Saturday 13 October: 11.00-18.00

Register Here.

What to expect

In his book ‘Tools for Conviviality’ (1973), the late Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich argued that the nature of modern ‘tools’, from machines to schools, had the effect of making people dependent and undermined their own natural abilities. What he called “convivial tools” were those that encouraged people to think for themselves and be more socially engaged.

Convivial Tools is a programme of talks, debates and workshops exploring new strategies for a more cooperative society. Using Ivan Illich’s concept of “conviviality”, it will bring together designers, artists, media theorists, curators, and social thinkers from diverse fields to examine current tools and technologies that encourage alternative modes of production and social relations.

Working together with those in the cooperatives movement – which includes economists, technologists, philosophers, sociologists and proactive citizens – the programme will explore whether they can help to create what Illich would call a convivial society.

Speakers include; John Thackara, Eleanor Saitta, Joseph Rykwert, Ben Vickers, Torange Khonsari, Adam Greenfield, Ben Terrett, Sarah T Gold, Dougald Hine, and many more…

Photo by P. Marioné

The post Event: Design Museum, Convivial Tools appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Before we start talking about your book, can you tell us a bit about the context that prompted you to write it, and how it fits in your personal quest for understanding social change? I mean, can you say a few words about yourself, your engagement in green politics, and your work with OIKOS?

Twenty-five years ago, I started working as an academic researcher in the field of environmental philosophy and bioethics. With degrees in engineering and philosophy, I tried to understand the role of technology in how people shape their world and dominate nature, to analyse what the importance is of the dominant value system in a society. So, I learned how Modernity radically changed our relation with nature, which from then is an object we as subjects can dominate and manipulate. While this was a rewarding time, it was maybe my engineering background that made me feel that only writing articles and lecturing is not enough to stop the destruction of our living planet. So I joined the Green party and within a few years I first was elected as local councilor of the City of Ghent and subsequently as member of the Flemish Parliament. I learned that politics really matters, being in government we were able to introduce innovative changes in e.g. the care system and energy policy (a law as voted to close the nuclear plants the coming decades). At the same time I experienced that our representative democratic system, established in the 19th century, needs a thorough update. So the first book I wrote was about the need for Deliberative Democracy, acknowledging the value and importance of citizens engaging in an active dialogue.

After being a member of parliament, I founded the green foundation OIKOS, because I believe innovative ideas are the core fuel of societal change. You cannot develop new sustainable systems – think of mobility, energy or food- with old concepts. At the same I noticed how citizens are taking their future back in their hands, becoming from consumer producer again. These citizens’ collectives, commons, are the basis for what I see as the most promising actor of change in our current times.

Your book centers around the tension between freedom, which I read as individual freedom, and security, which I read as more of a collective reality. Can you describe how you see that tension and how you see it as resolvable or not.

In the dominant narrative of our society, we see freedom as an individual quality. But this creates the illusion that we are independent actors that can create our own future and lifeworld on our one. While freedom is maybe the most collective concept we now. How free is someone who is born in a poor country, without a decent educational system? What kind of choices (s)he can make? If freedom is the ability to influence the future development of our world, we can only do it if we work together. That was what the green thinker Ivan Illich meant with autonomy: ‘the joyful capacity to shape the world together’. Anyway, how free are we if the corporations and multinationals determine what we (can) buy. Everyday, we see thousands of advertisements and marketings signals (like logos). Do you really think they don’t influence us in a profound way? So the paradox is that enhancing you personal freedom is working together to change the environment you live. Like the Green mayor of Grenoble did, but getting rid of advertisements boards in public spaces and streets.

Does our welfare system have to change, and if so, how so.

Our current welfare system was built on the assumption of full employment with man working 40 hours a week, staying 40 years with the same employer, in the framework of a decent fiscal system with rich people and big companies paying the fair share of taxes. No need to say that our society has changed in many fundamental ways.

We need what I call a new ‘security package’ for the 21th century, empowering people and allowing them to enrich their community and society. This package is based on the fact that there are three different kinds of work: next to our job, the paid work, there is the care work we do while raising kids, cooking at home etc. and also autonomous work, things we find important, like establishing with people in your town a commons, think about an energy co-op or growing vegetables together. If our goal is a good life for all, we have to make sure people can combine these types of work in a relaxed way. Hence, I suggest the combination of a shorter working week of 30 hours with a universal basic income of 500 euros that for low and middle incomes compensates for the lower salary, in combination with an affordable education and health system.

The number of hours, 30 a week, is not randomly chosen. It is the weekly number most women work who have to combine their job with their family work and personal development. I see the ‘security package’ as a transition model, in the evolution towards a social-ecological society. The more things we do in our autonomous work, products and services who are cheaper and last longer than produced by corporations – think about Wikipedia or platform co-ops for car sharing – will enable to live better with less buying power, allowing to maybe lower the normal working week to 21 hours, as the New Economics Foundation proposes.

What I found very useful in your book is the historical context you are offering about how current social movements, and the surge for the commons in particular, are related to the earlier struggles post-1968. Can you elaborate a bit?

Big corporations – think about Apple – want to make us believe that they invented all the new stuff in our society. Mariana Mazzucato has in a convincing way shown that corporations only can make these products and profits because governments invested loads of money in research and development. On top of this, I want to add that quite a lot of crucial innovations where introduced not by companies or public authorities, but by citizens’ initiatives. Who build for instance the first wind mill to start the transition towards a renewable energy system? It where villagers in the north of Denmark in the 1970’s. Who invented the recycle or thrift shop, the starting point for the circular economy: wise citizens in the Netherlands. The same goes for sharing, with people in Amsterdam experimenting with a bike sharing system, already in the mid 1960’s? These initiatives are part of a broader emancipatory movement with a lot new social movements..

Overall, the emancipatory movement wanted to create more space for citizens by reducing the reach of the state, other traditional structures and multinationals. Looking back, we can say that this movement has been successful, but did not achieve its goal. This is connected with the greater success of the neoliberal freedom concept. This concept of freedom succeeded in reducing the build-up of identity into an individualistic project, where consumption plays a crucial role.

How did it happen? The 1980s and 1990s are the battleground of these two freedom-based concepts. A crucial difference lies in scale: while businesses are organised worldwide, this is less evident for new civil movements and unions. Only the anti-globalisation movement would later bundle forces across borders. Meanwhile, large corporations have taken up the free space for the most part.

A second explanation concerns the evolution of most of the new social movements. Starting mostly from a position of a radical critique, professionalisation and building a relationship with mainstream politicians leads to a pragmatic attitude. Proposals must now be feasible within the framework of the current policy. The increasing dependency on subsidies of many non-governmental organisations has sometimes led to uncritical inscription into government policy options. As said, at the same time, more and more citizens were seduced by the neoliberal narrative that a good life means work hard, earn money and spent it all to be happy. If you don’t feel well, just buy a ticket for a wellness club.

The biggest financial crisis since the 1930’s, which started ten years ago, changed everything again. The crisis is a real wake-up call for a lot of citizens, they realize that if they want a sustainable future for their children, they have to build it themselves. So, we see all over the world a new wave of citizens’ initiatives, rediscovering the emancipatory concept of freedom and autonomy. A crucial difference is that we know live in the age of internet, lowering the transaction costs of cooperation dramatically. What was very hard to realize in the post-68 period, e.g. sharing cars in a neighborhood, is now a piece of cake with digital platforms.

What can we learn from this history? That if social movements want to be successful in a globalized world, they also have to build translocal and transnational networks. It for instance makes no sense that in ten cities in the world, people are trying to build their own digital platform as an alternative for companies like Airbnb or Uber. Transnational networks of commons cities can be the fundament of a new governance model in the future.

Do you have a prescription for our future, and a way to get there? Also to which degree does your book also apply to non-European or non-Western countries?

I don’t have of course the prescription for our future, what I did in preparing my book was observing society carefully, looking for the places and processes of hope. I found two very relevant developments: citizens starting new collective initiatives, commons, for the production of sustainable products and services, and local governments implementing very ambitious policy plans in fields like climate, energy, food and mobility policy.

Slowly but surely, there is a new range of autonomous activities that together form a transformational movement towards a socio-ecological society. It is important to note that we are not only talking about small or isolated projects. Take, for instance, the 20 majestic wind turbines at the coastline of Copenhagen. This project was started by a group of habitants of the city who developed the idea and went with it to their Minister of Energy. Instead of refusing or taking it over, the government decided to start a co-creation process. Civil servants give technical and judicial advice. Half of the shares were owned by a citizens’ co-op, after completion, thousands of families every year receive a financial dividend. Similarly, following the Energiewende in Germany, half of the renewable energy installations are owned by citizens and their co-ops. Even in smaller towns, governments support the local population in setting up renewable energy projects. This adds up to really big business. So, citizens and local governments really can make a difference, and build together the counter current.

My book starts from the history and developments in Europe, so I am really modest on what it has to say to other continents. At the same time, I see the same developments in cities all over the world. There I think the crucial concept of action developed in my book based on the work of André Gorz, revolutionary reformism, really can be very useful. It answers the question how to move a step further, beyond all the individual great citizens’ initiatives and local policy proposals.

The two concepts are each in themselves insufficient. A political revolution that will change everything for good at once – we should not hope for that. And a few reforms of the existing system will not lead to a real structural change. For example, while it’s good that people share cars, this alone will not lead us to sustainable accessibility and mobility. This needs strategic cooperation and planning.

Revolutionary reformism can be defined as a chain of far-reaching reforms that complement and strengthen each other and, at the same time, raise political awareness. In system terms, it is a matter of implementing reforms that are complementary and reinforce each other. This will generate synergy and even positive feedback: virtuous circles. For example, in progressive cities like Ghent you see the establishment of commons if the field of renewable energy, mobility, food, etc. But for most of them they don’t cooperate beyond the borders of their domain. Imagine a food coop distributing their food boxes by another commons specialized in delivery by electric bikes, that in turn only uses green energy produced by the urban energy coop. When they then, supported by the local government, introduce and use the same local currency for connecting their economic transactions, you put in motion a chain in action that will reinforce itself. It is this kind of thinking and action that is crucial for the future, and can be useful all over the world.

The post Freedom, Equality and Commoning in the Age of the Precariat: an interview with Dirk Holemans appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Two years after our first encounter, as the 2008 financial crisis was starting to unravel, the daily agenda of Greek politics was marked by enclosures of natural and civic commons, through privatizations and commodification of public goods and services. In the name of “green development,” the government has been working closely with private companies to develop industrial wind parks along the mountain ridges of most of the Aegean islands. A new Land Plan was also legislated for the island, which re-designates uses of land in ways that seem incompatible with traditional uses of land. Perhaps the most characteristic example has been the designation of some areas below the mountain range, traditionally pasturelands, as “industrial zones.”

In 2012, the government announced its decision to downgrade the Hospital of Ikaria into a branch of the hospital of the nearby island of Samos, thus downgrading the quality and quantity of health services provided at Ikaria. That measure, along with other measures which promoted the commodification of health, threatened to sweep aside the very reason Ikarians, locals and immigrants had built the Panikarian hospital in 1958 – to give all Ikarians equal access to health services. For Ikaria, an island of 8,000 inhabitants, legislation promoting the privatization or commodification of natural resources, public goods and services was seen as a serious threat to their way of life.¹

Frosini Koutsouti and I soon realized that Ikaria was a real-life laboratory for some key themes of our times: the various enclosures of the island’s commons, the people’s resistance in defending and/or reclaiming them, and their invention of innovative new commons. But how could we explore and document these phenomena? We concluded that such an endeavor could not be neutral, as if we could stand apart from local struggles. We could not ignore global neoliberal forces that are violently transforming citizens into consumers of goods whose production depends on relentless enclosures.

In 2012, Frosini and I formed a nonprofit group, the Documentation Research and Action Centre of Ikaria (DRACOI), as a “shelter” for our collaborative work on the commons. One major source of inspiration has been Ivan Illich’s Intercultural Documentation Center in Mexico, which he established in 1961 to document the role of “modern development” in the dismemberment of local cultures, the loss of traditional ways of life and the creation of poverty. Like Illich, we entered into collaboration with various locally based village associations, action committees, cooperatives and other collectivities. Our shared goals lay in protecting basic human rights like equal access to health, education and water. We also wanted to use the commons as a lens for understanding the larger processes of political and sociocultural transformation.

We began to realize that local responses to enclosures of commons could be “read” not merely as isolated moments of resistance against a neoliberal wave, but part of a much larger historical process of enclosure that began in England and elsewhere during the late Middle Ages. Local struggles can be seen as part of the double movement described by economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi, who explained that enclosures driven by the international market economy inevitably provoke countermovements of people seeking to reclaim their commons and create new ones. Seen in this light, the ideals of “green development”² promoted by corporatists as a “solution” to the crisis resembles the “improvements” of nineteenth century Britain that require ongoing enclosure of natural and civic commons.³

In the course of our journey in the immense sea of literature, activism and dialogue on issues of the commons, we came across thinkers posing issues relevant to our own questions and aims. Each added to our navigational horizons. Some became passengers, joining us in common endeavors, for varying periods of time. We also joined larger “ships” of shared inquiry. Such was the “Mataroa” seminar, named after the historical ship that in December 1945 left Greece, loaded with young scientists, students and artists, who, over the course of their lives, contributed to the formation of the thought and visions that was culminated with May 1968. Our ambitious idea for Mataroa was that now an imaginary ship would return to Greece, loaded, this time, with concepts and ideas proper for a critical and radical understanding of contemporary reality. Those were the concepts of crisis, critique, and commons and their enclosures, as well as the idea of a Mediterranean imaginary – a vision of what the region could be.⁴

In 2013, the Mataroa seminar “arrived” at the port of Ikaria, bringing together twenty-seven researchers and commoners from the Mediterranean Sea and beyond, to share their stories. One participant brought the other, some found out about the meeting through its blog (mataroanetwork.org), and each found the main concepts of the seminar to be fruitful organizing concepts for telling many different stories. All participants agreed on the need to deconstruct the idea of “crisis,” which was not to be taken as an objective condition of contemporary reality but as a powerful discourse for “Othering” as a powerful means of legitimizing conspicuous violations of the social contract and fundamental human rights.⁵

The question posed by the “Mataroans” was whether the main components of a new imaginary challenging the capitalist one could be identified. Instead of conceiving of more and more aspects of life in terms of market norms and “development,” could we imagine one that protects and regenerates the very sources of life? Could we discover whether a “Mediterranean Imaginary” existed in contrast to the imaginary of a Hobbesian “war of all against all” – a vision defined by such core values as offering and conviviality within communal institutions,⁶ and within familial and friendly ties?

The seminar was convened without a budget and depended entirely on the local gift economy of Ikarians, who provided hospitality to researchers and commoners. The logic of the gift also penetrated the organization of the seminar, which would “open up” to local society through a series of public talks on current political and social developments in the Mediterranean and beyond, and on issues relevant to Ikarian experiences. With that in mind, the organizing committee invited some of the “Mataroans” to publicly share their experiences and ideas. Some discussed the popular uprisings in Egypt (Samah Selim), Turkey (Merve Cagsirli) and Kentucky (Betsy Taylor). Others addressed the international experience of privatizing systems of water management (Dimitris Zikos), the experience of neoliberal environmental management of commons in Tanzania and Senegal (Melis Ece), and the idea of degrowth (Giorgos Kallis). Another presentation, inspired by American and European press accounts of Ikarian longevity, examined “slacker politics” (Kristin Lawler). (“Slackers” are people who always seek to avoid work.)

The Mataroa seminar-ship left the port of Ikaria for unknown destinations of new initiative, leaving behind a wealth of material available to anyone through a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. As a kind of countergift to our hosts in Ikaria, the Ikarian stakeholders of the Mataroa initiative prepared a publication that documented this dialogue about the commons.⁷ Instead of just publishing the proceedings of the seminar, we created a collection of essays that extended the dialogue sparked by the public talks during the seminar. We invited citizens and groups who are fighting privatizations and commodifications of natural resources, public goods and services, to share their thoughts and experiences. These included the vice chair of the local Association of Health Workers at the Hospital of Ikaria, for example, and SOS Chalkidiki, a coalition of collectives struggling against a huge gold mining plan that will have great environmental, economic and social consequences.⁸

This experience convinced us that, if we are to place the notion of the commons in our analytical epicenter, or use this notion as a compass, we cannot but do it in collaboration with people of praxis, within their own moral and social economies. The journey in this immense sea of the commons continues and new initiatives are already planned with new partners and enduring friends.⁹ The endeavor of creating a methodology of the commons has just started, many collaborations are to be made, and many more lessons remain to be learned.

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.

Maria Bareli-Gaglia (Greece) is an economist, currently pursuing her PhD in Sociology/Social Anthropology (University of Crete). Her thesis involves the study of the annual festivals (paniyiries) at Ikaria. She is chair of DRACOI, a nonprofit, which aims, among others things, at creating the conditions for an equal exchange of knowledge between locals and researchers.

Photo by almekri01

The post Patterns of Commoning: Voyaging in the Sea of Ikarian Commons and Beyond appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Humans do not control modern technology: the technological system has colonized their imagination and it shapes their activities and relations. This statement reflects the thought of influential degrowth scholars, like Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich.

Ellul believed that humans may control individual technologies, but not technology broadly conceived as the whole complex of methods and tools that advance efficiency. Instead, technology has taken a life of its own. Society should be in constant flux so that humans can shape it up to an important degree. Ellul was afraid that technology suppresses this flux, creating a uniform, static and paralytic system.

Building on Ellul, Illich and Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, I argue that there are alternative trajectories of technology appropriation that encompass small-scale, decentralized, environmentally sound and locally autonomous application. The aim of this short essay is to shed light on seeds that may exemplify new or revitalized techno-economic trajectories for post-capitalist scenarios.

Design global, manufacture local

The confluence of the digital commons of knowledge, software and design with local manufacturing technologies (from three-dimensional printers and laser cutters to low-tech tools and crafts) give rise to new modes of production, as exemplified by the “design global, manufacture local” (DGML) model.

DGML describes the processes through which design is developed as a global digital commons, whereas manufacturing takes place locally, often through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in check. Three interlocked practices observed in DGML projects (from wind-turbines and farming machines to prosthetic robotic hands) seem to present interesting dynamics for political ecology: the incentives for design-embedded sustainability, the possibilities of on-demand production and the practices of sharing digital and physical productive infrastructures.

A visualization of the “design global, manufacture local” model. Image credits: Vasilis Kostakis, Nikos Exarchopoulos, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

DGML technologies have the potential to be low-cost, feasible for small-scale operations and adjustable to local needs utilizing human creativity. DGML and other commons-oriented initiatives strive for technological sovereignty, by enabling communities (from farmers and artists to computer engineers and designers) to become technologically more autonomous.

The small group dynamics can now scale-up

The increasing access to information and communication technologies enables the global scaling up of small group dynamics. Local communities and individuals can thus shape their technologies up to an important degree, while benefiting from digitally shared resources in tandem. This dynamic of relating tach other, as exemplified by Wikipedia and free/open-source software to DGML projects such as L’Atelier Paysan and Farmhack, has been called “peer-to-peer” (P2P).

What peer-to-peer and the commons are in a nutshell. Image source: Bauwens, M., Kostakis, V., Troncoso, S., & Utratel, A. (2017). Commons Transition and Peer-to-Peer: A Primer. (pp.8-9). Amsterdam: Transnational Institute.

P2P allows people to connect to each other, to communicate to each other and to organize around common value creation, which is enabled by socio-technical networks that avoid intermediaries and gatekeepers. In this capacity of freely-associated common value creation, P2P becomes a synonym for “commoning”. As used in the current context, P2P is related to the capacity to collectively create commons in open contributory networks.

Challenges from a political ecology perspective

In the Ellulian spirit, technological development could therefore be in a flux. However, these P2P developments present several challenges that have to be examined from various perspectives.

The DGML model, for example, presents limitations within its two main pillars, information and communication as well as local manufacturing technologies. These issues may pertain to resource extraction, exploitative labour, energy use or material flows. A thorough evaluation of such products and practices would need to take place from a political ecology perspective. For instance, what is the ecological footprint of a product that has been globally designed and locally manufactured? Or, up to which degree the users of such a product feel in control of the technology and knowledge necessary for its use and manipulation?

In 2017-19, one of the main goals of the research collective I am part of is to provide some answers to the questions above and, thus, to better understand the transition dynamics of such an alternative trajectory of technological development.

Cross-posted from Entitle Blog

Photo by lars hammar

The post Are there alternative trajectories of technological development? A political ecology perspective appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In an earlier post (here), I summed up Dardot and Laval’s position on how we should think the common. What I want to do now is focus on the nine key political propositions about how to build the common to which their thought leads them. I have inevitably had to condense their writings and leave out many of their key references but have done my best to convey the spirit of what they propose faithfully.

Proposition 1: it is necessary to construct a politics of the common

Although the politics of the common builds on the tradition of 19^th century socialist associationism and 20^th century workers’ councils, it can no longer simply be thought in an artisanal context or in that of the industrial workplace. Nor will it emerge from some sort of encirclement of capitalism from the outside, nor from some mass desertion. There can be no politics of the common without a rethinking of property rights concerning the land, capital and intellectual ownership. Rights of use rather than rights of property must be the juridical axis for the transformation of society. It is necessary to find the correct form for the common production of society by creating institutions of self-government (whose role will be the production of the common) in all its sectors. It must not be thought, however, that the existence of a common principle will simply abolish the distinction between different socio-economic, public or private, or political spheres. To prevent public deliberation being captured by the interests of any one socio-professional category, the sphere of production and exchange must be completely reorganized around the self-government of the commons. Each commons must also take account of all the ‘externalities’ of its activity so that the its governance includes the users and citizens concerned by the activity. The socio-economic arena thus becomes schooled in co-decision taking.

Proposition 2: we must mobilise rights of use to challenge property rights

Historically, the articulation between the socio-economic and the public has been constituted by the double principle, coming from Roman law, of dominium (exclusive private property) and imperium (the overarching power of the sovereign). The politics of the common must challenge this double absolutism. Traditional ownership rights grant owners completely free use of their property and therefore imply no accountability before others. In contrast, the user of what is in common is tied to the other users by the co-production of the rules that govern the common use.

It might seem that capitalism itself is moving away from traditional models of property attached to physical things as it moves increasingly towards the provision of services, rather than the selling of goods. Instead of buying property, service users increasingly buy access, something that might seem to announce new models of co-use, and a multiplication of types of rights (rights of use, rights to rental revenue, rights to buy and sell different rights). But we are in reality moving to new forms of enclosure that concern time rather than space: the user has to pay as long as (s)he continues to use something. At the same time, corporations retain ownership and control of the networks through which individuals interact. In this situation, the right of co-use is a hollow one entirely dependent on the will of a higher body that is alone empowered to take decisions. To be truly common, use must be decided by collective deliberation. This is very different from the idea that the common is the equivalent of the universal so that a piece of land, say, is available to be used by everybody. For there to be common and not simply shared things, there must be co-activity. Rather than seeking to develop a form of property right that broadens ownership to include everyone, there must be a right of use that can be mobilized against property rights. The care of a common can only be entrusted to those who co-use it and not to states.

Proposition 3: the common is the route to the emancipation of labour

We always work with others. We also work for others. To work is always to engage oneself in shared action with moral, cultural and often aesthetic dimensions. Work is a way of affirming ones belonging to a community or a peer group. If workers are still attached to their labour, it is not simply due to alienation, voluntary servitude or economic constraint. It is also because work remains the activity through which individuals collectively socialize themselves and maintain ties to others. But we should not think that, by assembling workers, capitalism somehow allows for the spontaneous emergence of a truly co-operative workplace. The neo-liberal enterprise practices forced co-operation. The enterprise demands the active mobilization of the workers while reducing them to simple operatives. The long neglected struggle for workplace democracy must therefore be replaced at the heart of our efforts. It is not enough to ‘enrich’ workers’ tasks or to ‘consult’ them from time to time on their workplace conditions. They must take part in the elaboration of the rules and decisions that affect them. In order for the enterprise to become a truly co-operative space, it must become a democratic institution freed from the domination of capital.

Proposition 4: we must institute the common enterprise

The liberation of work from capitalist control will only be possible if the enterprise becomes an institution of a democratic society and ceases to be an islet of management and shareholder autocracy. As Marc Sagnier famously said, ‘we cannot have the republic in society as long as we have monarchy in the enterprise.’ Any workplace democracy is incompatible with capitalism’s control of what it considers to be its exclusive property. Yet state control is not the way forward. This is the obstacle on which socialism has historically stumbled: so-called social or collective property has been reduced to state property unable to practice anything other than a centralized, bureaucratic and inefficient form of management. In this context, the traditional workers’ co-operative offers an interesting alternative model whereby workers choose their managers, vote on the direction taken by their company and subordinate the company’s capital to their decisions rather than the other way round. But, although an important testing ground for alternative models, this has traditionally been a minor alternative caught between capitalist competition on the one hand and state enterprises on the other. In any case, it is not enough to institute the common in the workplace, as an islet of autonomy. It is necessary to think about how we would reintegrate the economy within the social and introduce a plurality of points of view (worker, consumer) within democratic workplace governance. In the process, the notion of the market itself would need to be rethought to re-inscribe the freedom of individual consumer decisions within frameworks decided collectively, especially at a local level, so that the consumer would no longer be played off against the worker as is the case today.

Proposition 5: association within the economic sphere must pave the way for the society of the common

The third sector or non-lucrative economy is sometimes presented as an alternative economy or even an alternative to capitalism. But the third sector varies from country to country both in definitional terms and in practice and typically involves institutions with different logics: it can be associative, on the one hand, providing mutual support among members of a profession or social group; it can be charitable, on the other, building on a religious tradition. It is therefore difficult to present this diverse assemblage as an alternative to capitalism especially given that its activities are exposed to considerable pressure from both capitalist enterprise and state bodies. Far from promoting an alternative economy, the associative sector currently tends to play a low cost sub-contracting role for the welfare state with the number of its poorly protected and low paid workers rising even as state employers have seen their numbers stagnate or fall. Under certain circumstances nonetheless, the social economy can place in question the monopoly of the definition of the general interest by the state and of value by the market. The kind of locally anchored conviviality preached by André Gorz and Ivan Illich, involving new solidarities at the level of the village, the town and neighbourhood, is undoubtedly something whose potential we should not underestimate. On its own, however, it is not sufficient to create a politics of the common.

Proposition 6: the common must establish social democracy

For some people, the objective of a progressive politics should essentially be the rebuilding of the welfare state. We should never forget, however, that the common was perverted by the state and that the latter now seeks above all to reduce the scope of welfare and to adapt it to the constraints of competitiveness. The social (welfare) state negates the common as the co-activity of the members of society. Its social protection and economic redistribution is granted in return for the abandonment of any real economic citizenship within the enterprise and submission to the most pitiless norms of new forms of organization of work. Therefore, any politics of the common should first aim to return the control of the institutions of reciprocity and solidarity to society.

Proposition 7: public services must become institutions of the common

Nineteenth century associative socialism and twentieth century workers’ councils sought to separate the institutional form that socialism should take from the bureaucratic management of the economy by the state. But these movements generally failed to foresee the future scale that public services would take. Because the latter are sites of conflict and struggle, they should be seen neither as ‘state apparatuses’ working for bourgeois domination nor as institutions fully serving society. The question that therefore arises is how to make them into institutions of the common organized around common rights of use and governed democratically. To this end, the state should no longer be seen as a gigantic, centralized administrative system but as the ultimate guarantor of the satisfaction of needs collectively judged to be essential. The administration of services should be entrusted to bodies including representatives of the state, workers and citizen-users. While services should be administered locally, the state, through the constitution or some other fundamental juridical document, should make access to the common a right. A solution of this sort is needed to guard against the danger of state centralism but also to prevent the reactionary exploitation of localism and regionalism.

Proposition 8: it is necessary to institute the global commons

How can we make the common the political principle for the reorganization of the whole of society under conditions which preserve an irreducible plurality of ‘commons’ of very variable shapes and sizes, going from local commons to global ones? How can we ensure a coordination of the commons without undermining the self-government of each common without which there can be no meaningful co-obligation and therefore no true common?

Various types of solution have been proposed. Some have sought a way forward in the affirmation of the rights of humanity as the basis of new world legal order, with the recognition of ‘crimes against humanity,’ or ‘world heritage sites’ pointing towards the progressive emergence of ‘humanity’ as a rights bearing subject. We know, however, that by retaining the monopoly of the use of force, states can paralyse the development of such a system of rights. We also know how neo-liberalism structures the world according to norms of competition, predatory strategies and warlike logics rather than principles of co-operation or social justice. We note too how neo-liberal practices have led to ‘law shopping’ (shopping around for the most advantageous conditions) in the domains of taxation and commercial and employment laws. These practices make law itself an area of capitalist competition and an object of commerce. In questions of health, culture, access to water, and pollution, the logic which is imposed is that of free-exchange and absolute respect of (private) property rights. A whole globalized and globalizing juridical apparatus made by and for capital is working to produce the institutions of ‘cosmocapital.’ We are witnessing an authentic privatization of international law.

Another discourse seeks to use the tools of classic economic science to plead in favour of ‘global public goods.’ At the start of the 1990s, seeming to diverge from the dominant neo-liberal path, and influenced by figures such as Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen, the United Nations widened the definition of development to include criteria such as life expectancy and literacy. It is in this context that the notion of global good governance emerged and was linked to the production of ‘global public goods.’ Economists of the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) have put forward a tripartite categorization of global public goods: (overused) globally indivisible goods (the ozone layer, the climate); (underused) man-made global public goods (scientific knowledge, the internet); goods that result from integrated global policy (peace, health, stability). One problem with the definition of these goods is its negative, residual nature –it applies to those things that the market cannot ‘spontaneously’ produce. Another issue is who or what will ensure their production: a global state? One answer given by the UNPD is that private actors should be incentivized to take responsibility for them, if necessary through market mechanisms and the reinforcement of property rights, as in the case of global trading in CO2 emissions. The effective outcome is to appear to deal with major questions while actually neutralizing any real challenge to the existing global order. While capitalism takes on the progressive colours of corporate social responsibility, it needs in fact to profit from all the ‘externalities’ put at its disposition by governments, benevolent associations and NGOs. Corporations need political stability, urban infrastructures, ‘high performing’ university systems and even charitable support for low paid workers and prisons for criminals in order to enjoy the environment most favourable to them.

It is clear that dominant neo-liberal logics need to ensure that demands for defense of the global public good be channeled towards the economic terrain of reified common goods in order to restrict their grasp. Progressive political struggle, on the other hand, seeks to extend the reach of common goods by attaching them to fundamental rights so that they are not simply goods but also involve access to services and institutions. In a context where neo-liberal states have become active agents of de-democratisation, it is understandable that political progressives such as counter-globalisers should seek to transform what used to be citizen based welfare rights into universal human rights thus welding the universalist reach of the old welfare state to the problematic of the global commons. But apart from being quite artificial, this move is also an attempt to transfer the old western social model to a radically changed context. It is hard to see how existing states, dominated as they are by capitalist logics, will provide support for the global commons or dispense the common good. Citizen rights, on the other hand, are worth struggling over. They form a core component of modern political subjecthood. But for them to be meaningful, citizens must not simply be social citizens, consumers of services who evoke their rights to welfare. They must be politically and civically active citizens who are able to invent institutions that will allow them to be conscious co-producers of the common.

Without some major shift, the future is unlikely to be one of ordered pluralism. It is more likely to be the kind of re-feudalization evoked by Alain Supiot whereby the social function of states shrinks and the repressive function grows, nation-states may fragment into region-states and there is a multiplication of local and supranational powers following a logic of multi-facetted fragmentation. In the face of this, can the old Westphalian system of nation-states still be patched together without us being swept up in the vast reactionary, nationalist and xenophobic movement which everywhere threatens to grow? We should perhaps ask if we have not come to the end of centralist mode of organization of the state and the forms of subjectivation linked to it. We should then ask ourselves what form of political organization would be capable of giving institutional form to the co-production of the global commons.

Proposition 9: It is necessary to institute a federation of commons

The only political principle that respects the autonomy of local governments is the federal principle. A federation is a contract, treaty or convention whereby one or several communes, or groups of communes, enter into a relationship of mutual obligation for one or several ends. Its essential feature is the reciprocal obligation which excludes all subordination of one party to another in a way which contrasts directly with the kind of sovereignty exercised by the state.

Given the existence of different models of federalism, our task is to identify which particular model lends itself to the practice of shared use at all the levels of social life. Here the thought of Proudhon rather than the Marxist tradition offers the best way forward. While Marx focused on the need for the proletariat to conquer state power, Proudhon preached a dual federal model: a federation of units of production, on the one hand, and of communal units, on the other. This model shows how the political democracy of communes could be combined with the industrial democracy of the workplace. In Proudhon’s eyes, the shared principle that could co-ordinate these two types of common was mutuality and the mutual obligation enshrined in laws of contract. Yet, while in line with Proudhon’s project to replace laws with contracts, this extension of mutuality implied the application of an essentially economic concept to the political sphere. A more suitable unifying principle is clearly the common which is a political principle equally suited to the governance of the socio-economic sphere and the public, political sphere. In terms of the co-ordination of these different commons, there would be no pyramidal hierarchy whereby each higher instance would enjoy greater powers than lower ones. In particular, the state, or any supra-state body, would simply be one level amongst other, with no special privileges or prerogatives. The lower levels could interact among themselves, in a horizontal manner, and on the basis of shared activity, without needing to work through the higher levels. Socio-economic commons (of production, of consumption, of seed banks or whatever) would be constituted independently of any territorial logic and in accord only with the necessity to assume responsibility for the activity for which they have been formed. Thus, for example, a river common might traverse several regional or even state boundaries. Political commons, in contrast, would be constituted according to a rising logic connecting together territories of increasing scale up to an including the global level.

What kind of citizenship could correspond to this proposition for a global federation of commons? It could certainly not be some ‘global citizenship’ thought along the lines of the nation-state model. It would have to be plural and decentred. The problem is that, the more citizenship is extended in territorial scope, the more it tends to lose political density, so that it eventually coincides simply with the quality of being human, a sort of empty cosmopolitanism. We need to develop a citizenship that is neither statist nor national without falling back on something simply ‘moral, ‘commercial’, or ‘cultural.’ A non-statist, transnational citizenship can take very diverse forms: dissociated from any relationship of belonging, and from the rights attached to belonging, it must be thought of in relation to practices and shared activity rather than the granting of formal rights.

For a similar set of proposals principally concerned with workplace democracy see here. For an interview on the common with Dardot and Laval see here.

Cross-posted from La France et la Crise.

All images by Marko Milošević

The post Nine Key Political Propositions for Building the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“I have no expectations from technology, but I believe in the beauty,

in the creativity, in the surprising inventiveness of people,

and I continue to hope in them.”

Ivan Illich (Cayley 1992:111)

This creativity and inventiveness are not, as we often believe, products of extraordinary individual minds. Instead, they originate from a culturally shaped cooperation that they also serve. And this collaboration could be described more aptly as “conviviality.”

“Conviviality” is still a foreign word, one that triggers the question, “Well, what does it mean?” At the same time, it risks becoming an all-purpose word that can be fitted into globalized “Uniquac” (Illich) without further ado, a word that technocrats invented to justify their misdeeds, and that alternative-minded people happily imitate – and which both groups confuse with proper language. It is tempting to protect this beautiful world by not using it – yet that would obviously be futile.

“Con-vivial” has two parts. The prefix “con,” derived from the Latin cum, means “together with,” and “vivial” is easy to recognize as coming from the Latin verb “vivere” = “to live.”

Conviva is a fellow diner; convivium is a party of invited guests, a feast, a circle gathered around a table; convivere means “living together, dining together,” and in English, the adjective means “sociable, joyful,” certainly also in the sense of “slightly tipsy.” The kind of gathering called conviviality apparently requires a table around which people can gather, a pitcher of wine to be emptied and bread to be broken together in order to have a good conversation. Of course, the table can also be an empty circle around which people are seated on the floor. Ivan Illich mentions another utensil: a burning candle. After all: “In other words, our conversation should always go on with the certainty that there is someone else who will knock at the door, and the candle stands for him or her. It is a constant reminder that the community is never closed.” (Illich 2005:105-151) But is “conviviality” in this sense inviting? Or does it rather tend to be a threshold that people can trip over?

The difficulties that this word poses, besides its meaning, lie less in that fact that even people proficient in using foreign vocabulary are not familiar with it, but more in the fact that in our habits of speaking and hearing, we have become entirely deaf to the good sound of the little word cum, just as we have become unreceptive to its meaning because of the circumstances and the practices of our lives. Com/Cum is a very widespread prefix that appears in German as “kom” or “kon.” Yet most of the composite words formed with it have turned its former meaning on its head. The preposition cum, which used to denote cooperation on equal footing – as though it sought to capture the meaning of “commoning” in just three letters – is increasingly serving to describe a sharp, relentless conflict in the struggle for advantages, power, or influence. “Com-petition” no longer describes common striving, but the effort to outdo one another; competitors vie for scarce resources. “Con-sensus” is no longer a spirit generated jointly, but prescribed equality. “Con-sumption” no longer means using something jointly and thoroughly; instead, people consume things to become the object of other people’s envy. “Con-formity” does not mean taking on a form through a common effort, in other words, educating oneself together and through one another, but rather being put in shape to be utilized arbitrarily.

I selected these four distortions of the meaning of words with care. They represent the destructive force of the great monopolies that have set out to rule the world as an alliance: The economy holds the world monopoly on distribution and fuels competition for scarce resources; science has claimed the world monopoly on explanation and demands consensus about its authority to interpret; technology asserts the monopoly on designing the world and is grooming the world for consumability. And bureaucracy claims the world monopoly on regulation and does not rest until everything is brought into line in procedural conformity. “Thou shalt agree with me and trust my evidence,” says natural science. “Thou shalt desire to prevail over your neighbor,” says economy. “Thou shalt have machines work in your place, have them serve you and care for you,” says technology. “Above all, thou shalt not disturb things,” says bureaucracy.

But: “Places devoid of power can always be found. The institutional clutches on life exist partly in appearance only,” wrote Peter Brückner about the possibility of finding such a place, even under the conditions of the Nazi period (Brückner, 1982:16). It would take nerve to ignore the omnipotence of the system. What mattered would be to perceive its enormous power without recognizing it. But where might such places devoid of power be found?

Perhaps they are no longer to be found today, but first need to be established. A place devoid of power is a place for deserters. The deserter is the “no-longer-participant” par excellence; he disobeys orders, he deprives the authorities of his collaboration by going absent on the quiet, but above all, without leave. “Places devoid of power” emerge by people filling them through their presence, people practicing conviviality.

The word “convivial” is still able to resist being disfigured by consumerism and being incorporated into jargon. “Convivial” – as is “commoning” – is still a stumbling block in our path, helping us to remain vigilant in the face of smokescreens muddling both our senses and the meanings of words by devastating the most valuable good from which fruitful cooperation can emerge: our language. And there cannot be enough stumbling blocks in an increasingly bulldozed world in which all thresholds, borders, and obstacles have been made to disappear so that everything runs like clockwork, while at the same time, walls, fences, and insurmountable barricades are erected to keep everything and everyone foreign off our backs.

Conviviality needs a language that is both objectionable and triggers ideas, a language without which there is no understanding but only “consensus” achieved by manipulation, research that speaks a personal language full of experience; practice that does not compete, but cooperates and shares; and technology that helps to make the best out of the power and the imagination that everyone has (Ivan Illich). “Conviviality” aims to be:

– nonviolent, but not tame;

– appealing to the senses, but not inimical to thought;

– power-less, but not without strength;

– regulated, but not bureaucratic;

– modest, but not lacking in aspirations;

– cognizant/in the present, but not trendy;

– self-determined, but not overly self-assured;

– determined by others, but not patronized;

– unpretentious, but not simple;

– in love with success, but not with victory;

– oriented toward complementarity of differences, not toward marginalization of the other.

Commons are either convivial or only a variant of globalized (and institutionalized) sameness.

References

Brückner, P. 1982. Das Abseits als sicherer Ort, Berlin. [no English translation published, according to Library of Congress and British Library catalogs]

Cayley, D., Editor. 1992. Ivan Illich in Conversation, Ontario.

Illich, I. 2005. In the Rivers North of the Future. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.

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 website for more resources.

The post Patterns of Commoning: Conviviality appeared first on P2P Foundation.

People in tech circles often talk about the “attention economy” with knowing nonchalance.  Instead of things being scarce, they note, the real shortage these days is people’s attention.  Hence the ferocious drive to capture people’s attention.

This analysis is true as far as it goes.  What it fails to address is that the “attention economy” is not really an “economy.”  It is a predatory invasion of our consciousness. Sellers are using every possible technique to colonize our minds and emotions at the most elemental levels in a relentless attempt to prod us to buy, buy, buy.

Author Matthew B. Crawford made an eloquent case for the “attentional commons” in an opinion piece, “The Cost of Paying Attention,” in Sunday’s New York Times (March 8).  “What if we saw attention in the same way that we saw air or water, as a valuable resource that we hold in common?” he asks.  “Perhaps, if we could envision an ‘attentional commons,’ then we could figure out how to protect it.”

Crawford recounts a series of all-to-familiar intrusions upon our attention:  ads on the little screen used to swipe credit cards at the grocery store…. ads for lipstick on the trays at airport security screening lines…. “endlessly recurring message from the Lincoln Financial Group” along the moving handrail on an airport escalator….the ubiquitous chatter of CNN and TV ads in the airport lounge.

“The fields of vision that haven’t been claimed for commerce are getting fewer and narrower,” Crawford writes.  He concedes that you can put on headphones or play with your smartphone – but the point is that neither of these strategies prevent a shared social space from being destroyed. Without such spaces, we are deprived of the opportunity to develop certain types of attitudes and relationships.  Our inner imagination and ability to reflect atrophy.  Such subtle, inner virtues that pale in the face of cold, hard cash!

Crawford writes:

“An airport lounge once felt rich with possibilities for spontaneous encounters. Even if we did not converse, our attention was free to alight upon one another and linger, or not.  We encountered another person, even if in silence.  Such encounters are always ambiguous, and their need for interpretation gives rise to a train of imaginings, often erotic.  This is what makes cities exciting.”

The most insightful part of Crawford’s essay is about the structurally unequality that gives some people access to silence while depriving others of that blessing.  Silence is now a luxury good available only to those who can afford it.  At the airport, wealthier people can retreat to the gracious silence of business lounges.  The rest of us in the “peon section” are subjected to an endless barrage of raucous commercial noise and visual clutter.

Crawford astutely notes:

“Other people’s minds, over in the peon section, can be treated a resource – a standing reserve of purchasing power to be steered according to the innovative marketing schemes hatched by those enjoying silence in the business lounge.  When some people treat the minds of others as a resource, this is not ‘creating ‘wealth – it is a transfer.”

Of course, the real problem is how to reassert our claims to the attentional commons and make that different ethic stick.  Crawford doesn’t have much to say about practical solutions, alas.  Perhaps because there ARE no easy solutions.

I once bought a remote control culture-jamming device that was able to turn off blaring TVs in public spaces.  A crude bit of electronic subterfuge and self-protection.  I never tried it on the invasive CNN noise in airport lounges, however.  I’m sure it would not have worked.

What’s really needed is a courageous voice for humanity in the board rooms and executive suites, one that is willing to stand up for our rich interior selves and reject the objectification of humanity into demographic units to be harvested for sales to advertisers.  But I have no illusions that high-minded moral suasion is going to carry the day.  Serious business people are not likely forgo the significant revenues that can be had from enclosing silence and mass attention.  Some other leverage points for change must be found — such as our civil protests and socially disruptive interventions.

Crawford’s essay reminds me of two great works on this subject, one quite short, the other a book.  The short piece is Ivan Illich’s classic essay, “Silence is a Commons,” which talks about how the arrival of electric-power loudspeakers on the Dalmatian coast where he was raised, and how they dispossessed people without speakers and enclosed the silence that was once the common wealth.

A book that bears further study, from Crawford and the rest of us, is Malcolm McCullough’s book, Ambient Commons:  Attention in the Age of Embodied Information (MIT Press, 2013), which takes this whole line of analysis to a much richer place — the ways in which the design of urban spaces and buildings can create ambient commons or, alternatively, private enclosures of the mind. The subtle structural nature of these enclosures is precisely what makes them so worthy of our attention.

The post Fierce Assaults on the “Attentional Commons” appeared first on P2P Foundation.