Charts the strategic thinking behind the movements challenging neoliberal globalization.

A Movement of Movements charts the strategic thinking behind the mosaic of movements currently challenging neoliberal globalization. Leading theorists and activists—the Zapatistas’ Subcomandante Marcos, Chittaroopa Palit from the Indian Narmada Valley dam protests, Soweto anti-privatization campaigner Trevor Ngwane, Brazilian Sem Terra leader João Pedro Stedile, and many more—discuss their personal formation as radicals, the history of their movements, their analyses of globalization, and the nuts and bolts of mobilizing against a US-dominated world system.

Explaining how the Global South and the experience of indigenous peoples have provided such a dynamic and practical inspiration, the contributors describe the roles anarchism and direct democracy have played, the contributions and limitations of the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre as a coordinating focus, and the effects of and responses to the economic downturn, September 11, and Washington’s war on terror. Their statements, at once personal and visionary, offer a dazzling new insight into the political imagination of the global resistance movements.

Available here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/170-a-movement-of-movements

The post Book of the Day: A Movement of Movements appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The way trade works in the global economy can be insane – it wastes resources, worsens climate change, and undermines the livelihoods of millions of small-scale producers worldwide. Yet it is an almost unavoidable consequence of de-regulatory ‘free trade’ agreements and the billions of dollars in supports and subsidies – many of them hidden – that prop up the global economy.

To raise awareness about this issue, we’ve produced a short film and a fully-referenced factsheet that helps to explain how and why ‘insane trade’ happens:Read our ‘Insane Trade’ Factsheet (PDF)

Some Jaw-Dropping Facts
about Insane Trade

• More than half of the seafood caught in Alaska
is processed in China; much of it is sent right back to American supermarkets – Alaska Journal of Commerce, 2018.

• Mexican calves fed American corn are exported to the United States, where they are butchered for meat, which is then sold in Mexico – The New York Times, 2017.

• African-grown coffee is often packed in India, Canadian prawns are processed in Iceland, and Bolivian nuts are packed in Italy – UK Times, 2007.

1) Say NO to Insane Trade

Eliminating unnecessary trade would immediately reduce pollution
– including CO2 emissions – and slow resource depletion.

– Speak up – Share our Insane Trade factsheet and short film.

– Call for an end to corporate subsidies and tax breaks. For links to other organizations working on these issues, see the Resisting Corporate Power, Globalization, & ‘Free’ Tradecategory on our Links page. Read more about subsidies on our blog.

– Critically question “free trade” dogma. See our Independent Media Sources page for a list of sites that critically cover free trade. Head to our blog to read more about why so few people are informed about trade issues, and what can be done to stop free trade treaties.

– Support steps to internalize the costs of fossil fuels. For links to other organizations working on this issue, see the Environmental Justice, Climate, & Energy category on our Links page.

2) Say YES to Local Economies

Localizing helps small farms and local businesses to thrive,
strengthens community, and supports personal well-being.

– Buy local food and other local products.

– Help build local food systems and local business alliances. For links to other organizations working on these issues, see the Local Economies and Rethinking Economies and Food & Agriculture categories on our Links page.

– Grow the movement by organizing a workshop, study group, or film screeningabout economic localization.

Frequently Asked Questions
about Insane Trade

How is it cheaper to ship food across the world for processing than to process it where it was grown or caught?

Companies often relocate labor-intensive work overseas to minimize costs – Scotland’s minimum wage is about four times that of China, for instance, which explains why Scottish fish is often processed in China.

With global fossil fuel subsidies (direct and indirect) on the order of $5 trillion per year, this energy-intensive way of doing business is often less expensive for large food distributors, though it carries great costs for the environment and for livelihoods in the food’s country of origin. Lax international free trade rules help make this possible as well.

Why else might countries “re-import” their own products?

In many cases, companies export and re-import goods to benefit from tax policy loopholes. For example, China’s value-added tax (VAT) allows businesses to claim tax rebates by exporting their products, while other businesses can then re-import those same products to claim rebates of their own. Fossil fuel subsidies, which reduce transport costs for businesses, help make this a viable strategy.

The results are absurd. For example, in most years since 2005, China has imported more from itself than from the United States – despite being the US’s third-largest export market.

Availability of crops varies seasonally – is this a factor in global trade?

Not really. Even in the height of apple season in the northern USA, apples from New Zealand and Chile flood supermarket shelves – and regardless of origin, many supermarket apples stay in cold storage for up to a year, so the season doesn’t matter.

Distributors source from wherever is least expensive within their established channels. Supermarkets will choose apples from 10,000 miles away if they’re cheaper than apples grown just 10 miles away. Same with other fresh foods.

The main contributors to insane trade are subsidized transport, free trade agreements, import-export tax rebates, and differences in labor costs and environmental and safety regulations – not seasonal availability of fresh produce.

What about differences between regional crop and livestock varieties? Does this explain why countries both import and export identical foods?

In most cases, NO. In the world of big agribusiness and global trade, foods are interchangeable commodities – they’re grown in large quantities, and regional differences are something to be eliminated. For monocultural producers and large- scale marketers, the goal is uniformity.

Sometimes, regional differences in foods do influence global trade – but not in the way you might expect. For example, beef from factory- farmed cows in the USA is usually too fatty to be sold as hamburger meat. So, that beef gets shipped abroad, and leaner grass-fed beef gets imported. Changing animal husbandry practices in the USA would solve this problem (and several others) – but because of subsidies for fossil fuels and transport infrastructures, insane trade is the industry’s most profitable “solution”.

How does global trade affect the climate?

In 2012, commercial ships produced over a million tons of CO2 per day – more than the emissions of the UK, or Canada, or Brazil. That’s roughly 4% of the world’s CO2 emissions – and it’s set to grow to 17% by 2050 if current trade rules continue.

The growing aviation industry will produce another 20% of global emissions by 2050. And that doesn’t account for the infrastructure needed to support long-distance trade – including cement production, which already contributes 8% of the world’s emissions per year.

Remarkably, climate agreements like the Paris Accords do not account for the emissions from international trade: the CO2 emitted by the thousands of oil tankers, container ships and cargo-carrying aircraft that crisscross the globe do not appear in any nation’s CO2 accounting. Why? Because policymakers believe that trade – and the growth of global GDP – is more important than the climate. Insane!

Do people just want to buy food, and other things, from far away?

Watch and Share our Insane Trade film (3.10min)

Read and Share our ‘Insane Trade’ Factsheet (PDF)

Photo by ImipolexG

The post How Insane is Global Trade? Here are the facts appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This has resulted in an “epistemological delirium.” As the ordering principle of “the modern” dissolves into thin air, we don’t know which way is up or how to proceed. Hence the title of the original French version of the book, Où atterir? Comment s’orienter en politique – “Where to land? How to orient yourself in politics?”

Humanity no longer has a shared framework of “becoming modern,” says Latour. It is hard for everyone to believe that globalized markets, “development,” and consumerism will yield a steady march toward civilization and progress. Corporations have proven themselves to be consummate externalizers of cost and risk. And climate change among other eco-crises suggests that relentless economic growth is simply preposterous — and grossly mal-distributed in any case.

Hence our profound disorientation. It’s hard to deal with the slow-motion collapse of a once-universal story of human aspiration.

The rich nations, or at least the US, remain mostly in denial about climate change, if only because acknowledging the truth would upend so much. The remaining nation-states of the world, meanwhile, have no clear path in a fractured, divided world for constructing a shared vision.

Without the unifying normative framework of “development” and its claims of infinite growth and progress, how can we figure out a new consensus narrative for humanity, one that acknowledges the existential reality that we live on the same, finite planet? How can we find a way to share and co-manage our only habitable space?

Donald Trump arguably triggered our deep epistemological confusion when he withdrew the US Government from the Paris Climate Accord, Latour argues. By declaring that the US will continue on the same path as it has for decades, with no changes in American lifestyles or reductions in carbon emissions, he was in effect declaring war on the rest of the world.

Or as Latour puts it, “We Americans don’t belong to the same earth as you. Yours may be threatened; ours won’t be!” Trump’s move officially ratified a mindset that President Bush I expressed so bluntly in 1992: “Our way of life is not negotiable!”

Down to Earth is a powerful look at how climate change is changing the tectonic plates of politics, economics, and culture. As the claims of modernity and globalized capitalism fall apart, revealed as ecologically and economically catastrophic, it has opened up an empty space that we don’t know how to fill. Latour brilliantly dissects why our epistemological delirium is happening, how it is transforming politics, and what a new paradigm might look like.

The coming shift is not simply a story of external institutions and nation-states; it’s mostly about our inner conceptualizations about the world and aspirations. For centuries, the Global, or modernization, has stood for scientific, economic, and moral progress. It later erected “the Local” to serve as a useful foil, a way of life that the Global helps us escape.

Modernization has meant progress, profit, development, innovation, and civilization — an escape from the Local, which situates our identities with secure geographic boundaries, ethnicity, and tradition. Modernity has positioned itself as “leaving our native province, abandoning our traditions, breaking with our habits, if we wanted to ‘get ahead,’ to participate in the general movement of development, and, finally, to profit from the world,” writes Latour.

The Local has served as a cautionary counterpoint — an impoverished realm of “the antiquated, the vanquished, the colonized, the subaltern, the excluded,” says Latour. “Thanks to that touchstone, one could treat them unassailably as reactionaries, or at least as anti-moderns, as dregs, rejects. They could certainly protest, but their whining only justified their critics.” 

Modernization has thus made “attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil” as antithetical to “having access to the global world.” One must choose between the two of them.

And so humanity has aligned itself with the ideals of global modernization, the grand project of moving forward in alliance with capitalism. Everything else is cast as lamentably premodern and backward-looking, a zone waiting to be properly modernized.

Defining modern life around these two poles of attraction may be coming to an end, Latour argues, saying “we have reached the end of a certain historical arc.” The onset of neoliberal policies in the 1980s marked a turning point for this change. Elites decided they were going to secede from the world, in effect, by privatizing wealth for themselves at the expense of sharing society and the polity with everyone else. This agenda is epitomized by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the Koch brothers, and the whole cast of neoliberal think tanks, PACs, Davos, survivalist billionaires, and more.

The Local – long the site of colonialist extraction – continues to be seen as “a rump territory, the remains of what has been definitely left behind by modernization.” While political movements have exploited sentimental notions of the Local using nationalist, authoritarian appeals – e.g., Trump, Brexit, Duarte, Bolsonaro, the National Front – these visions are ultimately cynical charades – attempts to capitalize on nostalgic, nativist reactions to the Global and its failures to deliver safety and security.

As the Global/Local framing of human development has fallen apart, Latour writes, it has exposed how neither is truly connected to the biophysical realities of the earth:

The terrifying impression that politics has been emptied of its substance, that it is not engaged with anything at all, that it no longer has any meaning or direction, that it has become literally powerless as well a senseless, has no cause other than this gradual revelation: neither the Global nor the Local has any last material existence.

Both are human projections, consensus fictions with little grounding in ecological realities. Climate change is blowing apart the fantasy of the Global as a realm of infinite possibilities and material extraction. It is also shattering the idea of the Local as a haven of sequestered safety, morality, and order.

What has propelled this change, says Latour, is that the earth itself is becoming a political agent. The earth can no longer be ignored as a powerful autonomous, living force in human affairs. This is making the grand project of modernization/development increasingly problematic because the finite and dynamic character of the earth is becoming quite visible, painfully so. Who can rally around the idea of modernization as a political project when its absurdly utopian dimensions and costs are increasingly plain to see? 

Latour argues that a new “third attractor” is gradually arising to harness political energies and revamp political alignments.The new attractor is based on a commitment to healing the earth and changing the dynamics of politics itself. The new vision, still emerging, is “perpendicular” to the Global/Local axis in the sense that it steps away from the arc of history plotted by capitalist modernization. It recognizes the gritty imperatives of living ecosystems and calls for a “sideway” shift of attention, energy, and innovation — a new narrative of the future.

This shift is occurring, says Latour, because earth systems are discrediting the idea of the world as a vast, limitless, and inert empty space in which human affairs take place. The Enlightenment idea that humanity and “nature” are separate entities is no longer tenable. As Latour notes, “How are we to act if the territory itself begins to participate in history, to fight back, in short, to concern itself with us – how do we occupy a land if it is this land itself that is occupying us?” (Paging John Locke….) 

In short, climate change is mooting many of the premises of modern consciousness itself. It is incubating a new attractor to organize our energies and imaginations. This attractor escapes the fantasies of the Global and Local by frankly recognizing the biophysical realities of the living earth as our destiny and mission. Humanity’s relationship to the earth becomes paramount. Latour decides to provisionally name this attractor “The Terrestrial.”

There is much else that Latour shares in his short book (at 106 pages, a long essay) that clarifies the macro-challenges we face in the coming years. Although he doesn’t mention the commons, it’s clear to me that the commons enacts Latour’s idea of the Terrestrial. Throughout the book, he cites the need for humanity to find “a place to land” – a way to escape the fantasies of modernity and to become more entangled with the biophysical life of the earth.

That’s what commons do! The commons has an ancient pedigree of being very “down to earth.” I think the commons holds great potential for serving as a new attractor for re-imagining life, politics, economics, and consciousness, in synergy with the Terrestrial. But how to hoist up this attractor and give it dynamic scope?

I suppose it takes a distinguished scholar of modernity to know how to critique modernity with such acuity and question some of its fundamental premises. By stepping outside of the conventional frames of discussion about climate change, Latour opens up a rich, grand structure for thinking about the future of politics in the Anthropocene. Now if only we can build out this new third attractor. Let us call it the Terrestrial Commons!

The post Bruno Latour on Politics in the New Climatic Regime appeared first on P2P Foundation.

At the heart of our supply partner chain is a sewers cooperative from Croatia. With a fixed percentage of our net sales we support garment workers in South Asia in their fights for better working and living conditions. This way, we want to create a positive impact for both workers in the alternative and in the mainstream economy.[1]

After two successful crowdfunding campaigns[2] and almost three years of business experience, we are now planning to take the next step by developing an innovative web platform which ultimately shall be collectively owned and governed by every party involved in the value chain; from the producers of the raw material all the way to the people who buy the clothes.

From platform capitalism to platform cooperativism

Never was it more obvious than today that capitalism fails to deliver on its promise of benefiting the many and not just the few. By grabbing after the internet, capitalism has given birth to business platforms that increase inequality, undermine democracy and lead to monopolies. The likes of Airbnb, Uber, Amazon and facebook are transforming our workplaces, relationships and societies and we have virtually no control over them. While nearly all aspects of our lives are being shifted online, a new and fairer model for the digital economy is needed. A promising model in that regard is co-ownership, transparency and democratic governance as promoted by an emerging number of so-called platform cooperatives. Contrary to venture capital funded platforms and their systemic flaw having to excessively extract and maximize value only for their shareholders, platform coops seek ways of including everybody who is affected by the platform’s activities in the equation.[3]

Applying the platform coop model to the buyer driven and undemocratic garment industry

How the industry works

Global fashion online sales are expected to grow massively from €415 billion in 2018 to €615 billion in 2022.[4] Approximately 75 million people are employed in the textile, clothing and footwear sector worldwide. Most of them are women. The industry is buyer driven which means that corporate giants such as H&M, Inditex, Primark or Kik usually do not own any of the factories they produce with, yet they basically control them. Their buying power lets them dictate where to produce, what to produce and at what prices. This, together with the rise of fast fashion, a business practice where the brands change their collections in very short time frames, puts enormous pressure on farmers, factory owners and workers. Supply chain transparency is another big issue.

Ways to gain power for workers

One way for workers to turn their often poor labour conditions into good or at least better conditions, has always been by organizing in independent labour unions and subsequently force the employers to negotiate collective agreements. However, this is easier said than done because anti-union practices are widespread in the global garment industry. Even though fundamental rights to join a union and bargain collectively are guaranteed in the big brands’ code of conducts and through various certification schemes, reality on the ground often looks very different.[5] Hence, the percentage of unionised garment workers in today’s main producing countries is very low.

Another way for workers to gain collective power and a higher level of self-determination is by organizing into worker cooperatives. Here, the workers collectively share the ownership of their workplace. Consequently, their work benefits themselves and their local communities rather than just filling the pockets of external shareholders, bosses or factory owners. However, there are currently just very few garment factories operating as a worker cooperative. In the first step of the value chain though, there is already a considerable amount of smallholder cotton farmers who are organized in cooperatives, primarily because together it is easier for them to sell their product and it also allows them to reach a higher price.[6]

Revolutionizing our garment value chain by becoming a platform coop

As of today, our immediate supply chain consists of three main partners. We buy 100 percent organic cotton for our fabric via Fair&Organic from India. The Social Cooperative Humana Nova receives these fabrics and sews them into t-shirts. Printex finishes these shirts with screen prints using water based eco-colours. Counting in the employees of the small manufacturers Fair&Organic works with, the combined number of people working for these three partners is likely to be around 50 to 60. It is safe to say that at least half of them in one way or another work for us during the realisation of a certain project. We should of course not forget all the additional people involved in logistics and transportation as well as in the raw material production. The products offered on our platform/website are only possible through the combined efforts of farmers, mill workers, fabric cutters, patternmakers, sewers, truck drivers, just to scratch the surface.

Now, imagine if all these hard working people were to become co-owners of the dna merch platform.

The co-ownership model would not only allow them to raise their voices concerning issues that affect them (e.g. delivery times, labour costs/wages and working hours), it would also make them eligible to a share of the surplus revenues generated by the platform.

And now try to imagine if all the other people in the value chain will become co-owners as well, those who will be using the platform to buy t-shirts and other garments either for their own use or to source and retail. If implemented properly in a truly inclusive way, this will lead to a fully democratised value chain in which both consumers and producers are empowered likewise. The technology for them to finally meet on eye-level and practice solidarity through direct interaction and trade is available. With the dna merch platform we want to put it in practice.

But why would it be so empowering to facilitate that sort of direct interaction between consumers and workers/producers? Two popular beliefs in today’s mainstream sustainability debate are that a) consumers have the power to make globalization fair and sustainable by shopping ethically and consciously, and b) that companies, to build trust in consumers, should certify their supply chains and guarantee universal standards through the means of independent audits.

While there is absolutely no doubt that our day-to-day shopping decisions matter and can drive companies to adjust and change their policies in a progressive way, it is way too easy to put all the responsibility in the end consumer’s pocket. We think it is hardly possible to always filter all products according to their social and ecological footprint and always make a conscious and ethical decision without going crazy, especially when the majority of products are known to be produced under poor conditions. What’s most important though, is that an approach which solely relies on the consumer power tends to treat workers in the global south as passive subjects who depend on our goodwill and help. Hence, it hinders us from seeing them as people just like us and makes it harder to create relations on eye level.

Audits are problematic, too. The vast majority of them has proven to be merely a paperwork exercise and does not lead to sustainable improvements of working conditions. A study from 2016 titled “Ethical Audits and the Supply Chains of Global Corporations” concludes that audits “are ineffective tools for detecting, reporting, or correcting environmental and labour problems in supply chains [and] they reinforce existing business models and preserve the global production status quo.” As with the consumer power argument, the biggest problem with audits is the passive position that the workers are put in.

We believe that it is the people themselves who know best what needs to be improved at their workplace or their favourite product. So, equipping people with the right tools to connect directly with each other, and putting them in a position where they no longer depend on powerful and manipulating intermediaries like most of today’s corporations are, they will figure out ways that benefit all those involved. With the dna merch platform coop we are determined to set out and prove it.

Lean proof of concept: Focussing on our status-quo

With our platform we want to address three dominant problems of the garment industry, i.e. lack of fairness and democracy, non-transparent prices and supply chains that hinder buyers from making informed decisions, and the fact that there is currently no easy way for workers and consumers to directly connect with each other.

To get things going we will make use of what we already have, a transparent supply chain for t-shirts with a self-organised sewers cooperative at the core, our existing website with a lot of transparent information and a network of customers comprising of trade unions, music bands, retail shops and crowdfunding supporters. We have various functionalities planned for the platform and will add and test them step by step along the way. First, we will add options to start one’s own crowdfunding campaigns and group orders. The idea is to make it possible for bands, organizations and individuals to initiate t-shirt pre-order campaigns to collectively pre-finance the production costs. If wished, users can add a margin on top of the costs to raise money via a public campaign.

Over time, we want to extend the product portfolio and offer not just customized printing on standardized garments but also enable e.g. young fashion designers to realize their first collection through the platform.

In terms of our organizational restructuring process from a German civil law partnership towards a platform coop with a legal structure yet to define, we aim to have an established organisation by mid of 2019 with at least 5 co-owners each from our producer part and the consumer/retailer part of our value chain (e.g. 3 workers from the sewers cooperative, 2 from the print shop, 1 band, 2 crowdfunding supporters, 1 fashion designer, 1 graphic designer)

Our biggest challenges and questions

1.       How exactly could a membership and governance structure look like in practice?
2.       How can we convince our stakeholders to embrace the undertaking of becoming a platform coop?
3.       What are the arguments and incentives that are valid for everybody?
4.       Which ones differ between the various actors?
5.       How will we ensure real participation of the coop members?
6.       Which tools and forms of communication will we need?
7.       How exactly will the business model look like?
8.       Transaction fees, membership fees …
9.       Coop shares
10.       Sales of own collections
11.       Consulting services for onboarding further producer partners
12.       Commission fees for fashion designers who win contracts through the platform from other users?
13.       How exactly can we make use of the Blockchain technology and other recent inventions that foster decentralisation?
14.       Which tools are readily available that we can make use of?
15.       Which impact on membership will the power imbalance in our supply chain most likely have, e.g. the fact that other than the     sewers cooperative all other partners are conventionally structured businesses?
16.       Should co-ownership of the platform become a prerequisite for being able to access all services and functionalities of the platform?

Call to action

We need and want more people to get involved in this!

Please get in touch by briefly mentioning what aspect interests you the most and where your expertise lies. We definitely need people with a technical background, people with experience working in coops, people with knowledge of the garment industry, social media and marketing experts, organizational theorists and probably a lot more that we cannot think of right now : )

Also, please feel free to reach out if you just want to comment on the idea as such or on one of the questions and challenges mentioned above or if you would like to add another one.

We are grateful for every input and consideration that you share with us!

You can best reach us via email or you can directly comment on the document here.

Doreen & Anton

[1]

[2] See https://www.startnext.com/dnamerch and https://www.startnext.com/dna-merch-vol-2

[3] For more info visit https://platform.coop

[4] See https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/ecommerce-fashion-industry

[5] See e.g. http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Global-Brief-1-Ethical-Audits-and-the-Supply-Chains-of-Global-Corporations.pdf

[6] See e.g. https://www.ica.coop/en/media/news/small-scale-farmers-achieve-a-26-higher-share-of-consumer-price-when-organized-in

The post dna merch: A Platform Co-op in the Making appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This post is part of our series of articles on the Urban Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 16 “Talk of the Town: Exploring the City in Europe”. In this instalment, Olivier Petitjean, French journalist with experience in the NGO sector, discusses remuniciplisation in Europe.

For some years, the prevailing narrative in Europe, from pretty much all sides of the political spectrum, has been one of ‘crisis’ – an economic crisis, a democratic crisis, the climate crisis, and of course a so-called ‘refugee crisis’. The problem with this crisis narrative – no matter how much basis it may have in facts – is that it is often used to undermine a sense of our collective capacity and willingness to address common issues, including (but not exclusively) through public institutions. In that sense, it goes hand in hand with the impression of an inevitable decline of the role of government (at all levels) and of the public sphere in general.

We need counter-narratives and fortunately, there are some at hand. One of these is remunicipalisation: the story of cities and citizens reversing privatisation, and successfully developing better and more democratic public services for everyone, while addressing wider challenges such as climate change. In a way, the push for privatisation and for the continued decline of the role of the public sector (and all other forms of non-profit service provision) has perhaps never been stronger than it is today in Europe and the global level, as evidenced by the privatisation agenda of Donald Trump in the United States or Michel Temer in Brazil. Yet it is all the more significant – and heartening – to see so many people in large and small cities – elected officials, civil servants, public services employees, and citizens – willing to redress the failures of privatised services and, by doing so, invent the public services of the future.

Remunicipalisation surge across Europe

This is the story that a recent book, Reclaiming Public Services: How Cities and Citizens Are Turning Back Privatisation, seeks to highlight. While it documents dozens of cases of remunicipalisation across continents and across sectors, Western Europe clearly stands out, both in purely quantitative terms and in terms of the significance and ambition of the cases. There are well-known examples, such as the German Energiewende, which has seen dozens of local grids taken back into public hands, and dozens of new public- or citizen-owned renewable energy providers created. In France, water remunicipalisation has been in the news for some years, and there are also significant trends towards remunicipalisation in sectors such as public transport or school restaurants. Even in Britain, the pioneer of privatisation and liberalisation policies in Europe, some cities such as Nottingham, Leeds, or Bristol have created new municipal energy companies to address energy poverty and shift towards renewable sources. In Spain, many cities conquered by progressive citizen coalitions in the 2015 municipal elections have embarked on systematic remunicipalisation policies. At the other end of the continent, in Norway, a similar process has been unfolding, with city councils led by progressive coalitions implementing a reversal of past privatisations of social services, in close coordination with trade unions.

Of course, as the list above illustrates, remunicipalisation can take many different forms. In some sectors, such as water, it involves taking back into public hands a service that is a natural monopoly. In other sectors that have been historically or recently liberalised, it is realised through the creation of new, not-for-profit companies that provide a ‘public option’ – whether they are public-owned, cooperatives, or hybrid forms. Many cases of remunicipalisation have been and continue to be politically polarising, but many are not. Sometimes citizens themselves are in the driving seat, and the newly created public services open a significant space for citizen participation; sometimes the process is confined to city council meeting rooms. The word ‘remunicipalisation’ itself could be questioned, because some of the services in question had never been publicly managed or didn’t previously exist, because it is happening at intermunicipal or regional, rather than city, level and because some of what we call remunicipalisation actually involves cooperatives and other forms of citizen-owned, rather than city-owned, companies.

Nevertheless, out of all this diversity a coherent picture can be drawn: not a turn of the tide (except in some sectors in some countries) nor a coherent movement, but an emerging remunicipalisation trend that has the potential to be a game-changer, in many ways, and far beyond public services. This trend has remained mostly under the radar, apart from some clear exceptions such as the German Energiewende, because most of it happens at local level, as local authorities do not necessarily wish to publicise the actions they are taking, for fear of being accused of being ideologically-driven, and of course because there are powerful players that would rather keep people in the dark about these possibilities.

Beyond de-privatisation

So why Europe, and why now? First, in the shorter term, the economic crisis and austerity imposed on local authorities in Europe has forced many of them to take a closer, harder look at their budgets and to seek greater control over their expenses. And more often than not they have indeed found, in spite of what private sector propagandists continue to repeat tirelessly, that privatisation is more expensive than direct public management. When, for example, Paris remunicipalised its water services in 2010, it saved 35 million euros a year just by foregoing payments to parent companies. Later, the regional court of auditors confirmed that remunicipalisation had allowed Paris to “decrease the price of water while maintaining high investment levels”.

In Newcastle, United Kingdom, the modernisation of signalling and fiber optic cable system was carried out by a new in-house team for about 11 million pounds, compared with more than double this figure that it would have cost if done by a private company. The city of Bergen, Norway, where two elderly care centres were taken back in-house, had a surplus of half a million euros whereas a one million loss was expected. The costs of waste collection and cleaning services decreased from 20 to 10 million euros annually in León, Spain, with remunicipalisation, and 224 workers have received public employment contracts.

Second, 20 years or so have now passed since the large waves of liberalisation and privatisation of public services that swept both Western and Eastern Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s. It is a good time to appraise the real achievements and shortcomings of private management. It is also a time where a lot of concessions, leases, and so-called ‘public private partnerships’ (or PPPs) contracts expire, and get to be renewed – or not. Whereas privatisation of services such as water has been more in the limelight in past decades, outsourcing to the private sector has also started to progress in sectors such as local health and social services, and local administration. It is interesting to see many examples of remunicipalisation in precisely these sectors in countries such as Norway, Sweden, or Austria, where water, for instance, has never been privately managed. Local authorities seem to have found they could provide a better service directly, at a lower cost and with better conditions for workers.

When Paris remunicipalised its water services in 2010, it saved 35 million euros a year just by foregoing payments to parent companies.

But the story of remunicipalisation is not just about reversing past privatisation or redressing its failures. In many sectors, it is also about a profound reinvention of public services; a paradigm change. In the energy sector, this is obvious enough, with the rise of decentralised, renewables-based energy systems. But the ongoing paradigm shift is not restricted to addressing climate change, in the narrow sense. It is also visible, for instance, in the waste sector, with the emergence of ‘zero waste’ policies. Reducing waste volumes is often mentioned as one of the key motivations for cities that have decided to remunicipalise waste collection and disposal services, because it is in contradiction with the business model of private waste companies, which remains entirely focused on landfills and incineration.

Similarly, in France, the main reason why many small and large cities have recently remunicipalised school restaurants is to provide organic, local food to children, whereas contractors such as Sodexo typically relied on standardised, international supply chains. Some smaller French towns even source the food for their school restaurants from local municipal farms, or through partnerships with local farming cooperatives. The strong connection between remunicipalisation and the ‘relocalisation’ of the economy (and of the cash generated by public service bills) is a common thread that cuts across all these sectors.

A renewed focus on cities and on citizen involvement

It is no coincidence that we see cities at the forefront of this movement. Indeed, they are first in line to deal both with the consequences of austerity and with the new challenges of climate change and resource constraints. It is at the local level that reality strikes, and it is harder for local politicians than for national or European ones to ignore the very concrete daily consequences of public policies. One would also like to think that European cities have retained a bit of their political traditions of freedom, asylum, and citizenship. There is no doubt that active citizen involvement and participation – for which cities remain the most natural space – is at the heart of the ongoing paradigm shift and has been a fundamental driver behind many of the most interesting remunicipalisation cases of recent years in Europe, whether in alliance with local politicians or against them.

Citizens have pushed local authorities to reclaim public services and in many cases have played an active part in creating and running these very services. In doing so, they are effectively reinventing what ‘public’ actually means. Fundamentally, it is about (re)building collective capacity and solidarity, beyond public services. In this sense, there is indeed a strong connection between the fight for local public services and the fight for the rights of refugees and migrants. The example of Barcelona and other Spanish cities, where years of organising against evictions and water or power cuts have led to the election of progressive municipalities committed both to remunicipalisation and migrants’ rights, are just some amongst many illustrations of this connection.

Cities are first in line to deal both with the consequences of austerity and with the new challenges of climate change and resource constraints.

All of this begs the question, of course, of whether the current emphasis on the role of cities in the public services sphere – and in climate issues or the topic of welcoming refugees and migrants – reflects, before anything else, a retreat of progressive forces from the national level. Are national governments not, at the same time, increasingly committed to the interests of big business and to forcing austerity on society, local authorities included? Although remunicipalisation is alive and thriving throughout most of Europe, there is also a distressing pattern of national governments actively opposing and seeking to prevent it. The Spanish government, along with the private operator and other business bodies, actually took the city of Valladolid to court, after it remunicipalised its water system. It has also adopted legislation to prevent the creation of new municipal companies or new public service jobs. Similarly, the UK now has a law actually banning city councils from creating new local bus companies.

Even if they do not all go to such extremes, it would be difficult to name one European government that is actually encouraging or even merely enabling remunicipalisation at the moment. As for the European institutions, they officially maintain some form of ‘neutrality’ towards the public or private management of essential services. But the culture prevalent at the Commission and the balance of power at the European Parliament and Council results in rules and legislations that, even when they do not directly favour the interests of large corporate players, tend to consider integrated, liberalised markets at European level, where a handful of large for-profit players compete with each other, as the ‘normal’ way things should be organised. Big business knows how to make itself heard in Brussels, whereas the local governments and citizen movements that drive the remunicipalisation movement on the ground have a weaker presence, if any, in the European capital.

Networks of cities to counterbalance corporate influence

Can the remunicipalisation trend thrive and expand without proper support at the national and European levels? Do cities have the capacity to deal, by themselves, with the wider economic and geopolitical forces at work today, over which they have very little control? In the short term, remunicipalisation and the fight for better, democratic, sustainable and inclusive public services will continue to depend on the personal energy and motivation of citizens and officials. This certainly appears fragile in comparison to the established machineries of the private sector and unfavourable national and EU policies. However, there is potential for responding to the challenge. Networks of collaboration between remunicipalised public services are building up at regional, national, and European level, particularly in the water and energy sectors. Mutual assistance between cities can be an effective way to address the limitations of smaller, local public operators in comparison to large multinationals; and it could even become an effective check on the influence of multinationals over public policies.

Of course, these networks also need to develop beyond the limits of Western Europe, particularly in places where the balance of power between cities and large international companies (who more often than not have headquarters and shareholders in Western Europe) is much more unfavourable. The Eastern half of the continent is the obvious place to start. Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, has recently decided not to renew its heating contract with Veolia and is now facing a one million euro compensation claim in front of an international arbitration tribunal. A few years ago, the authorities of Sofia, Bulgaria, cancelled a referendum on water remunicipalisation, allegedly because they were threatened with exactly the same kind of procedure. And whilst countries such as France, Germany, Spain or even the UK are experiencing a wave of public services remunicipalisation, their governments and the European Union often turn into active promoters of the private sector’s role in providing essential services in other countries and continents, including by subsidising European multinationals under the mask of ‘development assistance’.

The remunicipalisation movement in Europe already demonstrates that there is an alternative for the future of public services to the vision currently prevailing at the EU and national levels. One of the key challenges ahead is to consolidate this alternative vision and impose it on institutional agendas, both within Europe itself and in its relations with the rest of the world and particularly the Global South. With remunicipalisation, and with the reinvention of public services that it often entails, Europe has something much more valuable to share with the world.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 4th article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by Harald Felgner

The post Can Cities and Citizens Reinvent Public Services? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I. Commons and Worlds

Commons exist within worlds. Long before private property showed its ugly head and started to devour territories, people created what today we call commons as a principal strategy to enact their worlds. These worlds, made up of human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, material and spiritual beings and forms woven together in inextricably entangled ways, have continued to persevere nevertheless.

Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda (1984) describes how the introduction of barbwire for cattle ranching in the Caribbean Coast region of Colombia at the dawn of the twentieth century interrupted flows of people and animals, regularized landscapes and even desiccated wetlands and lagoons in some areas. Despite these challenges, the region’s people had a resilient culture and strove time and again to reconstitute their commons. They sought to recreate the sensual wholeness that Raoul Vaneigem describes as a casualty of the economy:

The economy is everywhere that life is not….Economics is the most durable lie of the approximately ten millennia mistakenly accepted as history….With the intrusion of work the body loses its sensual wholeness…work existed from the moment one part of life was devoted to the service of the economy while the other was denied and repressed (Vaneigem 1994:17, 18, 27, 28).

And so, and against all odds, and like many other people throughout the world, the Caribbean people described by Fals go on enacting a world of their own, creating with every act and every practice worlds in which the commons – indeed, commoning – still find a breathing space and at times even the chance to flourish. Commoners are like that. They refuse to abide by the rules of the One-World World (OWW) that wishes to organize everything in terms of individuals, private property, markets, profits, and a single notion of the Real. OWW seeks to banish nature and the sacred from the domain of an exclusively human-driven life (Law 2011).

Those who insist on commoning defy this civilization of the One-World (capitalist, secular, liberal, patriarchal, white) that arrogates for itself the right to be “the world” and that reduces all other worlds to nonexistence or noncredible alternatives to what exist (Santos 2002). Vaneigem is again instructive:

Civilization was identified with obedience to a universal and eternal market relationship….The commodity is the original form of pollution….Nature cannot be liberated from the economy until the economy has been driven out of human life….(From the moment the market system minimizes the fruits of the earth by seeing them only in terms of the fruits of labor, the market system treats nature as its slave)… As the economy’s hold weakens, life is more able to clear a path for itself (Vaneigem 1994).

This reality has always been evident to most of the world’s peoples-territory (pueblos-territorio).¹ An activist from the Process of Black Communities of Colombia said: “The territory has no price. Our ancestors cared for the territory with a great sense of belonging. This is why we have to create our economies not from the outside coming in but the other way around: from the inside going outwards.”² The world this activist talks about has persevered, again despite all odds. Let us visit this this world for a brief moment.

II. Yurumanguí: Introducing Relational Worlds

In Colombia’s southern Pacific rainforest region, picture a seemingly simple scene from the Yurumanguí River, one of the many rivers that flow from the Western Andean mountain range towards the Pacific Ocean, an area inhabited largely by Afrodescendant communities.³ A father and his six-year old daughter paddling with their canaletes (oars) seemingly upstream in their potrillos (local dugout canoes) at the end of the afternoon, taking advantage of the rising tide; perhaps they are returning home after having taken their harvested plantains and their catch of the day to the town downstream, and bringing back some items they bought at the town store – unrefined cane sugar, cooking fuel, salt, notebooks for the children, or what have you.

On first inspection, we may say that the father is “socializing” his daughter into the correct way to navigate the potrillo, an important skill as life in the region greatly depends on the ceaseless going back and forth in the potrillos through rivers, mangroves and estuaries. This interpretation is correct in some ways; but something else is also going on. As locals are wont to say, speaking of the river territory, acá nacimos, acá crecimos, acá hemos conocido qué es el mundo (“Here we were born, here we grew up, here we have known what the world is”). Through their nacer~crecer~conocer they enact the manifold practices through which their territories/worlds have been made since they became libres (i.e., free, not enslaved peoples) and became entangled with living beings of all kinds in these forest and mangrove worlds.

Let us travel to this river and immerse ourselves deeply within it and experience it with the eyes of relationality; an entire way of worlding emerges for us. Looking attentively from the perspective of the manifold relations that make this world what it is, we see that the potrillo was made out of a mangrove tree with the knowledge the father received from his predecessors; the mangrove forest is intimately known by the inhabitants who traverse with great ease the fractal estuaries it creates with the rivers and the always moving sea; we begin to see the endless connections keeping together and always in motion this intertidal “aquatic space,” (Oslender 2008) including connections with the moon and the tides that enact a nonlinear temporality. The mangrove forest involves many relational entities among what we might call minerals, mollusks, nutrients, algae, microorganisms, birds, plant, and insects – an entire assemblage of underwater, surface and areal life. Ethnographers of these worlds describe it in terms of three non-separate worlds – el mundo de abajo or infraworld; este mundo, or the human world; and el mundo de arriba, or spiritual/supraworld. There are comings and goings between these worlds, and particular places and beings connecting them, including “visions” and spiritual beings. This entire world is narrated in oral forms that include storytelling, chants and poetry.

This dense network of interrelations may be called a “relational ontology.” The mangrove-world, to give it a short name, is enacted minute by minute, day by day, through an infinite set of practices carried out by all kinds of beings and life forms, involving a complex organic and inorganic materiality of water, minerals, degrees of salinity, forms of energy (sun, tides, moon, relations of force), and so forth. There is a rhizome “logic” to these entanglements, a logic that is impossible to follow in any simple way, and very difficult to map and measure, if at all; it reveals an altogether different way of being and becoming in territory and place. These experiences constitute relational worlds or ontologies. To put it abstractly, a relational ontology of this sort can be defined as one in which nothing preexists the relations that constitute it. Said otherwise, things and beings are their relations; they do not exist prior to them.

As the anthropologist from Aberdeen Tim Ingold says, these “worlds without objects” (2011:131) are always in movement, made up of materials in motion, flux and becoming; in these worlds, living beings of all kinds constitute each other’s conditions for existence; they “interweave to form an immense and continually evolving tapestry.” (2011:10) Going back to the river scene, one may say that “father” and “daughter” get to know their local world not through distancing reflection but by going about it, that is, by being alive to their world. These worlds do not require the divide between nature and culture in order to exist – in fact, they exist as such only because they are enacted by practices that do not rely on such divide. In a relational ontology, “beings do not simply occupy the world, they inhabit it, and in so doing – in threading their own paths through the meshwork – they contribute to their ever-evolving weave.” (Ingold 2011: 71) Commons exist in these relational worlds, not in worlds that are imagined as inert and waiting to be occupied.

Even if the relations that keep the mangrove-world always in a state of becoming are always changing, to disrupt them significantly often results in the degradation of such worlds. Such is the case with industrial shrimp farming schemes and oil palm plantations for agrofuels, which have proliferated in many tropical regions of the world. These market systems, often built at the expense of mangrove and humid forest lands, aim to transform “worthless swamp” into agroindustrial complexes (Ogden 2012; Escobar 2008).

Here, of course, we find many of the operations of the One-World World at play: the conversion of everything that exists in the mangrove-world into “nature” and “nature” into “resources”; the effacing of the life-enabling materiality of the entire domains of the inorganic and the nonhuman, and its treatment as “objects” to be had, destroyed or extracted; and linking the forest worlds so transformed to “world markets,” to generate profit. In these cases, the insatiable appetite of the One-World World spells out the progressive destruction of the mangrove-world, its ontological capture and reconversion by capital and the State (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). The OWW, in short, denies the mangrove-world its possibility of existing as such. Local struggles constitute attempts to (re)establish some degree of symmetry by seeking to influence the partial connections that the mangrove-worlds inevitably maintain with the OWW.

III. Territoriality, Ancestrality and Worlds

Elders and young activists in many territorial communities worldwide (including increasingly in urban areas) eloquently express why they defend their worlds even at the price of their lives. An activist from the Afrodescendant community of La Toma of Colombia’s southwest, which has struggled against gold mining since 2008, said: “It is patently clear to us that we are confronting monsters such as transnational corporations and the State. Yet nobody is willing to leave her/his territory; I might get killed here but I am not leaving.”⁴

Such resistance takes place within a long history of domination and resistance, and this is essential for understanding commoning as an ontological political practice. La Toma communities, for instance, have knowledge of their continued presence in the territory since the first half of the seventeenth century. It’s an eloquent example of what activists call “ancestrality,” referring to the ancestral mandate that inspires today’s struggles and that persists in the memory of the elders, amply documented by oral history and scholars. (Lisifrey et al. 2013) This mandate is joyfully celebrated in oral poetry and song: Del Africa llegamos con un legado ancestral; la memoria del mundo debemos recuperar (“From Africa we arrived with an ancestral legacy; the memory of our world we need to bring back”).⁵ Far from an intransigent attachment to the past, ancestrality stems from a living memory that orients itself to a future reality that imagines, and struggles for, conditions that will allow them to persevere as a distinct, living mode of existence.

Within relational worlds, the defense of territory, life and the commons are one and the same. This is the ontological dimension of commoning. To this extent, this chapter’s argument can be stated as follows: The perseverance of communities, commons, and movements and the struggles for their defense and reconstitution can be described as ontological. At its best and most radical, this is particularly true for those struggles that incorporate explicitly ethno-territorial dimensions and involve resistance and the defense and affirmation of commons.

Conversely, whereas the occupation of territories implies economic, technological, cultural, ecological, and often armed aspects, its most fundamental dimension is ontological. From this perspective, what occupies territories and commons is a particular ontology, that of the universal world of individuals and markets (the OWW) that attempts to transform all other worlds into one; this is another way of interpreting the historical enclosure of the commons. By interrupting the neoliberal globalizing project of constructing One World, many indigenous, Afrodescendant, peasant, and poor urban communities are advancing ontological struggles. The struggle to maintain multiple worlds – the pluriverse – is best embodied by the Zapatista dictum, Un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos, a world where many worlds fit. Many of these worlds can thus be seen as struggles over the pluriverse.

Another clear case of ontological occupation of territories comes from the southernmost area in the Colombian Pacific, around the port city of Tumaco. Here, since the early 1980s, the forest has been destroyed and communities displaced to give way to oil palm plantations. Nonexistent in the 1970s, by the mid-1990s they had expanded to over 30,000 hectares. The monotony of the plantation – row after row of palm as far as you can see, a green desert of sorts – replaced the diverse, heterogeneous and entangled world of forest and communities.

There are two important aspects to remark from this dramatic change: first, the “plantation form” effaces the socioecological relations that maintain the forest-world. The plantation emerges from a dualist ontology of human dominance over so-called “nature” understood as “inert space” or “resources” to be had, and can thus be said to be the most effective means for the ontological occupation and ultimate erasure of the local relational world. Conversely, the same plantation form is unthinkable from the perspective of the forest-world; within this world, forest utilization and cultivation practices take on an entirely different form, closer to agroforestry; even the landscape, of course, is entirely different. Not far from the oil palm plantations, industrial shrimp farming was also busy in the 1980s and 1990s transforming the mangrove-world into disciplined succession of rectangular pools, “scientifically” controlled. A very polluting and destructive industry especially when constructed on mangrove swamps, this type of shrimp farming constitutes another clear example of ontological occupation and politics at play (Escobar 2008).

IV. Commons Beyond Development: Commoning and Pluriversal Studies

The ontological occupation of commons and worlds just described often takes place in the name of development. Development and growth continue to be among the most naturalized concepts in the social and policy domains. The very idea of development, however, has been questioned by cultural critics since the mid-1980s; they questioned the core assumptions of development, including growth, progress, and instrumental rationality. These critiques came of age with the publication in 1992 of a collective volume, The Development Dictionary. The book started with the startling claim: “The last forty years can be called the age of development. This epoch is coming to an end. The time is ripe to write its obituary.” (Sachs 1992; Rist 1997) If development was dead, what would come after? Some started to talk about a “post-development era” in response to this question (Rahnema 1997). Degrowth theorists, notably Latouche (2009), contributed to disseminate this perspective in the North.

Postdevelopment advocates argued that it is possible for activists and policymakers to think about the end of development, emphasizing the notion of alternatives to development, rather than development alternatives. The idea of alternatives to development has become more concrete in South America in recent years with the notions of Buen Vivir (good living, or collective well-being according to culturally appropriate ways) and the rights of Nature. Defined as a holistic view of social life that no longer gives overriding centrality to the economy, Buen Vivir (BV) “constitutes an alternative to development, and as such it represents a potential response to the substantial critiques of postdevelopment” (Gudynas and Acosta 2011; Acosta and Martínez 2009). Very succinctly, Buen Vivir grew out of indigenous struggles for social change waged by peasants, Afrodescendants, environmentalists, students, women and youth. Echoing indigenous ontologies, BV implies a different philosophy of life which subordinates economic objectives to ecological criteria, human dignity and social justice. Debates about the form BV might take in modern urban contexts and other parts of the world, such as Europe, are beginning to take place. Degrowth, commons and BV are “fellow travelers” in this endeavor.

Buen Vivir resonates with broader challenges to the “civilizational model” of globalized development. The crisis of the Western modelo civilizatorio is invoked by many movements as the underlying cause of the current crisis of climate, energy, poverty and meaning. This emphasis is strongest among ethnic movements, yet it is also found, for instance, in peasant networks such as Via Campesina for which only a shift toward agroecological food production systems can lead us out of the climate and food crises. Originally proposed by the Centro Latinoamericano de Ecología Social (CLAES) in Montevideo and closely related to the “transitions to post-extractivism” framework, Buen Vivir has become an important intellectual-activist debate in many South American countries (Alayza and Gudynas 2011; Gudynas 2011; Massuh 2012). The point of departure is a critique of the intensification of extractivist models based on large-scale mining, hydrocarbon exploitation or extensive agricultural operations, particularly for agrofuels such as soy, sugar cane or oil palm. Whether they take the form of conventional – often brutal – neoliberal extractivist policies in countries like Colombia, Perú or México, or the neoextractivism of the center-left regimes, these models are legitimized as efficient growth strategies.

This implies a transition from One-World concepts such as “globalization” to concepts centered on the pluriverse as made up of a multiplicity of mutually entangled and co-constituting but distinct worlds (Blaser, de la Cadena and Escobar 2013; Blaser 2010). There are many signs that suggest that the One-World doctrine is unraveling. The growing visibility of struggles to defend mountains, landscapes, forests and so forth by appealing to a relational (non-dualist) and pluriversal understanding of life is a manifestation of the OWW’s crisis. Santos has powerfully described this conjuncture with the following paradox: We are facing modern problems for which there are no longer modern solutions (Santos 2002:13).

This conjuncture defines a rich context for commons studies from the perspective of pluriversal studies: on the one hand, the need to understand the conditions by which the one world of neoliberal globalization continues to maintain its dominance; and on the other hand, the (re)emergence of projects based on different ways of “worlding” (that is, the socioecological processes implied in building collectively a distinctive reality or world), including commoning, and how they might weaken the One-World project while widening their spaces of (re)existence.

The notion of the pluriverse, it should be made clear, has two main sources: theoretical critiques of dualism, and the perseverance of pluriversal and non-dualist worlds (more often known as “cosmovisions”) that reflect a deeply relational understanding of life. Notable examples include Muntu and Ubuntu in parts of Africa, the Pachamamaor Mama Kiwe among South American indigenous peoples, Native US and Canadian cosmologies, and even the entire Buddhist philosophy of mind. Examples also exist within the West as “alternative Wests” or nondominant forms of modernity. Some of the current struggles going on in Europe over the commons, energy transitions, and the relocalization of food, for instance, could be seen as struggles to reconnect with the stream of life. They also constitute forms of resistance against the dominant ontology of capitalist modernity. Worldwide, the multiple struggles for the reconstruction of communal spaces and for reconnecting with nature are giving rise to political mobilizations for the defense of the relational fabric of life – for instance, for the recognition of territorial rights, local knowledges, and local biodiversity. Struggles over the commons are key examples of such activation.

V. The Commons and Transitions Towards the Pluriverse

Economically, culturally, and militarily, we are witnessing a renewed attack on anything collective; land grabbing and the privatization of the commons (including sea, land, even the atmosphere through carbon markets) are signs of this attack. This is the merciless world of the global 10 percent, foisted upon the 90 percent and the natural world with a seemingly ever-increasing degree of virulence and cynicism. In this sense, the world created by the OWW has brought about untold devastation and suffering. The remoteness and separation it effects from the worlds that we inevitably weave with other earth-beings are themselves a cause of the ecological and social crisis (Rose 2008). These are aspects of what Nonini (2007) has insightfully described as “the wearing-down of the commons.”

The emergence, over the past decade, of an array of discourses on the cultural and ecological transitions necessary to deal with the interrelated crises of climate, food, energy and poverty, is powerful evidence that the dominant model of social life is exhausted. In the global North and the global South, multiple transition narratives and forms of activism are going beyond One-World strategic solutions (e.g., “sustainable development” and the “green economy”) to articulate sweeping cultural and ecological transitions to different societal models. These Transition discourses (TDs) are emerging today with particular richness, diversity and intensity. Those writing on the subject are not limited to the academy; in fact, the most visionary TD thinkers are located outside of it, even if most engage with critical currents in the academy. TDs are emerging from a multiplicity of sites, principally social movements and some NGOs, from emerging scientific paradigms and academic theories, and from intellectuals with significant connections to environmental and cultural struggles. TDs are prominent in several fields, including those of culture, ecology, religion and spirituality, alternative science (e.g., complexity), futures studies, feminist studies, political economy, and digital technologies and the commons.

The range of TDs can only be hinted at here. In the North, the most prominent include degrowth; a variety of transition initiatives (TIs); the Anthropocene; forecasting trends (e.g., Club of Rome, Randers 2012); and the movement towards commons and the care economy as a different way of seeing and being (e.g., Bollier 2014). Some approaches involving interreligious dialogues and UN processes are also crafting TDs. Among the explicit TIs are the Transition Town Initiative (TTI, UK), the Great Transition Initiative (GTI, Tellus Institute, US), the Great Turning, (Macy and Johnstone 2012) the Great Work or transition to an Ecozoic era, (Berry 1999) and the transition from The Enlightenment to an age of Sustainment. (Fry 2012) In the global South, TDs include the crisis of civilizational model, postdevelopment and alternatives to development, Buen Vivir, communal logics and autonomía, subsistence and food sovereignty, and transitions to post-extractivism. While the features of the new era in the North include post-growth, post-materialist, post-economic, post-capitalist and post-dualist, those for the south are expressed in terms of post-development, post/non-liberal, post/non-capitalist, and post-extractivist. (Escobar 2011)

VI. Conclusion: Commoning and the Commons as Umbrella and Bridge Discourses

What follows is a provisional exploration, as a way to conclude, on the relation between commoning and the commons and political ontology and pluriversal studies. To begin with TDs, it is clear that there needs to be a concerted effort at bringing together TDs in the global North and the global South. There are tensions and complementarities across these transition visions and strategies – for instance, between degrowth and postdevelopment. The commons could be among the most effective umbrellas for bringing together Northern and Southern discourses, contributing to dissolve this very dichotomy. As Bollier (2014) points out, the commons entails a different way of seeing and being, a different model of socionatural life. Seen in this way, the commons is a powerful shared interest across worlds. Struggles over the commons are found across the global North and the global South, and the interconnections among them are increasingly visible and practicable (see, e.g., Bollier and Helfrich 2012). Commons debates show that diverse peoples and worlds have “an interest in common,” which is nevertheless not “the same interest” for all involved, as visions and practices of the commons are world-specific (de la Cadena, 2015).

Second, reflection on commons and commoning makes visible commons-destroying dualistic conceptions, particular those between nature and culture, humans and nonhumans, the individual and the communal, mind and body, and so forth (see Introduction to the volume). Commons reflection reminds those of all existing in the densest urban and liberal worlds that we dwell in a world that is alive. Reflection on the commons resituates the human within the ceaseless flow of life in which everything is inevitably immersed; it enables us to see ourselves again as part of the stream of life. Commons have this tremendous life-enhancing potential today.

Third, debates on the commons share with political ontology the goal of deconstructing the worldview and practice of the individual and the economy. No single cultural invention in the West has been more damaging to relational worlds than the disembedded “economy” and its closely associated cognate, “the autonomous individual.” These two cornerstones of the dominant forms of Western liberalism and modernity need to be questioned time and again, particularly by making evident their role in destroying the commons-constructing practices of peoples throughout the planet. Working towards a “commons-creating economy” (Helfrich 2013) also means working towards the (re)constitution of relational world, ones in which the economy is re-embedded in society and nature (ecological economics); it means the individual integrated within a community, the human within the nonhuman, and knowledge within the inevitable contiguity of knowing, being and doing.

Fourth, there are a whole series of issues that could be fruitfully explored from the double perspective of commons and political ontology as paired domains. These would include, among others: alternatives to development such as Buen Vivir; transitions to post-extractive models of economic and social life; movements for the relocalization of food, energy, transport, building construction, and other social, cultural, and economic activities; and the revisioning and reconstruction of the economy, including proposals such as the diverse economy as suggested by Gibson-Graham et al. (2013), subsistence and community economies, and social and solidarity economies (e.g., Coraggio and Laville 2014). There are many ontological and political questions relating to these issues that cross-cut both commons and political ontology, from how to question hegemonic forms of thinking more effectively to how to imagine truly innovative ways of knowing, being and doing with respect to “the economy,” “development,” “resources,” “sustainability,” and so forth. Along the way, new lexicons will emerge – indeed, are emerging – for transitions to a pluriverse within which commoning and relational ways of being might find auspicious conditions for their flourishing.

Today, the multiple ontological struggles in defense of commons and territories, and for reconnection with nature and the stream of life, are catalyzing a veritable political awakening focused on relationality. Struggles over the commons are key examples of such activation. Moving beyond “development” and “the economy” are primary aspects of such struggles. But in the last instance .

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.

References

Acosta, Alberto, and Esperanza Martínez, editors. 2009. El buen vivir. Una vía para el desarrollo. Quito: Abya-Yala.

Alayza, A. and Eduardo Gudynas, eds. 2011. Transiciones, post-extractivismo y alternativas al extractivismo en el Perú. Lima: RedGE y CEPES.

Berry, Thomas. 1999. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. New York, NY: Bell Tower

Blaser, Mario. 2010. Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Blaser, Mario, Marisol de la Cadena, and Arturo Escobar. 2013. “Introduction: The Anthropocene and the One-World.” Draft in progress for the Pluriversal Studies Reader.

Bollier, David. 2014. Think Like a Commoner. A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.

Bollier, David, and Silke Helfrich, editors. 2012. The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and the State. Amherst, MA: Levellers Press.

Coraggio, José Luis, and Jean-Louis Laville, eds. Reinventar la izquierda en el siglo XXI. Hacia un diálogo norte-sur. 191-206. Buenos Aires: Universidad de General Sarmiento.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

de la Cadena, Marisol. 2015. Earth Beings: Provincializing Nature and the Human through Andean Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Escobar, Arturo. 2008. Territories of Difference: Place~Movements~Life~Redes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Escobar, Arturo. 2011. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Second Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Fals Borda, Orlando. 1984. Resistencia en el San Jorge. Bogota: Carlos Valencia Editores.

Fry, Tony. 2012. Becoming Human by Design. London: Berg.

Gibson-Graham, J.K., Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy. 2013. Take Back the Economy. An Ethical Guide for Transforming Our Communities. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Gudynas, Eduardo. 2011. “Más allá del nuevo extractivismo: transiciones sostenibles y alternativas al desarrollo”. En: El desarrollo en cuestión. Reflexiones desde América Latina. Ivonne Farah y Fernanda Wanderley, coordinator. CIDES UMSA, La Paz, Bolivia. 379-410.
http://www.gudynas.com/publicaciones/GudynasExtractivismoTransicionesCides11.pdf

Gudynas, Eduardo., and Acosta, Alberto. 2011. “La renovación de la crítica al desarrollo y el buen vivir como alternativa”. Utopía y Praxis Latinoamericana 16(53):71-83. Venezuela.
http://www.gudynas.com/publicaciones/GudynasAcostaCriticaDesarrolloBVivirUtopia11.pdf

Helfrich, Silke. 2013. “Economics and Commons?! Towards a Commons-Creating Peer Economy.” presentation at “Economics and the Commons Conference,” Berlin, Germany, May 22, 2013. See report on the conference, pp. 12-15, at
http://www.boell.de/sites/default/files/ecc_report_final.pdf.

Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge, and Description. New York, NY: Routledge.

Latouche, Serge. 2009. Farewell to Growth. London: Polity Press.

Law, John. 2011. “What’s Wrong with a One-World World.” Presented to the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University, September 19. Published by heterogeneities on September 25,
www.heterogeneities.net/publications/Law 2111WhatsWrongWithAOneWorldWorld.pdf

Lisifrey, Ararat, Luis A. Vargas, Eduar Mina, Axel Rojas, Ana María Solarte, Gildardo Vanegas and Anibal Vega. 2013. La Toma. Historias de territorio, resistencia y autonomía en la cuenca del Alto Cauca. Bogotá: Universidad Javeriana y Consejo Comunitario de La Toma.

Massuh, Gabriela, editor. 2012. Renunciar al bien común. Extractivismo y (pos)desarrollo en America Latina. Buenos Aires: Mardulce.

Macy, Joanna, and Chris Johnstone. 2012. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy. Novato, California. New World Library.

Nonini, Donald. 2007. The Global Idea of the Commons. New York. Berghahn Books.

Ogden, Laura. 2012. Swamplife. People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades. Minneapolis, Minnesota. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Oslender, Ulrich. 2008. Comunidades negras y espacio en el Pacífico colombiano: hacia un giro geográfico en el estudio de los movimientos sociales. Bogotá: ICANH

Randers, Jorgen. 2012. 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.

Rahnema, M. and V. Bawtree, editors. 1997. The Post-Development Reader. London: Zed Books.

Rist, G. 1997. The History of Development. London: Zed Books.

Rose, Deborah B. 2008. “On History, Trees, and Ethical Proximity.” Postcolonial Studies 11(2):157-167.

Sachs, Wolfgang, editor. 1992. The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London. Zed Books.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2002. Towards a New Legal Common Sense. London. Butterworth.

Vaneigem, Raoul. 1994. The Movement of the Free Spirit. New York. Zone Books.

Arturo Escobar (Colombia/USA) is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Research Associate, Grupo Nación/Cultura/Memoria, Universidad del Valle, Cali.

Photo by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center

The post Patterns of Commoning: Commons in the Pluriverse appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Robin’s vision was always grounded in what exists. It starts from a radical move away from the conventional classification of the economy as the market, state and ‘third sector’. He argued instead that the key divide is between those parts of the economy that are driven by social goals (the social economy) and those that are subject to the imperatives of capital accumulation.

The social economy is a hybrid of several sub-economies, all distinct in how they are financed, who has access to output and on what terms, what kinds of social relations are involved, how surplus is distributed and what kind of economic discipline is exerted to achieve their social goals. They consist of the household, governed by relations of reciprocity; the state, funded by taxes and governed in theory by democratically-decided social goals; and that section of the market that involves the exchange of equivalents (between small social or co-operative businesses) and not yet dominated by capitalist enterprises.

They are all in different ways in conflict with the profit-driven economy and vulnerable to its imperatives. But there is nothing intrinsic to the state, grant or household economies that drives them towards capital accumulation. As economies they are oriented to their own social goals. Each can operate in the market (or, as Robin would say, ‘in and against the market’ – just as when we worked together at the Greater London Council we were, in Robin’s view, working ‘in and against’ the state) in pursuit of their goals without being drawn into the vortex of accumulation.

The cell is key

How different civil economic initiatives work to pursue their social goals was his interest, and how to strengthen them was his political passion. ‘It’s the cell that’s the most important and what we must study,’ he said when I last saw him, moving a discussion from systems of planning to the micro-detail of the highly successful Japanese consumer co-ops. For him the conditions of success of the cell was key: ‘If the cell is flourishing, that’s the thing.’

He was also concerned to explain the patterns of emergence of many cells. He pointed to the importance of the marginalised responding to globalisation, and of responses to the challenges of climate change to which neither market nor state had solutions. He highlighted the importance of ICT and the ways it enables complex distributed initiatives to connect, makes it possible for people to collaborate across production and consumption, and facilitates platforms for co-operation and the infrastructure for a massive increase in the civil economy.

One trend that particularly excited him was the rise of fair trade as a counterpoint to neoliberalism. He would have fought hard against the serious threat it now faces from major UK supermarkets, led by Sainsbury’s, who are planning to replace the Fairtrade mark, with their own ‘Fairly Traded’ label undermining decades of hard-won rights for hundreds of thousands of co-operative producers.

The term was first used in 1988 to refer to the surge of solidarity trading networks. Though they take different forms, reflecting different struggles, they are all part of an attempt to socialise the market and remake the relationships, rules and purposes of international trade. The idea works on several different levels, which can be in tension – but tension was never a problem for Robin.

On one level it involves the various kinds of fair trade shops, such as Altromercato in Italy, 300 ‘world’ shops with an annual turnover of $48 million. Shops that for Robin carried ‘within them the political economy of the world in one hundred objects’. On another level there are brands, such as Cafedirect, established between producer co-operatives. Twin Trading, which Robin helped to found, had become the sixth largest coffee brand in the UK by 2005. It used its brand profits to provide an extensive programme of technical support for producers. It extended the model to cocoa through Divine chocolate, fresh fruit (Agrofair UK) and nuts (Liberation) – all of them, including Twin Trading itself, co-owned by the producers. The next level involved the formation of an international body, the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation, to operate an international trademark and ensure consistency. Finally, via ALBA, an alliance of progressive Latin American countries, fair trade extended into government policy.

Transforming the state

It is this final challenge of how to integrate the state and civil economy that especially intrigued Robin. It was in just such an experiment in public-civil collaboration that I worked closely with him for five years at the GLC. He was the ‘chief economic advisor’ – titles meant little to him; I was his deputy and co‑ordinator of the Popular Planning Unit. We were, in his words, showing ‘how to heal that conceptual split introduced by 19th-century liberal theory: the forced separation of the economic and the political’.

Our work involved transforming the state, so that it was more supportive of the creative capacities and associational power of the civil economy and more intransigent in resisting the imperatives of private capital. Two principles of Robin’s were important. First, ‘productive democracy’: the idea that the state and civil economy, especially through the organised capacities of labour – household labour and precarious labour as well as waged labour – was productive, breaking the dependence of democratic politics on private capital. Second, the role of the state in supporting – not substituting – the realisation and development of the capacities of civil economic associations.

This support took many forms, with Robin and the GLC leadership always encouraging a bold, experimental approach. Sometimes it was a matter of using the GLC’s powers to block financial speculators – for example, supporting the community development plans of the people of Coin Street, Waterloo, against office developers from the City. Sometimes it involved using the GLC’s high public profile to support workers organising in multinationals such as Ford and Kodak with public inquires that questioned capital’s sacrifice of jobs and communities in the constant search for profit. At other times, it involved encouraging civil organisations to produce positive plans for socially-useful jobs, whether by negotiating research support for trade unions to develop alternative plans for rundown industries, or working with women’s groups across London on proposals for childcare that the GLC would then fund.

It was an experiment made possible by Robin’s ability to draw on a wealth of historical experience of associational/co-operative socialism and combine it with modern ideas of participatory democracy or ‘popular planning’. The memory of his generative and supportive leadership will continue to animate many people engaged in productive democracy of all kinds, whether in reversing power relations in the food chain, developing peer-to-peer production with the digital commons, or spreading models of decentralised and co-produced health care, personal care for the elderly and childcare. His arguments and ideas will live on and will animate our lives as we seek out our path away from neoliberalism.

This support took many forms, with Robin and the GLC leadership always encouraging a bold, experimental approach. Sometimes it was a matter of using the GLC’s powers to block financial speculators – for example, supporting the community development plans of the people of Coin Street, Waterloo, against office developers from the City. Sometimes it involved using the GLC’s high public profile to support workers organising in multinationals such as Ford and Kodak with public inquires that questioned capital’s sacrifice of jobs and communities in the constant search for profit. At other times, it involved encouraging civil organisations to produce positive plans for socially-useful jobs, whether by negotiating research support for trade unions to develop alternative plans for rundown industries, or working with women’s groups across London on proposals for childcare that the GLC would then fund. It was an experiment made possible by Robin’s ability to draw on a wealth of historical experience of associational/co-operative socialism and combine it with modern ideas of participatory democracy or ‘popular planning’. The memory of his generative and supportive leadership will continue to animate many people engaged in productive democracy of all kinds, whether in reversing power relations in the food chain, developing peer-to-peer production with the digital commons, or spreading models of decentralised and co-produced health care, personal care for the elderly and childcare. His arguments and ideas will live on and will animate our lives as we seek out our path away from neoliberalism.”

Cross-posted from Red Pepper.Photo by JD Hancock

The post Robin Murray: A very social economist appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This workshop will be adressing several thematics around commons and the political in tandem (urban commons, solidarity economy and social movements, governance issues and digital commons amongst others) challenging the gaps in the contemporary political theory and the practices and theory of the commons.

Heteropolitics is a project in contemporary political theory which purports to contribute to the renewal of political thought on the ‘common’ (communities and the commons) and the political in tandem. The common implies a variable interaction between differences which communicate and collaborate in and through their differences, converging partially on practices and particular pursuits. The political pertains to processes through which plural communities manage themselves in ways which enable mutual challenges, deliberation, decision-making, and creative agency.

Since the dawn of the 21st century, a growing interest in rethinking and reconfiguring community has spread among theorists, citizens and social movements (see e.g. Esposito 2013; Nancy 2000; Dardot & Laval 2014; Amin & Roberts 2008). This has been triggered by a complex tangle of social, economic and political conditions. Climate change, economic crises, globalization, increasing migration flows and the malaise of liberal democracies loom large among them.

These issues are essentially political. Rethinking and refiguring communities goes hand in hand thus with rethinking and reinventing politics. Hence ‘hetero-politics’, the quest for another politics, which can establish bonds of commonality across differences and can enable action in common without re-enacting the closures of ‘organic’ community or the violence of transformative politics in the past.

Heteropolitics will seek to break new ground by combining an extended re-elaboration of contemporary political theory with a more empirically grounded research into alternative and incipient practices of community building and self-governance in: education; the social economy; art; new modes of civic engagement by young people; new platforms of citizens’ participation in municipal politics; network communities, and other social fields (relevant cases include x, a community currency in Sardinia; Barcelona en Comú, a participatory citizens’ platform governing now the City of Barcelona, etc.).

Please do find the link of the programme below, as well as more information about Heteropolitics project:

http://heteropolitics.net/index.php/tag/international-workshop-commons-political-theory/

The workshop will be livestreamed, so if you are interested in attending it online, follow these links.

The post International Workshop on the Commons and Political Theory: 13-15 September 2017, Thessaloniki appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In their latest episode, Upstream takes a close look at this story, starting in ancient Mesopotamia and tracing the history of beer up through the giant consolidations of the 20th century to the birth of the craft beer revolution in the 1970s and 80s. Brew expert and award-winning author Randy Mosher guides us through this history, telling great stories and exploring ancient beer mythology along the way.

But the story doesn’t end there. The beer revolution is really just beginning. Craft beer has begun to bring back many of the most important values and characteristics of beer that were lost for so long, going far beyond just taste.

How is the new economy embodied in a pint of beer? This is an important theme that Rob Hopkins, the co-founder of the Transition Town movement and founder of New Lion Brewery, explores throughout the episode. How is craft beer beginning to stitch back together the economies of towns and cities that have been torn apart by globalization and an obsession with growth? How can beer demonstrate the concept of the circular economy? These are important questions explored in depth through Rob’s expertise.

There are many other incredible stories of brewers and breweries that are radically changing the landscape of the beer industry. Throughout this episode you’ll meet a wide variety of folks: from a brewery in London that makes beer out of surplus bread, to the first cooperatively owned brewery in California. After listening to this episode, you may never look at a bottle of beer in the same way.

Disclaimer: listening to this episode may cause you to crave a dark, chocolatey stout. Or a piney, hoppy IPA. Or a nutty brown ale. Or a fruity saison. Or a tangy farmhouse ale. Or…well you get the point: you may want to listen to this episode over a pint.

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

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

Header image by Bethan Mure. A version of this post was originally published on Shareable. 

The post Podcast: Crafting a Better Economy with Beer appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We recommend watching at least the first fifty minutes of this stellar presentation by Mark Blyth. At the end of his lecture, he notes both of these reactions to the current crisis, for which no clear escape seems at hand, are in fact about a return to local control by national governments. What is missing therefore is a new global outlook that is not neoliberal globalization, nor simple localism. This is I believe, what the analysis of the P2P Foundation actually provides, which keeps global cooperation intact, while aiming for the ‘subsidiarity of material production’. You’ll here much more about this in the course of this year.

The post Understanding the current blocked ‘world conjuncture’, and why it produces ‘global Trumpism’ appeared first on P2P Foundation.