controlled by corporations, resulting in the enclosure of the digital commons also (see for example the emergence of on demand /corporate collaborative economies and the enclosure of collaborative production online). In this stage of things, I think we need to gain political control over political institutions in order to create public-commons alliances to confront the commons enclosure. A private – public alliance has resulted in the kidnap of political institutions; together they are creating what I call (glossing feminist theory) the “glass ceiling”, working to ensure that the greater capacity for the commons to expand and gain centrality in the digital era is kept under control, and that commons are enclosed for profit purposes. But the process of organizing to gain political power in political institutions should happen in parallel with the reorganization of economic power under commons logic. We need external, social movements to push for policy change, and economical affinity activity in order to be able to perform political changes inside the institution.

ROD: In the last decade we are seeing a growing centrality of forms of commoning and commons-based peer production to capital, particularly in informational and digital spheres. You call this relationship ‘wiki-washing’. What strategies exist to protect forms of commoning from commercial expropriation? Or is this an inevitability? Or maybe not always a bad thing?

MFM: Regarding the case of the collaborative economy, commons collaborative economy was original to the internet with FLOSS, Wikipedia etc. Then we have witnessed several waves of incorporation of collaborative dynamics for capitalism innovation, with the case of platforms like YouTube and Flickr first, and now with the “collaborative economy” of Uber and AirBnb. These have popularized collaboration, but they have also emptied it of its empowering dimension. We should keep working on alternatives that scale (being aware that it is not only a matter of lack of ability, but a ‘glass ceiling’ that I mentioned earlier that ensure such efforts remain small). We must denounce the bad practices of unicorn modalities and their wiki-washing (for a discussion of the use of the wiki ethos to further corporate interests see my article The unethics of sharing: wikiwashing”). Still, we have also to be tactical and take advantage of the situation created – to play the game in our favor. For example, the European Commission did not get interested in commons production until the debate on the collaborative economy gained importance with the controversies connected to the disruption of Uber and AirBnb. I’m often asked to speak about the collaborative economy by organizations who have AirBnb and Uber in mind because they do not know anything else and I take advantage of these opportunities to explain that they were not the first to appear and that there are other running models based on commons logic which can favor a more inclusive economical “growth”.

The capitalist market adoption of commons creativity has ambivalences, and we should be tactical and practical in taking advantage of these depending on the period. This ambivalence of the market can also be applied to social networks. The appearance of Facebook and Twitter was a defeat to autonomous communication alternatives, but nowadays it has also become a tool for social mobilization, and it is right to use it as such. But we also have to keep in mind how we might gain them back for commons governance? There is, for example, a campaign to buy Twitter by the Twitter community and transform it into a cooperative. In sum, politics is done with “what there is”, advancing with the opportunities of each moment – not with great conditions that are not there.

ROD: What does the term ‘digital commons’ mean to you?

MFM: Commons is an ethos and an umbrella term that encompasses many practices and transformative changes. The commons emphasizes common interests and needs. It includes collaborative production, open and shared resources, collective ownership, as well as empowering and participative forms of political and economic organizing.

It is, however, a very plural concept with very diverse ‘traditions’ and perspectives. Some commons, for example, are connected to material resources (pastoral, fields, fishing etc.) and others to immaterial ones (knowledge etc.).

In the area of knowledge commons, the emphasis is on the conditions of access – open access and the possibility to access resources and intervene in their production without requiring the permission of others. It emphasizes knowledge as a public good, a patrimony, and a human right.

I proposed a definition of digital commons as “information and knowledge resources that are collectively created and owned or shared between or among a community and that tend to be non-exclusive, that is, be (generally freely) available to third parties. Thus, they are oriented to favor use and reuse, rather than to exchange as a commodity. Additionally, the community of people building them can intervene in the governing of their interaction processes and of their shared resources” (Fuster Morell, M. (2010, p. 5). Dissertation: Governance of online creation communities: Provision of infrastructure for the building of digital commons. http://www.onlinecreation.info/?page_id=338).

ROD: What do we need to do to cultivate and defend the digital commons?

MFM: The same that we have to do with any common.

At this moment there are, in my view, three key strategies and goals: 1) Create public commons partnerships. Push for political institutions to be led by commons principles and to support commons-based economic production (such as reinventing public services led by citizens’ participation, what I call ‘commonification’). Barcelona en Comu is providing a great model for this. 2) Reclaim the economy, and in particular develop an alternative financial system. 3) Confront patriarchy within the commons – in other words embrace freedom and justice for all, not just for a particular privileged subject (male, white, etc.) and help foster greater diversity in society.

ROD: What for you is the key difference between the digital and the material commons? Do these distinctions hold? Or are they holding us back?

MFM: Over time I think there is less and less of a distinction.

ROD: What do you think of proposals for new forms of technology that scale commons-based peer production such as distributed ledger technologies, the blockchain or new reputation and trustless systems? How do these fit within the broader projects of commons-based peer production?

MFM: Certainly, technological development is important, but much less that what is framed in the blockchain hype. For a period around the early development of the Internet, I thought – and I think this was a general collective feeling – that technological development and creativity towards decentralized modes would be the more effective strategy to gain commons space. I no longer think this (as I previously discussed, I think we have to combine several strategies: political, economical, technical and “genderal”). I think we were wrong. The evolution of the Internet is the best proof of this. This is why I am so surprised by the wave of naïve enthusiasm for the blockchain and its technological solutionism and apolitical vision. It assumes there are not also power struggles and asymmetries in networked and decentralized modalities.

ROD: Can you tell us a bit about your own work on infrastructure governance?

MFM: My doctoral thesis was on the governance of infrastructure for the building of digital commons (the thesis is available here). In this research I challenged previous literature by questioning the neutrality of infrastructure for collective action and demonstrating that infrastructure governance shapes collective action.

ROD: I’ve read that your research challenges the idea that oligarchy, bureaucracy and hierarchy are inevitable products of scaled forms of cooperation. How can we prevent these from kicking in? Are these always bad things? Joe Freedman, for example, writes of the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ and how the ostensible idea of no structure allows for more insidious forms of structural power i.e. gender/class/race to play a key role and to develop oligarchies.

MFM: The research I developed in my thesis provided an empirical explanation of the organizational strategies most likely to succeed in creating large-scale collective action in terms of the size of participation and complexity of collaboration. In hypothesizing that the emerging forms of collective action are able to increase in terms of both participation and complexity while maintaining democratic principles, I challenged Olson’s classical political science assertion that formal organizations tend to overcome collective action dilemmas more easily, and challenges the classical statements of Weber and Michels that as organizations grow in size and complexity, they tend to create bureaucratic forms and oligarchies. I concluded that online creation communities are able to increase in complexity while maintaining democratic principles. Additionally, in light of my research, the emerging collective action forms are better characterized as hybrid ecosystems which succeed by networking and combining several components, each with different degrees of formalization and organizational and democratic logics. Wikipedia is a great example of hybridism. Wikipedia kept its community decentralized, autonomous and allowed open models of organizing to scale, while at the same time having the Wikimedia Foundation with a more hierarchical and labor-based form. Each piece is necessary for the whole ecosystem to scale.

Regarding your question on the tyranny of structurelessness. It is an important question. I think the work of Ostrom questioning Hardin’s conception of the commons is in the same line of what I want to argue here. Ostrom critiqued Hardin’s piece on ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, because the example he used (farmers coordinating grazing rights) was not that of a commons organizational form, but an open field without a social contract around its use, as commons provide. So in this line, yes, there is the need for social organizing in order to preserve resources and organize equality and justice etc.; without structure there is no organization and no commons. Then, the question is what type of organizing, what type of structure and how to govern it. And here I want to recall that network forms are also an organizing structure. But its governance should be transparent and inclusive to all its members. Informality is one of the channels for injustice, such as male domination or corruption, and in this sense I agree with Freedman. It is ok to have open and networked forms, but their governance should be transparent and inclusive. By themselves, network decentralization does not assure power equality (this goes back to the debate on the blockchain).

At the same time, I think we have to go beyond Freedman’s critique and say that it is not that we need structure generally. Structure is not enough to solve inequality, but we need an explicit gender equality plan too. Without a specific set of norms and forms to confront the patriarchy, any commons is going to reproduce it – even reinforce it. The case of FLOSS is very clear here. Studies suggest that only 1.5% of contributors to FLOSS communities are women, while in proprietary closed software production, the proportion is closer to 30%. Similarly, communities that manage natural resources, such as fishing commons institutions in Albufera, Valencia restricted women’s participation until very recently. Equality regarding social and economical dimension is not the only aspect to have present, as it is quite common in commons approaches. Patriarchy is previous to capitalism, and to move towards a commons paradigm, as an alternative to capitalism does not assure a solution to a much deep violent system that works against women and diversity generally.

Finally, the third pillar is the preservation of nature. We have to overcome the current “commons” framework in order to create a new framework based on the confluence of the social and the commons, one that includes gender and diversity feminism, and nature and environmental preservation. Any approach that lacks any of these three pillars explicitly does not have much potential.

The post Women in P2P: Interview with Mayo Fuster Morell appeared first on P2P Foundation.

David Bollier is very enthused about this essay:

“I recently encountered a brilliant new essay by German writer Ina Praetorius that revisits the feminist theme of “care work,” re-casting it onto a much larger philosophical canvas. “The Care-Centered Economy: Rediscovering what has been taken for granted” suggests how the idea of “care” could be used to imagine new structural terms for the entire economy.

By identifying “care” as an essential category of value-creation, Praetorius opens up a fresh, wider frame for how we should talk about a new economic order. We can begin to see how care work is linked to other non-market realms that create value — such as commons, gifts of nature and colonized peoples –all of which are vulnerable to market enclosure.

https://www.boell.de/en/2015/04/07/care-centered-economy

The basic problem today is that capitalist markets and economics routinely ignore the “care economy” — the world of household life and social conviviality may be essential for a stable, sane, rewarding life. Economics regards these things as essentially free, self-replenishing resources that exist outside of the market realm. It sees them as “pre-economic” or “non-economic” resources, which therefore don’t have any standing at all. They can be ignored or exploited at will.

In this sense, the victimization of women in doing care work is remarkably akin to the victimization suffered by commoners, colonized persons and nature. They all generate important non-market value that capitalists depend on – yet market economics refuses to recognize this value. It is no surprise that market enclosures of care work and commons proliferate.

A 1980 report by the UN stated the situation with savage clarity: “Women represent 50 percent of the world adult population and one third of the official labor force, they perform nearly two thirds of all working hours, receive only one tenth of the world income and own less than 1 percent of world property.”

But here’s the odd thing: The stated purpose of economics is the satisfaction of human needs. And yet standard economics don’t have the honesty to acknowledge that it doesn’t really care about the satisfaction of human needs; it’s focused on consumer demand and the “higher” sphere of monetized transactions and capital accumulation. No wonder gender inequalities remain intractable, and proposals for serious change go nowhere.

“The Care-Centered Economy” asks us to re-imagine “the economy” as an enterprise focused on care. While Praetorius’ primary focus is on the “care work” that women so often do – raising children, managing households, taking care of the elderly – she is clearly inviting us to consider “care” in its broadest, most generic sense. The implications for the commons and systemic change are exciting to consider.

I think immediately of the Indian geographer Neera Singh, who has written about the importance of “affective labor” in managing forest commons. Singh notes that people’s sense of self and subjectivity are intertwined with their biophysical environment, such that they take pride and pleasure in becoming stewards of resources that matter to them and their community.

Such affective labor – care – that occurs within a commons becomes a force in developing new types of subjective identities. It changes how we perceive ourselves, our relationships to others, and our connection to the environment. In Singh’s words: “Affective labor transforms local subjectivities.” In this sense, commoning is an important form of care work.

By setting forth an expansive philosophical framework, Praetorius’ essay provokes many transdisciplinary, open-ended questions about how we might reframe our thinking about “the economy.” The 77-page essay, downloadable here, was recently published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin as part of its “Economy + Social Issues” series of monographs.

Praetorius begins by situating the origins of “women’s work – children, cooking and church – in the original “dichotomization of humanity” into “man” and “nature.” This artificial division of the world into realms of man and nature lies at the heart of the problem. Once this “dichotmomous order” is established, the public realm of monetized market transactions is elevated as the “real economy” and given gendered meaning. Men acquire the moral justification to subordinate and exploit all those resources of the pre-economic world – nature, care work, commons, colonized people. Their intrinsic needs and dignity can be denied.

What’s fascinating in today’s world is how the many elements of the “pre-economic lifeworld” are now starting to assert their undeniable importance. As Praetorius puts it, “Without fertile soil, breathable air, food and potable water, human beings cannot survive; without active care, humanity does not reproduce itself; and without meaning, people descend into depression, aggression and suicide.”

As the pre-economic lifeworld becomes more visible, it is exposing the dichotomous order as unsustainable or absurd. Climate change is insisting upon limits to economic growth. Modern work life is becoming ridiculously frenetic. Questions of meaning arise that “free markets” are unequipped to address. “Why work at all if working amounts to nothing more than functioning for absurd, other-directed purposes?” writes Praetorius. “Why keep living or even conceiving and bearing children if there is no future in sight worth living?”

As the private search for meaning intensifies, the formal political system has little to say. It is too indentured to amoral markets to speak credibly to real human needs; it is ultimately answerable to the highest bidders. This also helps explain why politics, as the helpmate of the market order, also has so little to say about people’s yearnings for meaning.

But new meaning are nonetheless arising as the credibility and efficacy of the old order begin to fall apart. Praetorius argues that the anomaly of a black man as US President and a woman as Germany’s chancellor makes it increasingly possible for people to entertain ideas of subversive new types of order. “The supposedly natural order of the hierarchical, complementary binary conception of gender is inexorably disintegrating,” writes Praetorius. Other dualisms are blurring or becoming problematic as well: “belief and knowledge, subject and object, res cogitans and res extensa, colonizer and colony, center and periphery, God and the world, culture and nature, public and private spheres.”

What’s exciting about this time, she suggests, is that the “dichotomous order” is opening up new spaces for new narratives that re-integrate the world. People can begin to “collectively dis-identify” with and deconstruct the prevailing order, and launch new stories that speak to elemental human and ecosystem needs. If there is confusion and disorientation in going through this transition, well, that’s what a paradigm shift is all about. In any case, people are beginning to recognize the distinct limits of working within archaic political frameworks – and the great potential of a “care-centered economy.”

What exactly does “care” mean? It means the capacity for human agency, individual initiative yoked to collective practice, shared identity and meaning-making. It means “being mindful, looking after, attending to needs, and being considerate.” It refers to “awareness of dependency, possession of needs, and relatedness as basic elements of human constitution.”

While some might regard the elevation as “care” as vague, I agree with Praetorius: “Care” helps break down the dichotomous order and emphasize the “pre-economic” order of human need. “The illusion of an independent human existence becomes obsolete,” she writes. Relationships outside of markets become more important.

Introducing “care” into discussions about “the economy” can also have the effect of transforming ourselves. We can begin to name the pre- and non-economic activities — care, commoning, eco-stewardship – that create value. We can develop a vocabulary to identify those things that mainstream economics deliberately does not name. In this sense, talking in a new way becomes a political act. It begins to change the cultural reality, one conversation at a time.
Praetorius’ essay is a fairly long read, but a rewarding one. I came away from it with a fresh, more hopeful perspective. I also realized how care work and commoning are part of a larger enterprise of honoring, and creating, new types of value.”

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For further research, there are links to studies and research papers in the description box of this video on YouTube.

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For further references and resources on what I speak about in this video, you can find a myriad of links to articles and research papers in the description box of this video on YouTube.

The post The Gender Wage Gap Part 1: Why Statistics Are a Bitch appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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The following is excerpted from an interview that was conducted by Cecilia Gingerich for The Next System Project:

“CG: In your work you describe moving to a “partnership system.” Can you briefly describe what a partnership system is?

RE: The method I used in my research, the study of relational dynamics, differs from other approaches in a number of critical respects. It draws from a much larger database than most studies of society: it includes the whole of humanity (both its male and female halves), the whole of our history (including prehistory), and the whole of our lives (not only the public spheres of politics and economics, but also the private spheres of family and other intimate relations). It focuses on two systems dynamics; First: What is the relationship between key elements of a social system in maintaining or altering the system’s basic character? And second: What kinds of relationships – from intimate to international – does a social system support: top down ranking or relations based on mutuality?

This methodology revealed two underlying social patterns or configurations: the partnership model and the domination model. These new social categories transcend conventional ones such as right vs. left, religious vs. secular, ancient vs. modern, capitalist vs. socialist, and so on – which focus only on particular aspects of a system and pay scant, if any, attention to the cultural construction of the primary human relations between the female and male halves of humanity and between them and their daughters and sons. The partnership model and the domination model have two very different core configurations.

In contrast to domination systems, where there is top-down authoritarian rule in both the family and state or tribe, partnership systems have democracy and equality in both the family and state or tribe.

Unlike domination systems, where the male half of humanity is ranked over the female half, in partnership systems there is gender equity, and with this, a greater valuing of “feminine” traits and activities such as caring, caregiving, and nonviolence – in both women and men as well as in social and economic policy.

Whereas domination systems are ultimately held together by fear, force, and the threat of pain, partnership systems are based on mutuality; there are hierarchies, but rather than hierarchies of domination, these are hierarchies of actualization where power is empowering rather than disempowering and accountability, respect, and benefits flow both ways, rather than just from the bottom up. These configurations or models are the two ends of a partnership-domination continuum, as no society is a pure partnership or domination model. But the degree of orientation to either end of this continuum makes for very different social systems. For example, Nazi Germany (secular, Western) and Khomeini’s Iran and ISIL (religious, Eastern) orient closely to the domination model. The Minangkabau (religious, Eastern) and Nordic nations (secular, Western) orient to the partnership model.”

…

* CG: Can you spend a bit more time describing how a partnership system would address current environmental issues, and particularly climate change?

RE: Both capitalist and socialist theory fail to recognize the value of caring for nature. The applications of socialism in both the former Soviet Union and China have been characterized by environmental disasters. In other words, it is not just unregulated capitalism that has been bad for our natural environment.

By contrast, caring for people and for nature is highly valued in partnership systems, and these values would inform policies. For example, high taxes would be levied on activities that create carbon emissions and there would be tax credits for companies that protect our natural life support system, such as manufacturing that recycles. Keeping a clean and healthy environment in both our homes and our planet would be highly valued. So would caring for people, which would be honored as both men’s and women’s work. The pejorative “nanny state” would be recognized as sexist and absurd.

* CG: How quickly could large domination-oriented societies like the United States and China transition to a partnership-oriented society? Could the change occur quickly enough to address some of the major “tipping points” for climate change, which climate scientists expect to occur in the next several decades?

RE: To achieve this, we have to recognize that the devaluation of caring for people and for nature is deeply rooted in the system of gendered valuations we have inherited. Unless we make this visible we will not see fundamental change. This is why an important part of the partnership political agenda is to bring partnership education into schools and universities. Many people recognize that old thinking cannot help us solve the problems it created. Young people are especially hungry for a new paradigm, a new way of looking at the world and living in it. If they are to be effective agents of change, starting now, they need to recognize beliefs, myths, and stories that promote domination or partnership, and learn the terrible consequences of domination and the benefits of partnership.

…

* CG: Are there any specific economic elements that are necessary for a partnership system in a post-industrial country? (markets, money, etc.)

RE: Systemic change requires both cultural and institutional or structural change, especially in economics. To achieve this, we need a new economic map. The old economic map fails to recognize the contributions of the three unpaid economic sectors: the household economy, the community volunteer economy, and the natural economy. My book The Real Wealth of Nations introduces a new economic map that – along with the market, government, and illegal economies – includes these essential economic sectors. This integrative map is the foundation for a partnership economic system that recognizes that the real wealth of a nation consists of the contributions of people and nature.

* CG: Can you explain to us the importance of economic indicators, and specifically the Social Wealth Economic Indicators (SWEIs) that you have developed at the Center for Partnership Studies?

RE: The main economic indicator policy makers rely on today is GDP or Gross Domestic Product. It is a strange indicator. It includes activities that harm and take life. Selling cigarettes and the medical and funeral costs of smoking boost GDP; so do oil spills, since cleanup, litigation, and their other costs augment GDP. But GDP fails to include activities essential to support life, such as the work in households of caring for people, starting in early childhood, even though without it there would be no workforce. GDP also gives no value to caring for our natural life-support systems, without which we could not survive.

The “informal” work carried out principally by women makes up a large proportion of the U.S. economy.

Social Wealth Economic Indicators (SWEIs) are unique tools for both progressive policy makers and advocates for a more equitable and environmentally sustainable society. They differ not only from GDP but also from most other GDP alternatives by demonstrating the enormous economic value of caring for people and nature. For example, a recent Australian study showed that if the work of caring for people in households were included in GDP, it would add 50% to it. SWEIs also pay much more attention to gender than other GDP alternatives. For instance, they reveal the link between the disproportionate poverty of women and the lack of policies that support the care work still primarily performed by them. Also unlike other GDP alternatives, SWEIs not only measure outputs (where a nation stands in its quality of life); it pays equal attention to inputs: what kinds of investments lead to better outcomes. SWEIs show that the United States lags way behind other developed nations in its public support for early childhood care and education. This is a major factor in our high poverty rates. It also means that we are not adequately investing in creating the “high quality human capital” economists tell us is essential for success in our post-industrial, knowledge/service age.

* CG: How might a partnership system in a post-industrial country deal with currently unpaid work, including unpaid care work?

RE: There are policies already in place in other developed nations – from publicly funded paid parental leave to stipends to help families with children and refundable tax credits for caregivers of the elderly. Our county has to catch up! So also do poorer nations, which is why we are seeking funding to adapt SWEIs into a global Index: one number per nation, like GDP.

The combination of overpopulation (due to denying women reproductive freedom) and resources depletion makes a shift from the present market consumer-driven economics essential. This shift is also essential because we are entering an era of structural unemployment and underemployment due to a massive technological shift. A guaranteed annual income or negative income tax where people are given monetary stipends is one response to the replacement of human workers by automation and robotics – trends that will exponentially increase with the advent of artificial intelligence. The response I propose in The Real Wealth of Nations is linking this monetary support to the work that only humans can perform: caring, caregiving, creating. People need meaningful work to be fulfilled, and just handing out money does not encourage positive contributions.”

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