An open farm day tour in Zsambok’s Organic Garden, Cargonomia’s organic farming partner. Credit – Logan Strenchock

The cooperative supplies more than 3,000 food boxes per year, with messengers cycling nearly 18,000 km while servicing a 27 km2 section of the city annually. This directly reduces the environmental impact of food production and distribution that at a global level accounts for about a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions as well as an alarming amount of food waste.

Cargonomia operates from a hub that serves as the messenger dispatch centre; food box pickup point; do-it-yourself repair workshop for bicycles, clothing and electronics; and logistics centre for sustainable urban transport solutions where community members can borrow locally manufactured cargo-bikes. The site also serves as a space for community activities that focus on sustainable transitions, community building and ways to find alternatives to limitless, consumerist growth.

Cargonomia illustrates that prioritizing relationship-building, direct interaction and community development can trigger substantial reductions in carbon emissions while delivering important positive social impacts. By lending its cargobikes to neighbours, music bands, non-governmental organisations and artists, it has helped generate a growing interest in alternatives to motorized vehicles in Budapest. The wider impact of this localized network is felt most within the community through regular activities offering citizens open spaces for learning and exchange, creating conditions for meaningful dialogues between neighbours, craftspeople and volunteers.

Vincze with a cargobike loaded with organic vegetables and bread on a delivery day. Photo Credit: Stefan Roch

“What inspires me most about this initiative is the systems thinking that underpins the initiative bridges urban/rural livelihoods, and attempts to orientate the solidarity economy towards concrete political activity.”

– Bertie Russell

Would you like to learn more about this initiative? Please contact us.

Or visit cargonomia.hu

Transformative Cities’ Atlas of Utopias is being serialized on the P2P Foundation Blog. Go to TransformativeCities.org for updates.

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The best that nation-states could do was adapt to planet-scale forces of capital, technology and migration. And part of that adaptation meant national identities would become more worldly and cosmopolitan. It would be a functional necessity to tolerate, even embrace, difference.

Jump-cut to now. Where some in a 60,000-strong crowd for a national anniversary in Budapest freely hold up posters titled “White Europe” and “Clean Blood”. Where ex-Trump advisor Steve Bannon, a self-proclaimed “economic nationalist”, addresses a French National Front rally with the words, “Let them call you racist… wear it as a badge of honour”. Where elements of the UK commercial press (and other pint-wielding provocateurs) describe domestic judges and MPs as “traitors” and “saboteurs”.

All of this underpinned by proclamations of national glory and tradition — more often than not deemed as under threat from a host of named and nameless “others”.

Understanding nationalism

Bewilderment is understandable. As are laments that this is a veritable retreat from the future. Yet at FutureFest, we try to set current developments in deep and wide contexts. As it extends outwards from now, the “cone of uncertainty” that futurologists talk about contains many thorny issues — and that means power, passions and asymmetries, as well as tidy and gleaming solutions.

If the call to nationhood is irresistibly on the rise, the future-minded should be thinking about how to turn its dynamics to the good.

What that might imply, to begin with, is an understanding of nationalism that is less phobic and alarmist than is (understandably) generated by the headlines.

In much political science, the assumption behind the term “nationalism” is that the qualities of the nation are the driving force of its ideology — just as the dynamism of capital propels “capitalism” or the primacy of social relations fuels “socialism”.

The anthropologist Ernest Gellner understood nationalism as a functional phenomenon. It was a means whereby industrialising territories established a common language, clock-time and other useful standards. It justified investing in education and welfare systems, in order to strengthen the capacities and character of the “folk”.

Now, 19th and 20th century nationalism could fall into preposterous myths of racial superiority, and provide a logic for imperial exploitation and the subjugation of others. But it could also — in, say, the Nordic countries — become a transformative spur for societal development in economy, culture, education and land ownership (as outlined in Tomas Bjorkman and Lene Rachel Anderson’s recent book The Nordic Secret).

Altruistic and narcissistic nationalism

What form of nationalism — with its “Janus” face, as Tom Nairn once called it, facing both forwards and backwards — is prevailing in the present moment? As reported in the Economist a few months ago, the Polish social psychologist Michal Bilewicz has made a useful distinction between “altruistic” and “narcissistic” forms of contemporary nationalism:

Altruists acknowledge a chequered past, give thanks for today’s blessings and look forward to a better future — a straight line sloping up across time. Narcissists exalt in a glorious past, denigrate a miserable present and promise a magnificent future — a rollercoaster U-curve with today in its pit… If you need a rule of thumb for assessing a nationalist movement, ascending ramp versus switchback U is as good as you are likely to get.

One might recognise the altruistic version in the small-nationalisms of Scotland and Wales, or the Catalonian independence movement, or even Macron’s forward motion for the French nation. These nationalisms are liberal and progressive. They are pro-EU or other transnational regimes, shouting ‘stop the world, we want to get on’.

Yet it would be fair to say the narcissistic form is currently dominant in Europe. The administrations of Hungary, Poland, Russia and Turkey — and the anti-immigration contenders in many other countries — do indeed combine these elements. That is: a glorious reading of their own history; a vision of a present society overrun by malign, polluting and external forces; and a future which restores national “Greatness”.

A post-Brexit UK looks like it’s trying to be both kinds of nationalism at the same time. Meaning a “Global Britain” that’s about to be freed from the exactions of European bureaucracy, in order to extend its national genius for democracy and industry around the world… so we are told. And as for Trump’s America? Well, as presidential tweet tumbles after presidential tweet, it’s difficult to tell.

“New nationalism” at Futurefest

In this year’s FutureFest, we’ve been trying to grapple with the full spectrum of creative (and destructive) forces shuddering through our lives at the moment. Our aim is to open up alternatives than can occupy the future in a confident way. The enduring appetite for collective identity has to be one path we explore. Which means taking nationalism seriously.

We’ve invited Professor Manuel Castells to dwell again on his remarkably prescient comments about the power of identity, made in his mid-90s trilogy The Information Age. Castells saw the interdependence of what he called “the Net and the Self”. Our networked, mobile and global existence is so demanding that it produces a need for a collective anchor in the storm; a more slow-moving resource of culture and history.

The narcissistic nationalisms previously mentioned indicate how this relationship can go badly wrong. Castells, himself Catalonian, will give us clues as to how it can be set right for the future. He will also be exploring these ideas in a conversation with Sir Nick Clegg.

Our panel on the “new nationalism” has a range of leading experts who will take “these islands” of Britain as their starting point. British Future’s Sunder Katwala has been conducting research on attitudes to Britishness since 2011 and Cambridge’s Michael Kenny is as interested in the nations that comprise the “United” Kingdom. As a leading scholar on cosmopolitan identity, the LSE’s Ayça Çubukçu will hold open a wider space in which a post-Brexit British identity can be explored.

A few decades ago, Benedict Anderson once described nationalism as an “imagined community” — a sense of connection with those who we will never actually, physically meet. How much of our virtualised, networked life does that concept also describe? How much of our future depends on how well we imagine our communities? What can the nations we craft teach us about how to invoke and locate the collective in our lives?

As ever, in one single FutureFest, many possible worlds.

Originally published by NESTA

Photo by alda chou

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This post by Jaroslav Fiala was originally published in Czech on A2larm.cz; the English version is from politicalcritique.org and reposted with permission to republish and digitally distribute, with the full support and consent of the A2larm team as well as their editor in chief, author Jaroslav Fiala.

Jaroslav Fiala speaks to about the brutality of capitalism, Orbán’s Hungary, and the failure of the European system.

Gaspár M. Tamás is a Hungarian philosopher, politician, and publicist. Before 1989, he was a dissident who protested against “real socialism”. He has lectured at English, French, and American universities, and was briefly an MP. Today, he is one of Europe’s leading public intellectuals and a critic of Viktor Orbán’s government.

Jaroslav Fiala: Recently, Europe has been experiencing dangerous times: the crisis of the Eurozone, terrorist attacks, the rise of the far right, Brexit, and so on. Is liberal democracy in peril?

Gaspár M. Tamás: Nobody can say that liberal democracy has not liberated some people and that some kinds of servitude have not been obliterated. But the current system has run into a number of contradictions. We are experiencing a serious crisis of liberal democracy, which coincides with the “death” of socialism. The necessary condition of liberal democracy was the existence of the workers’ movement. It was the result of a compromise in which, in exchange for inner peace and stability, social democracy had given up some of its revolutionary demands and had become part of the bourgeois state. As a result, the lower classes were represented. The inner balance between classes within Western welfare states, with privileges for the proletariat, its trade unions, social democratic and communist parties and the international equilibrium between reformed and limited capitalism and the Soviet bloc led to what we today call “liberal democracy”, which existed between 1945 and 1989. Western European labour legislation has followed Soviet and socialist legal patterns from the 1920s, so have legal measures concerning gender equality and family law. This is proven by recent legal-historical scholarship.

Paradoxically what is lacking from liberal democracy today, is socialism. This is the reason why there is no countervailing force that keeps liberal democracy democratic. Today’s ruling classes are not threatened from within. Thus, they can do what even fascists wouldn’t dare to do. They are smashing real wages, pensions, welfare systems, public schools, free healthcare, cheap public transport, cheap social housing and so on. Who will stop the ruling class?

Is it possible to save liberal democracy?

I don’t think so. Liberal democracy was an extremely complicated system. The ruling classes in liberal democracy were limited from the left by the workers’ movement and, from the right, by the forces of the past – by the remnants of the aristocracy, of the church and of monarchy. Liberal democracy on its own is unlikely to survive. In spite of what the liberals think, the far right is no danger for capitalism. Danger for life and limb, but not for capital and not for the state. Don’t forget that Adolf Hitler was considered to be the saviour of Western civilization from communism. Even people who despised him, such as Friedrich-August von Hayek – the free market zealot, who was after all an anti-Nazi émigré – claimed that Hitler might have been a monster but that he had saved Europe from communism. For people like Hayek, fascism was a preventive anti-communist counterrevolution. Which it was. That it ruined and exterminated half of Europe? Pity. Do you think the bourgeoisie would hesitate now? I don’t think so.

Paradoxically, what is lacking from liberal democracy today is socialism. This is the reason why there is no countervailing force that keeps liberal democracy democratic.

You live in Hungary. Many from the outside world are horrified by the government of Viktor Orbán, who is annihilating liberal democracy. On the other hand, some people see a certain alternative or an “interesting choice” in Orbán. What would you say to them?

Orbán is doing exactly what you dislike in your own country but since he is doing it without resistance, he seems to be more coherent and successful. There are some admirers of Viktor Orbán in Eastern Europe who wouldn’t put up with his system in Hungary for a single day. They admire his talk about national pride, they find it funny that he would “brutally” attack America, the EU, and so on. In reality, Hungary is sustained by Western European, mostly German capital. We have low taxes for big business, there are “sweetheart deals” for Mercedes and Audi, which aren’t exactly anti-Western or anti-capitalist forces. Orbán destroyed the social system. The hospitals are empty because there are no doctors and nurses. People are dying on the corridors. My little daughter goes to an elementary school in the centre of Budapest, and there is no toilet paper and no chalk to write on the blackboard. Orbán is a miserable failure in all respects. And a neoliberal failure at that. The budget is balanced, the debt is down, and the lower forty per cent are starving. Problems are solved just by silencing criticism.

Why Orbán has been successful as a politician then?

The majority of Hungarians are apathetic, indifferent, and devoid of hope. My country is a very sad place where people say that they can’t do anything in order to forward their aspirations or to change anything. Mr Orbán knows that the secret of success is to support this passivity and apathy. He realized that he should put a stop to the quasi-totalitarian mobilization of society. The first phase of his rule was to mobilize crowds with xenophobic and ethnicist slogans and use extreme militant groups. Now all the mobilization networks have been disbanded, as they could become a voice of social discontent. Orbán has destroyed functional bureaucracy, too. Public administration hardly exists, regional administration is officially and openly and completely terminated. Experts, intellectuals, “enlightened bureaucrats” are fired by their thousands. Inner controls don’t exist anymore. Cultural institutions, publishing, periodicals, research, higher education, quality press, good museums and theatres, art cinematography have been destroyed. So have independent media. The result is a dysfunctional state. So, when someone tells you that dictatorship means “law and order”, you should laugh. It means corruption, disorder, total chaos. And it also means the bitter  hopelessness of the body politic, which is the true secret of Orbán’s power.

There has been a lot of criticism of East-Central European countries because of their refusal of solidarity with refugees from the Middle East and Africa. But if we look to the West, there is a lot of racism and resistance towards the refugees as well. What has happened in Europe?

The same causes that explain Western racism have appeared immediately in Eastern Europe and have caused identical phenomena. First, the multinational states of East-Central Europe like Masaryk’s and Havel’s Czechoslovakia and Tito’s Yugoslavia had vanished. We have created small, ethnic, monocultural, monolingual non-republics, in which we are supposed to live.

After 1989, it seemed to us that in this part of the world, the normal shape of a state is one that is inhabited by a single ethnic group. Still, Prague and Budapest are full of rich but non-white people, tourists and business people settle here, and nobody is objecting. They are not beaten up as racial inferiors. There is no racial antipathy. Rich people don’t count as aliens, as Muslims, as blacks, as migrants…

You mean there is also class hatred…

For the European poor, refugees are competitors on the labour market. They are considered “welfare rivals”, and the result is social and moral panic. But the anti-refugee hysteria is not totally crazy. The mass influx of refugees would be a great burden on the welfare system, especially in Central-Eastern Europe. These are poor countries. Of course, the problem could be solved. But when you see that our welfare system as it is now cannot take care of our own populations, can you imagine what will happen? The current Hungarian government is not able to sustain railways, post offices, elementary schools that have existed for two hundred years. People know perfectly well that their states are not functioning. The panic is explained by the conservative intelligentsia in culturalist or openly racist terms. Although the problem is the depletion of the welfare state and of social solidarity and a rigid, anti-popular class politics. Racializing and ethnicizing social inequalities is the oldest tactic of the bourgeoisie. In America, “unemployed” has been made to mean “black”, in Eastern Europe, “unemployed” means “Roma” or “Gypsy”. Recipients of  “welfare”, of unemployment benefit, of social assistance of any kind are classified as “criminal elements”, “single mothers” (i. e. “immoral women”) and, again, coloured people. Even indigents, members of the underclass are tolerant of the destruction of the welfare structure which is clearly advantageous to them, because it hurts racial aliens.

What should be the reaction of the left to this state of panic?

If we had a compassionate and egalitarian welfare system, we could enlarge it, and accept refugees. But at the same time, let’s be fair to ourselves. Am I or are you responsible for the dismantling of the welfare system? The responsibility rests with the ruling classes and political elites of the last thirty years. And if someone says, “You cannot just open the frontiers because you will destroy the fabric of society”, you can reply, “The fabric of society has already been destroyed, and this is why it is so difficult to welcome refugees. And this is the fault of the establishment”. Unfortunately, it is my generation that created this 100% capitalist utopia in East-Central Europe that does not exist anywhere in this radical form, certainly not in the West. The Czech Republic is more of a market society than Austria or Britain. Unlike what the liberals say, the rule of the market in East Central Europe is absolute and complete. If we are so-called serious intellectuals, we have to be objective, and recognize that our societies are facing insoluble problems. How can people show solidarity in a system which is not solidary at all, which is selfishness itself? Many politicians in today’s Europe, especially on the far right, promise some sort of welfare state, but only for “hard-working”, home-grown, respectful white people.

But the point is that they won’t do it. This is just talk. These are middle class movements that fear and despise the lower classes and the poor. They are open partisans of the class society – class warriors from above. They aren’t proposing anything new, they are just defending the repression, the exploitation and the injustice of today. Look at the situation in Poland or in Hungary. Have these societies had become more generous, more cohesive, and more collectivist at least within the white middle class? Of course not. This is just rhetoric.

Why do the people still believe in their promises?

There is no real left. A famous quote says: Every extreme right victory shows the failure of the left. And the remnants of the traditional working class have changed as well. 90% of the Austrian industrial working class voted for Norbert Hofer, the far-right candidate. But this is only 10% of the whole working population in Austria. This has become a relatively privileged group, which is defending its own class position against competitors on the labour market – against refugees, against the unemployed, against migrants and against women who’d work for less. Voters are blaming women, ethnic minorities and migrants, instead of demanding to be integrated into a higher wage/dole/pensions system. But for being integrated into a higher wage system, you need a strong left social democracy, which does not exist.

We need a countervailing power to present-day capitalism in order to insure, simply, the survival of humankind. Capitalism left on its own obviously cannot and will not do it.

Could a strong left-wing social democracy be created again?

Hardly. If a new left of any kind will come into existence, it will have to represent and to mobilize not only the remnants of the old industrial working class, but a much larger mass of people, the complete proletariat-precariat without capital property. If not, these people will become something like the ancient Roman proletariat. They will be kept alive by gifts, state donations, and spectator sports. They might become a reactionary force serving the interests of tyrants. That was the role of the “proletariat” in the late Roman republic and the early Roman Empire. We may end up in a society torn apart by competing class egotisms that will be uglier than what we have now. We are sitting here in the beautiful sunshine of Prague, it is quiet, pretty, and still there is peace. But so it was in June 1914. It was also very peaceful. The crash of whatever nature may not come today, it may come in ten years. But the system is highly unstable. That is the lesson of all of this.

Who are the main enemies of Europe today?

All governments of Europe, without exception. The riders of the apocalypse. They don’t know what they are doing. The conservative leaders of the past, however nasty they might have been otherwise, had some traditional sense of what you “don’t play with”. You do not play with your country, however defined, just for the hell of it. Look at people like David Cameron, François Hollande, Miloš Zeman. These people have no idea, they’re just blundering around. This is really serious. Then look at all the decadence around us – the falling intellectual level of most institutions, the general cultural crisis and illiteracy of the middle class, including so-called professionals and so-called intellectuals. We need a countervailing power to present-day capitalism in order to insure, simply,  the survival of humankind. Capitalism left on its own obviously cannot and will not do it. This is not the old and bad bourgeois system. It is much worse. We must create new political structures, if there is still time for it. I am not at all certain that there is.

This post by Jaroslav Fiala is reposted from politicalcritique.org

Photo credits: MTI/Mohai Balázs

Lead Photo by sjrankin

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