Part I: Data Collection

New technology isn’t disrupting power – it’s reinforcing it

Republished from New Economics Foundation

Duncan McCann: A new economy is emerging. And this new economy is powered by a new type of fuel: data. As the data economy becomes increasingly prominent, there are troubling signs that it is worsening existing power imbalances, and creating new problems of domination and lack of accountability. But it would be wrong simply to draw dystopian visions from our current situation. Technological change does not determine social change, and there is a whole range of potential futures – both emancipatory and discriminatory – open to us. We must decide for ourselves which one we want.

This is the first of four papers exploring power and accountability in the data economy. These will set the stage for future interventions to ensure power becomes more evenly distributed.This paper explores the impact of the mass collection of data, while future papers will examine: the impact of algorithms as they process the data; the companies built on data, that mediate our interface with the digital world; and the labour market dynamics that they are disrupting.

Our research so far has identified a range of overarching themes around how power and accountability is changing as a result of the rise of the digital economy. These can be summarised into four arguments:

• Although the broader digital economy has both concentrated and dispersed power, data has had very much a concentrating force.
• A mutually reinforcing government-corporation surveillance architecture – or data panopticon – is being built, that seeks to capture every data trail that we create.
• We are over-collecting and under-protecting data.
• The data economy is changing our approach to accountability from one based on direct causation to one based on correlation, with profound moral and political consequences.

This four-part series explores these areas by reviewing the existing literature and conducting interviews with respected experts from around the world.

The Facebook/​Cambridge Analytica scandal has made data gathering a front-page story in recent months. We have identified four key issues related to data gathering:

• GDPR will not save us: Although GDPR will be an improvement for data privacy, it should not be considered a panacea. Some companies, especially global ones, will structure their business to dodge the regulations.
• Privacy could become the preserve of the rich: The corporate data gathering industry may evolve to create a system where only the rich are able to afford the necessary tools and labour time to effectively maintain their privacy.
• Privacy is an increasingly unmanageable burden: responsibility for managing data falls far too heavily on the individual rather than those who want to use individuals’ data.
• Are we becoming a conformist society? Ubiquitous data collection, coupled with data never being deleted means we could be entering an era of self-censorship and ​‘social cooling’.

The Rise of the Data Oligarchs: Power and Accountability in the Digital Economy Part 1: Data Collectionn shared by P2P Foundation on Scribd

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Photo by moleitau

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Furtherfield Gallery
Saturday 14 Jul until Sunday 19 Aug 2018

Open Sat – Sun, 11:00 – 17:00 or by appointment – Admission Free

Would you like to monetise your social relations? Learn from hostile designs? Take part in (unwitting) data extractions in exchange for public services?

Examining the way that the boundaries between ‘play’ and ‘labour’ have become increasingly blurred, this summer, Playbour: Work, Pleasure, Survival, will transform Furtherfield Gallery into an immersive environment comprising a series of games. Offering glimpses into the gamification of all forms of life, visitors are asked to test the operations of the real-world, and, in the process, experience how forms of play and labour feed mechanisms of work, pleasure, and survival.

What it means to be a worker is expanding and, over the last decade, widening strategies of surveillance and new sites of spectatorship online have forced another evolution in what can be called ‘leisure spaces’. From the self-made celebrity of the Instafamous to the live-streaming of online gamers, many of us shop, share and produce online, 24/7. In certain sectors, the seeming convergence of play and labour means work is sold as an extension of our personalities and, as work continues to evolve and adapt to online cultures, where labour occurs, what is viewed as a product, and even, our sense of self, begins to change.

Debt: Bad Spelling, an Adult Problem, Cassie Thornton

Today, workers are asked to expand their own skills and build self-made networks to develop new avenues of work, pleasure and survival. As they do, emerging forms of industry combine the techniques and tools of game theory, psychology and data science to bring marketing, economics and interaction design to bear on the most personal of our technologies – our smartphones and our social media networks. Profiling personalities through social media use, using metrics to quantify behaviour and conditioning actions to provide rewards, have become new norms online. As a result, much of public life can be seen as part of a process of ‘capturing play in pursuit of work’.

Although these realities affect many, very little time is currently given over to thinking about the many questions that arise from the blurring between work and play in an age of increasingly data-driven technologies: How are forms of ‘playbour’ impacting our health and well-being? What forms of resistance could and should communities do in response?

To gain a deeper understanding of the answers to these questions, we worked with artists, designers, activists, sociologists and researchers in a three-day co-creation research lab in May 2018. The group engaged in artist-led experiments and playful scenarios, conducting research with fellow participants acting as ‘workers’ to generate new  areas of knowledge. This exhibition in Furtherfield Gallery is the result of this collective labour and each game simulates an experience of how techniques of gamification, automation and surveillance are applied to the everyday in the (not yet complete) capture of all forms of existence into wider systems of work.

In addition to a performance by  Steven Ounanian during the Private View, the ‘games’ that comprise this exhibition are:

• Public Toilet by Arjun Harrison-Mann & Benjamin Redgrove, which asks visitors whether the Furtherfield building should be a gallery or a toilet… and also who has the right to make this type of decision.
• Treebour by Marija Bozinovska Jones (with special thanks to Robert Gallagher) is a sound work in which three anthropomorphised ‘trees’ personify the different kinds of work trees are required to do in contemporary society.
• Feminist Economics Yoga (FEY) by Cassie Thornton, The Feminist Economics Department (FED), invites us to think about how our screen addictions connect us to the predatory workings of the economy at large.
• Hostile Environment Facility Training (HEFT) by Michael Straeubig enables visitors to create their own ‘hostile environment’, a design approach used by governments in a variety of settings – schools, banks, universities, hospitals, places of work – to make staying in this country as difficult as possible for migrants.

Lab session leads and participants: Dani Admiss, Kevin Biderman, Marija Bozinovska Jones, Ruth Catlow, Maria Dada, Robert Gallager, Beryl Graham, Miranda Hall, Arjun Harrison Mann, Maz Hemming, Sanela Jahic, Annelise Keestra, Steven Levon Ounanian, Manu Luksch, Itai Palti, Andrej Primozic, Michael Straeubig, Cassie Thornton, Cecilia Wee, Jamie Woodcock.

Curated by Dani Admiss.

For more information visit the Furtherfield site

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Join us for this intensive two-week study programme with Schumacher College and Synergia Institute. This course offers participants a practical guide on how we can shift our economy to put people and planet first This programme brings together international scholars and experts who will explore all key areas of society; food, democracy, housing, social care, the commons and social finance. This course is useful for people involved in developing social enterprises and co-operative organisations, students, activists and academics.

An intensive two-week study programme with Schumacher College and the Synergia Institute

What is the ethical economy and how does it work?

• Comprehensive exploration of economic democracy and sustainability as viable bases for system change at local, regional and international scales.
• Unique combination of history, theory, and practice.
• Strong focus on personal & professional experience & participation as key elements of the course.

The Synergia Programme will include

The Problematic with John Restakis
How might we frame the historic moment in which we find ourselves from a political economy perspective? This session presents both a historic retrospective on the movement for economic democracy and how the current configuration of global capitalism demands new perspectives, models, and action strategies for change makers world-wide.

The Partner State with John Restakis
The current crisis of the welfare state is the culmination of a process of de legitimation that has been in the making for more than a generation. For many, the very notion of the state as a force for the good is untenable. But is there a way to reclaim and re conceptualize the state as an institution in service to the common good? This session introduces the concept of the Partner State as an extension of the principles that characterize co-operative economic democracy as a political, economic, and social ideal.

Labour and the Precariat with Cilla Ross
With the emergence of revolutionary digital and informatics technologies, traditional forms of labour are rapidly being replaced with the rise of a new class of precarious and atomised work that threatens not only the livelihoods millions but also the very meaning of work itself. This session examines the implications of this revolutionary shift in the forms of labour, what this entails for the well-being of workers, local communities, and society, and how co-operative and human-centred models of work can challenge the dominant paradigm.

The Commons with Michel Bauwens
Over the last decade, the idea of the commons has emerged as a powerful antidote to the prevailing private property and free market notion of how economies, markets, and social relations might be organized. In particular, the rise of digital platforms and the restructuring of online work through the operation of peer-to-peer networks has offered a revolutionary re think of how co-operative and commons-based principles are redefining both economic and societal relations in service to the common good. This session examines what the idea of the commons means for re visioning models of political economy as alternatives to the status quo.

For more information and registration, visit the Shumacher College site

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Originally posted on provocations.darkmatterlabs.org

We face a paradigm shift in the role of humans in our economy — The rise of the real C-Economy.

Indy Johar: Most of our human economy has since the industrial & managerial revolution functioned to fullfill and comply with roles & processes for predefined value and imagination.

The industrial economy made humans “labour”, designed, focused and instrumentalised in the fullfillment of corporate value creation and the imagination of the few.

This industrial human economy is coming to an end; we have begun a transformation which is massively signalled by a confluence of drivers and trends, from the rise of innovation labs & start up culture – all seeking to grow the innovation pie of cities, to the arrival of platform corporates, driving the disintermediation of middle management, to the growing capability of AI, automation and algorithms to manifest the reality of post managerial city. In fact it could be argued – our current paranoia of Brexit and Trump – extends from a deep worry for the growing redundancy of human value & labour and our perceived future as an overhead and liability to the capital class.

The above list could go on, but what is becoming apparent is process driven, codifiable labour – “jobs for bad robots” will be automated and commodified – it is only a matter of time and its also time to say good riddance. We need to liberate Humans from having to be “bad robots” as the industrial revolution liberated us from being bad domestic animals.

But the emancipation of Humans from labour – does not mean a redundancy of Humans, in fact its means the freedom of Humans from labour to discover what it means to be human in the 21st Century.

This is a future which needs us to embrace the awesome capacity of humans – for discovery, for expeditions into the unknown, to mine the future, to care, create, dream.

This is a future which needs us to invest and create the conditions to unlock the full potential and capacity for all citizens to care, create and discover.

This is a future not designed to instrumentalise and passively enslave humans and drive compliance – through debt and wage incentives but to use “Universal Basic Income” to unleash and liberate purpose, care, collaboration and the capacity to dream and disrupt the future.

This is a future which requires us to reimagine “Management” from being a means of control to a means to emancipate, nurture grow care and capacity.

This is a future in which the conditions for unleashing the full capacity of all humans must be the new 21st century public utility – where spatial justice is foundational to unleashing our democratic humanity.

This is a future we requires us to start by embracing the relatively infinite possibility of humans – as opposed to our limited capacity to make roles and manage process.

This is a future which is not about supply demand matching labour markets but about making the fertile conditions to grow the dreamers, disrupters and discovers of the future.

This is a future in which humans are not an overhead on the balance sheet but its foundational fragile asset.

This is a future where the human(e) corporate will be defined by its capacity to drive the 4C revolution — collaboration, care, creativity, contextual intelligence powered by democratized agency – not its aggregative efficiency to manage financial capital and procure in scale; these efficiencies are likely to distributed and platformed to the whole economy – with rise of zero overhead platform bureaucracy.

This is a future in which investing for the human development of an organisation manifests on its asset register.

This is a future which embraces a tomorrow, where humans are the source of economy not redundant to its function.

This is a future Beyond Labour, embracing the coming Human(e) Revolution.

Dark Matter Laboratories is a Strategic Design Studio at Project00.cc working at the interface of Disruptive Technology, Human Development & System Change with world leading organisations to transform and embrace the future.

Photo by 96dpi

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Andrea Fumagalli on the Five Criteria To Distinguish a Progressive Interpretation of the Basic Income

Basic Income presents different and contradictory definitions. That is why the terms can mislead. On my opinion, we can speak of Basic income only when the following five criteria are verified:

1. Individuality criterion: the basic income must be paid at the individual level and not familiar. It can then discuss if children under 18 years will have the right or not.

2. Criterion of residence: the basic income must be paid to all / the people who, residing in a given territory, live, rejoice, suffer and participate in the production and social cooperation regardless of their marital status, gender, ethnicity, religious belief, etc.

3. Criterion of unconditionality: basic income must be provided by minimizing any form of compensation and / obligation as a free individual choice as possible.

4. Access criteria: the basic income is paid in its initial phase of experimentation to all / the people who have an income below a certain threshold. This threshold may, however, be greater than the relative poverty line and converge toward the median level of the personal distribution of existing income. Moreover, this level of income must be expressed in relative terms, not absolute, so that increasing the minimum threshold (as a result of the initial introduction of the measure) the range of beneficiaries will increase continuously until to rise to graded levels of universality.

5. Criteria for funding and transparency: the modalities of financing of basic income must always be set out on the basis of economic viability studies, detailing where resources are obtained based on an estimate of its cost necessary. These resources have to fall on general taxation and not on other assets of origin (such as, for example, social security contributions, sale of public assets, privatization proceeds, etc.). Basic income is complementary to welfare systems and never substitutive. On my opinion, basic income should be a conflict tool not a compatibility tool with respect to the existing contemporary neo-liberalist capitalism. That is why, the criteria of total unconditionality and an enough level (> relative poverty line as minimum) just to say “NO” to halting conditions of work and exploitation without blackmail, are more important than an immediate universality (may be, providing a insignificant amount of money).

Link to original discussion on Facebook

Photo by Thomas Hawk

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Photo by Christopher Lane Photography

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By Thomas M. Hanna, Joe Guinan and Joe Bilsborough: There is no telling when the next UK general election will come, and when the Corbyn Project could accede to national political power in what R.H. Tawney once called ‘the oldest and toughest plutocracy in the world’. But there is still plenty of work to be done in the meantime. While there were some advances in last month’s local elections, the mixed results underscore the difficulty of mobilisation around a stale and sterile managerialist model of local government, as embodied in all too many Labour councils.

Austerity at the national level may have been eased, at least rhetorically, but a fiscal crisis of the local state still rages. Since 2010, government funding to local authority budgets has been slashed by 49.1 per cent, with more pain still to come; by 2020, cuts in central government funding are forecast to reach 56.3 per cent. Although plans for all councils to receive 100 per cent rates retention by 2019/2020 have been placed on ice, cuts premised on this change continue unabated. Almost half of all councils are set to lose all central government funding by 2019/2020, with a yawning £5.8bn funding gap opening up by the end of the decade. Even with the best will in the world—clearly lacking in places like Haringey, where until recently a ghoulish Blairite zombie local government politics still walked at night—this has not been a promising context in which to build political support for and project out a Corbyn-inflected ‘new economics’.

But difficulty need not be impossibility—as can be seen in the path taken by the flagship Labour council of Preston in Lancashire. In a few short years Preston has gone from being one of the most deprived parts of the country to a model of radical innovation in local government through its embrace of community wealth building as a modern reinvention of the longstanding political tradition of municipal socialism. Community wealth building is a local economic development strategy focused on building collaborative, inclusive, sustainable, and democratically controlled local economies. Instead of traditional economic development through public-private partnerships and private finance initiatives, which waste billions to subsidize the extraction of profits by footloose corporations with no loyalty to local communities, community wealth building supports democratic collective ownership of—and participation in—the economy through a range of institutional forms and initiatives. These include worker co-operatives, community land trusts, community development finance institutions, so-called ‘anchor’ procurement strategies, municipal and local public enterprise, participatory planning and budgeting, and—increasingly, it is to be hoped—public banking. Community wealth building is economic system change, but starting at the local level.

The term first emerged in the United States in 2005, and was coined by our colleagues at The Democracy Collaborative. It was used to describe the model then beginning to emerge in the severely disinvested inner-city neighbourhoods of some of America’s larger cities as a response to crisis and austerity. As federal and state fiscal transfers dried up, social pain intensified in communities that had long been suffering from high levels of unemployment and poverty. Precisely because large public expenditures for jobs and housing were seen to be no longer politically achievable, more and more people started turning to economic alternatives in which new wealth could be built collectively and from the bottom up.

There are now two flagship models of community wealth building—and a growing number of additional efforts in cities across the United States and United Kingdom.  The first model is the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio—created, in part, by our own organisation, The Democracy Collaborative. Cleveland had lost almost half of its population and most of its large publicly-traded companies due to deindustrialisation, disinvestment, and capital flight. But it still had very large non-profit and quasi-public institutions such as the Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University, and University Hospitals—known as anchor institutions because they are rooted in place and aren’t likely to up and leave. Together, Cleveland’s anchors were spending around $3 billion per year, very little of which was previously staying in the local community. The Democracy Collaborative worked with them to localise a portion of their procurement in support of a network of purposely-created green worker co-ops, the Evergreen Co-operatives, tied together in a community corporation so that they too are rooted in place. Today these companies are profitable and are beginning to eat the lunch of the multinational corporations that had previously provided contract services to the big anchors. Last month came the announcement of an expansion of the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry to a new site serving the needs of the Cleveland Clinic, with a hundred new employees on fast track to worker ownership.

The ‘Cleveland Model’ is one of the sources of inspiration for Preston, now the pre-eminent example of community wealth building approaches in the UK. Back in 2012, Evergreen caught the attention of Labour councillor Matthew Brown, now a colleague at The Democracy Collaborative. With the help of others, such as Neil McInroy at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES), Brown took the Cleveland Model and radically expanded it. The ‘Preston Model’ now encompasses a string of public sector anchors across Preston and Lancashire, to which has been added public pension fund investment, affordable housing, and—hopefully, in the near future—an energy company and a community bank.

A longstanding tradition

Both the Cleveland and Preston Models represent a reinvention of a longstanding political tradition that played a significant role in the development of mass socialist politics in Europe and North America—and could now do so again, just when such a politics is most needed. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, activists on both sides of the Atlantic began to articulate a sophisticated political-economic theory of change. They suggested that by advancing a radical yet popular economic strategy of democratised ownership, good governance, and better working conditions at the local level, they could begin to build political power from the ground up. “Little by little the conditions of the people are to be improved”, Carl Thompson, a Wisconsin State Legislator and one of the United States’ leading municipal socialists, argued in 1907. “[T]hus, in every way, society will be gradually prepared for and led into the experience of Social-Democracy” (Thompson, 1908, 28). Similarly, in Britain in 1919, the Russian émigré and radical journalist Theo Rothstein asserted that local councils should be transformed “into so many forts from which to assail the Capitalist order” (Rothstein, 1919).

Municipal socialists believed that by pursuing policies and conducting campaigns around economic issues that directly affected the community, they could build durable political coalitions, raise the aspirations and political awareness of ordinary working people, and develop the political and administrative skills for further social and economic transformation (Judd, 1989; Stave, 1975). This coupling of consciousness-raising with the marked material enrichment of everyday life could then be deployed to the furtherance of socialism more broadly—in local, state, and national elections.

Image: The Democracy Collaborative, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In the UK, interest in the economic and political possibilities of municipal socialism came and went with the rising and ebbing of the tides of economic reform and mass politics. At the beginning of the twentieth century it was led by early Fabian thinkers, with six Fabians—among them Sidney Webb—being elected to the London County Council in the 1892 elections. Of the first hundred Fabian tracts, written between 1884 and 1900, some forty-three discussed issues of local government (Chandler, 2007, 130-131). In What About The Rates?, Webb’s 1913 treatise on the financial autonomy of the municipalities, he protested vociferously against a political strategy which sought to marginalise the municipal: “Let us leave such proposals to the enemy … We, as Socialists, much cherish local government, and aim always at its expansion, not its contraction” (Webb, 1913, 9-10).

Municipal socialism was thus conceptualised as a consciously-evolving process, simultaneously shifting ownership—and with it power—whilst raising local living standards. Economic and political successes were consciously built upon to expand the strategy both horizontally (to other municipalities and industries) and vertically (to larger enterprises and services, and higher levels of governance). F. Lawson Dodd demonstrated the unfolding logic of this approach in a 1905 tract, arguing that the merits of water municipalisation warranted a further municipalisation of the milk supply on the bases of both power and public health: “The establishment of municipal milk depots supplied from municipal farms is the first step towards the social organisation of the dairy industry … The community would take over the whole of the supply”, he argued (Lawson Dodd, 1905, 17). The full extent of the impressive economic footprint achieved by municipal ownership in late-nineteenth-century Britain is nicely captured in the account given by Webb in his 1890 book Socialism in England:

“The ‘practical man,’ oblivious or contemptuous of any theory of the Social Organism or general principles of social organisation, has been forced by the necessities of the time into an ever deepening collectivist channel. Socialism, of course, he still rejects and despises. The Individualist Town Councillor will walk along the municipal pavement, lit by municipal gas and cleansed by municipal brooms with the municipal water, and seeing by the municipal clock in the municipal market, that he is too early to meet his children coming from the municipal school hard by the county lunatic asylum and municipal hospital, will use the national telegraph system to tell them not to walk through the municipal park but to come to the municipal tramway, to meet him in the municipal reading room, by the municipal art gallery, museum and library, where he intends … to prepare his next speech in the municipal town hall, in favour of the nationalisation of the canals and the increase of government control over the railway system. ‘Socialism, sir,’ he will say, ‘don’t waste the time of a practical man by your fantastic absurdities. Self-help, sir, individual self-help, that’s what’s made our city what it is’” (Webb, 1890, 65)

Tensions soon arose, however, between local and national aspirations. With the rise of Labour as an electorally successful national party committed to a top-down reorganisation of the British economy, municipal socialism began to wither. This was partly the party’s own doing, with one of the deleterious consequences of the centralising tendencies of Attlee’s post-1945 nationalisation programme being the abandonment and erasure of the rich tapestry of local traditions of municipal ownership, mutualism, and co-operation. The boards of the newly nationalised (and centralised) public companies were comprised of a curious assemblage of the contemporary elite, which often meant that the extensive tacit knowledge of the workers and successful economic practices of municipal enterprises were marginalised, ignored, or lost altogether. Knights, Lords, and generals were well represented on these boards (Jenkins, 1959, 16), but—to take but one example—not a single member of the fourteen appointees to the board of the first Gas Council had been connected with any of the numerous previous municipally owned public gasworks (Kelf-Cohen, 1973, 59).

Only with the sunset of the top-down Keynesian economic management of the postwar Golden Age did municipal socialism begin to re-emerge as a political force. In the dark days of Thatcherism, radical local experiments re-appeared in the shape of the Greater London Council (GLC) and other metropolitan councils. As Stuart Hall wrote, the GLC “operated right across the spectrum, politicising sites of daily life and drawing them into the orbit of politics in ways unthinkable to most conventional Labour councils” (Hall, 1988, 237). Thatcher, perhaps more than anyone, immediately saw the political danger inherent in any significant revival of municipal socialism—especially one with a strong participatory, democratic character. “The GLC represents modern socialism”, the arch-Thatcherite Norman Tebbit stated, concluding that ‘we must kill it’ (Wainwright, 2003, 8).

Many of Thatcher’s own colleagues were made somewhat uneasy by “her deep-seated and almost obsessive objections to urban socialists” (Kösecik and Kapucu, 2003, 87), whilst the municipal socialist and Labour MP for Manchester Central, Bob Litherland, wondered aloud in Parliament as to whether it might be deemed “unfair that the metropolitan counties have to suffer because a Prime Minister takes a paranoic view of Ken Livingstone and thinks that he is immortal” (HC Deb 11 April 1984). George Tremlett, a Conservative councillor on the GLC and outspoken critic of Thatcher’s abolition agenda, was dropped from the Conservative Group altogether after arguing that “the proposals were so outrageous and so contrary to all the Conservative traditions of government that they must call into question Mrs. Thatcher’s capacity to form a balanced judgement on important issues of public policy”, and eventually encouraging Conservatives to vote Labour in the 1984 by-elections (Kösecik and Kapucu, 2003, 77).

Despite this opposition, Thatcher persisted in her determination to abolish the GLC, which was accomplished with the Local Government Act of 1985, wherby these resurgent experiments in municipal socialism were legislated out of existence. With Thatcher’s defenestration of local government, municipal socialism once again faded from the picture politically in Britain. Recent plans to devolve power to local government have been a mixture of unintelligibility and—especially since 2010—cynical exercises in political buck-passing, particularly attempts to shift the blame for implementing austerity. As a consequence, the public has quite rightly reacted negatively to such efforts, as well as other associated attempts to address the overwhelming centralisation of Britain’s political economy and governance. Referenda on regional assemblies in England advanced by Tony Blair were soundly rejected—by as much as 78 per cent in the vote on devolution to North East England in 2004—while George Osborne’s lopsided localism agenda has been plunged into legislative formaldehyde with the arrival of Theresa May in Downing Street.

Municipal socialism revisited

In the modern era of 24-7 news cycles and horserace political coverage, local politics rarely receives much attention. When local campaigns and politics are covered at all, it is usually because such elections are deemed to be a bellwether for the relative national political strength of the parties. This downgrading of local politics also extends to political analysts and activists, and often even to the political parties themselves, as can be seen in their reluctance to invest precious resources in local campaigns.

There are promising signs, however, that this is now beginning to change. With the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, municipal socialism has once again returned to the Labour Party’s agenda in a powerful way. “With amazing creativity in the toughest of times, we are seeing the first shoots of the renaissance of local government for the many, not the few—the rebirth of municipal socialism”, Corbyn proclaimed in February of this year.

As indicated above, one of the leading models of re-emerging, modern-day municipal socialism in the UK is to be found in Preston. In 2011, the city—which had been declining economically since the 1970s—was reeling from a bitter double blow. Central government funding was plummeting under the austerity regime of Cameron’s coalition government and long held revitalization plans based on a £700 million shopping centre had collapsed. The newly-elected Labour council realized that they needed to come up with a new strategy. It was then that Councillor Matthew Brown, Cabinet Member for Social Justice, Inclusion, and Policy, stepped forward with his ideas. Inspired by alternative forms of economic development around the world, including the Mondragón cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain and the Evergreen Co-operatives in Cleveland, Ohio, Brown and his fellow councillors began to develop plans to deploy Preston’s existing assets and financial clout to catalyse a new local economic model that builds wealth rather than extracts it from the community. Working with the Manchester-based CLES, Preston Council approached the large anchor institutions in the area and came up with a strategy to shift as much of their spending and procurement back into the local economy as possible. In 2013, six of the local institutions that signed up for the effort spent around £38m in Preston and £292m in Lancashire as a whole. By 2017 this had skyrocketed to £111m and £486m respectively. The new localized contracts cover everything from school lunches to large-scale construction projects. Moreover, contracts shifted locally have a multiplier effect, as pounds circulate and recirculate throughout the local economy, creating jobs which in turn lead to more spending on goods and services, which then leads to the creation of more jobs, and so on.

The Preston Model, however, is about much more than just developing the local economy through shifts in spending and procurement. It is about alternative forms of ownership that not only enrich the lives and livelihoods of residents and workers, but also give them the opportunity to actively participate in the economic decisions that affect their lives and the future of their city. Even before working with the anchor institutions, Preston Council backed plans to develop co-operatives (and link them to the procurement needs of the anchors) and a public financial institution (see Chakrabortty, 2018; Sheffield, 2017; Singer, 2016).

Preston has been lauded by the Labour leadership and by sections of the media as an example of what could be achieved—albeit on a far greater scale—nationally under a Corbyn-led government. “This kind of radicalism”, argued John McDonnell in a 2016 speech at the Preston-based, worker-owned transport company TAS, “is exactly what we need across the whole country”.

Star Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty kicked off his excellent new series exploring real-world economic alternatives with an in-depth study of the Preston Model, following on the heels of a broadly sympathetic write-up in The Economist, which dubbed Preston ‘Corbyn’s model town’. In a speech to the Co-operative Party, Corbyn himself praised the “inspiring innovation” of developments in Preston, particularly when set against the wider backdrop of swinging cuts to local government funding.

Preston also demonstrates the renewed potential of modern municipal socialism as a political strategy. As was the case a century ago, advancing a radical and innovative program of local economic regeneration can quickly lead to tangible political benefits. In the May 2018 local council elections, the Preston Labour Party pledged (among other things) to increase investment and jobs based on the Preston Model; to create a public bank and local wealth fund; to support the creation of new worker cooperatives; and to ask the Lancashire Pension Fund to invest more in the local economy (Preston Labour, 2018). The voters responded, as Labour increased its majority on the local council by picking up two seats—College Ward and Garrison Ward—that had long been controlled by the Tories. Moreover, as new councillor for College Ward Freddie Bailey explained to local journalists, “what we found helped was the Preston Model” (Farnworth, 2018). This was reinforced in the wake of the election when Matthew Brown was elevated to become Leader of Preston City Council.

Onwards to municipal socialism!

While it is right to remain cognisant of the limitations placed on local government by colossal cuts and decades of restrictive legislation, the twin temptations of fatalism—that nothing can be done—and deferral—that nothing can be done until Labour is in power in Westminster—must be roundly rejected. As Preston today demonstrates, a new radical municipalism can indeed emerge in Britain (as it is doing all across the world in the face of neoliberal crisis and austerity) and can serve as the basis for potentially much further reaching national and international change. Exorcising the zombie councils who do little besides implement austerity is vital, but so is creatively, confidently, and collaboratively exercising the significant powers councils do still possess.

As Daniel Frost recently urged in New Socialist, and as we have argued previously, there is much that can be done already—as a movement we need not wait for Labour to gain power nationally before we begin advancing ambitious programmes around a ‘new economics’ based on radical modern reinventions of municipal socialism.

Working with and for the local community to invigorate popular participation in economic decision-making and create—rather than merely extract—community wealth represents both an electorally and an economically successful strategy that can be implemented by councils across the country. The manner in which Preston has caught the imagination as a laboratory of ‘Corbynomics’ points to the wider role such approaches can play, not just in delivering for their local communities (vitally important though that is, the foundation of all else that follows) but also in helping us all to imagine, experience, and get involved with systemic economic transformation.

In an earlier period of economic contraction and difficulty in Lancashire, none other than Karl Marx wrote, in the New York Herald Tribune, of the emerging workers’ movement in the region: “The eyes of the working classes are now fully opened, they begin to cry: Our St. Petersburg is at Preston!”

Today, anyone looking around, from Capita to Carillion to the grim shadow of Grenfell Tower and the travails of East Coast Mainline, can see the existing neoliberal economic model failing and collapsing. But what holds a system in place, often, is a failure of imagination that things can fundamentally change, and that there are real, viable alternatives for organising a next system. Part of the answer to our failing economic system lies in on-the-ground experimentation and model building that embraces the design and principles of a new systemic alternative.

There is precedent for this. In the political science literature in the United States, it is known as the ‘laboratories of democracy’. In Britain, when Nye Bevan launched the NHS in 1948, he drew as inspiration from the Tredegar Medical Aid Society, a community-based model in South Wales that began in 1890. This small Welsh experiment was then scaled up into one of the world’s truly great public health systems.

We now have an opportunity—in the unknown amount of time between now and the next UK General Election—to get people familiar with the elements of the democratic economy through a widespread embrace of community wealth building approaches by Labour councils and local authorities. This suggests the potential basis for a new institutional underpinning for socialist politics, building support for our new economics from the ground up in a way that is far less scary and more comprehensible in a local context than it can sometimes appear at the national level. Our ambition, as the Corbyn Project, should be to bring about what Tony Benn termed “a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families”. Community wealth building is what that looks like when you start at the local level and begin creating systemic economic change from the ground up.

***

References

Chakrabortty, A. (2018) ‘In 2011 Preston hit rock bottom. Then it took back control’, The Guardian, 31.01.2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/31/preston-hit-rock-bottom-took-back-control

Chandler, J. A. (2007) Explaining local government: Local government in Britain since 1800.Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Farnworth, A. (2018) ‘Labour turns two parts of Fulwood red with local election wins’, Blog Preston, 04.05.2018, http://www.blogpreston.co.uk/2018/05/labour-turns-two-parts-of-fulwood-red-with-local-election-wins/

Hall, Stuart. (1988) The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left.London: Verso.

HC Deb (11 April 1984) Vol. 58, https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1984/apr/11/local-government-interim-provisions-bill#S6CV0058P0_19840411_HOC_413

Jenkins, C. (1959) Power at the top: A Critical Survey of the Nationalized Industries. London: MacGibbon and Kee.

Judd, R. (1989) Socialist Cities: Municipal Politics and the Grass Roots of American Socialism. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Kelf-Cohen, R. (1973) British Nationalisation 1945-1973. London: The Macmillan Press.

Kösecik, M., and Kapucu, N. (2003) ‘Conservative Reform of Metropolitan Counties: Abolition of the GLC and MCCs in Retrospect’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 71-94.

Lawson Dodd, F. (1905) Municipal Milk and Public Health. London: The Fabian Society.

Preston Labour. (2018) ‘Preston Labour Manifesto 2018 City Council Elections’, https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/b14b61_3f842b96c215443cac627887a71a18d7.pdf

 Rothstein, T. (1919) ‘A Revolutionary Municipal Policy’, The Call, 27.11.1919, https://www.marxists.org/archive/rothstein/1919/11/27.htm

Sheffield, H. (2017) ‘The Preston model: UK takes lessons in recovery from rust-belt Cleveland’, The Guardian, 11.04.2017, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/apr/11/preston-cleveland-model-lessons-recovery-rust-belt

Singer, C. (2016) ‘The Preston Model’, The Next System Project, 09.09.2016, https://thenextsystem.org/the-preston-model

Stave, B. (ed.) (1975) Socialism and the Cities. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat.

 Thompson, C. (1908) The Constructive Program of Socialism. Milwaukee: Social-Democratic Publishing Co.

 Wainwright, H. (2003) Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy. London: Verso.

 Webb, S. (1889) Socialism in England. Baltimore: American Economic Association.

Webb, S. (1913) What about the rates?: or, Municipal finance and municipal autonomy. London: The Fabian Society.

Photo by drinksmachine

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The Laura Flanders Show, YouTube

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The new hype

A new phase of agriculture is promoted by the industry and innovation policies in Europe and worldwide, promoting the development and integration of Information and Communication (ICT), sensor-based and data technologies. Many stakeholders refer to this integration of hi-tech solutions in farming as “Agriculture 3.0”, leaving behind Agriculture 1.0, the main form up to 1920 with manual labour, and Agriculture 2.0 following, also known as Green Revolution. Indeed, this new trend has become currently a mainstream narrative of innovation in agriculture, including all sorts of novel high-tech approaches; cloud computing, specialized software, drones and Internet of Things, all presented as promising tools to increase yields, reduce costs and, notably, promote agricultural sustainability. The EU also appears willing to provide a suitable environment through policies which strongly facilitate the development of “smart farming” and data-driven business models in agriculture.

Consequently, this has created an ambitious, and often opportunistic, business “ecosystem”, consisting of a diverse mix of specialised larger or small companies, entering the agricultural sector with a variety of promises for solutions to important agricultural and environmental issues, aiming at a share of the new market, created by the neoliberal approach of delivering profit and entrepreneurship opportunities out of new topics. That includes also a “share data” and “open source” approach, not with the intention of sharing, but for ensuring the possibility these new stakeholders will be able to “extract value” from this raising market.

On the other hand, agroecology as an emerging concept providing a holistic approach for the design of genuinely sustainable food systems not simply seeking temporary solutions that unambiguously will increase environmental performance and productivity. It stands mostly as a systemic paradigm of perception change, towards full harmonization with ecological processes, low external inputs, and use of biodiversity and cultivation of agricultural knowledge. Additionally, agroecology emphasizes independent and grassroots experimentation, and not the reliance on high tech and external suppliers, with a high degree of dependency on additional support services. Obviously, the new “sustainable” approaches and promises of digital technology and big data could be considered as focusing mainly on conventional, industrial-scale agriculture, allowing only large-scale farmers to thrive at the expense of smaller ones, while not having much to do with the transition towards truly sustainable and resilient food systems. However some alternative examples of digital innovation in agriculture focusing on agroecology-based approaches also exist, including open source agricultural technology initiatives (farmhack.net), collaborative projects for the creation of technology solutions and innovation by farmers (l’Atelier paysan) or research projects using data technologies to promote biodiversity and sustainable land management.

Farm Hack from farmrun on Vimeo.

Considering the above, important question marks are raised whether digital solutions fit within the agroecological concept, or they are inherently non-compatible with a strong sustainability approach in agriculture, and to what extent and under which framework such digital innovations may play a role in the transition towards truly sustainable food systems.

Consultation on the topic* recognized that the main barrier to consider to the use of digital innovations in agroecology is related to the lack of autonomy. Farmers may lose control of data provided by vertically developed and hierarchically-based decision support tools that often largely ignore ecological processes and are mostly based on optimization of production models. In addition, the cost of technologies is often not economically viable for individual farmers, especially for the small ones. However, automation of specific production processes and the use of high-tech equipment had and may still have some positive impact on the quality of farmers’ life.

Commonly peer

The main issue is related to how the innovation process to develop a specific technological tool is evolved. The attribution of power relationships in the development of innovative tools, a peer-to-peer approach and the user’s engagement to technology development, often called user innovation, can definitely be used to give power to all actors collectively involved in developing an innovation. We also keep in mind that digitization is no miracle, no more than classic tools are; innovation lies in the creative process, not only in the tool itself. There is a need to work on methodologies to develop a responsible innovation system that allow the technologies to respond to real users needs and not to create needs induced by the technology developers. The main issue is who takes the lead in the innovation system that develops the new digital solutions.

Digitization may also be an opportunity for democratization of knowledge, and agroecology is a knowledge intensive system in which information and data should be specific to the local context. As an example, climate change is an issue that requires a global perspective to solve local problems, but many other natural and ecological processes ask for this approach. Hence, the main issue raised is how to decentralize digital innovation and transform it to a public tool of knowledge exchange, complementary to personal and individual-to-individual processes rather than a substitute to them? An opportunity is offered by the Economy of Commons approach (see here also) – when actors can give and receive back data related to the combination of data collected from different stakeholders. The capacity to combine open data in a way that is useful for farmers at local level can be of interest for agroecology if the technology will work for and from the communities.

The point that makes a difference is the role of rural communities in the innovation process; are they just clients and potential users or main co-innovators?

Notes

* Discussion and consultation on the issue in the relevant workshop, held at the 1st European Forum on Agroecology, Lyon, France, October 26, 2017, with the participation of various academic organizations, organizations and producers, and with presentations by Vassilis Gkisakis (Dr. agronomist, Agroecological Network of Greece, organizer of the workshop), Nicolas Sinoir (L’atelier Paysan), Mariateresa Lazzaro (Dr. agronomist, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy) Livia Ortolani (Rete Semi Rurali, Italian Seed Network).

This article originally appeared on the website of the Agroecological Network of Greece (Agroecology Greece) consists a network and a platform aiming to promote Agroecology as a science, practice and movement, in Greek. Its purpose is to network agricultural scientists/trainers, in order to exchange information, knowledge & research that will familiarize the principles and framework of agroecology in Greece and promote the transition of food production systems towards a truly sustainable form, integrating food sovereignty and security principles.

Vasileios Gkisakis, Agronomist (MSc, PhD): Vassilis specialises in Sustainable Agriculture and Agrobiodiversity, with a background in Food Science. He worked previously in the organic farming sector, while he has collaborated with several research groups across Europe on organic farming/agroecology, olive production, biodiversity management strategies and food quality. He is a contracted lecturer of i) Organic Farming and ii) Food Production Systems in the TEI of Crete and visiting lecturer of Agroecology & Sustainable Food Production Systems in the Agricultural University of Plovdiv. He is official reviewer in one scientific journal, Board member of the European Association for Agroecology and moderator of the Agroecological Network of Greece and also the owner of a 20 ha organic olive and grain farm.

Lead image of an Open Source Compost Sensor – an agroecologically acceptable new technology? Developed by KindaSmith (CC BY-NC-SA 2.5)

Originally published on arc2020.eu

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Nick Buxtom: The bad news streaming through our media in 2017 has been relentless. However it doesn’t tell the full story. Beyond the headlines, there have been countless amazing social movement struggles in different regions of the world that deserve to be celebrated. Here are ten stories showing that people power works:

1. EL SALVADOR BANS MINING

In a classic David and Goliath tale, this small Central American state took on a Canadian transnational corporation to become the first country in the world to ban metals mining. Farmer communities led the struggle when they came together in 2004 to save the Lempa River watershed. They built a national coalition in the face of massive repression (including the assassination of several activists), formed alliances internationally, took on the Canadian corporation OceanaGold and finally secured a mining ban in March 2017.

2. #METOO CAMPAIGN CHALLENGES IMPUNITY FOR SEXUAL HARASSMENT

Sexual harassment has been a constant reality for women everywhere for generations, but in 2017 the wall of impunity was breached – suddenly and powerfully. Revelations of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s repeated sexual abuses prompted 1.7 million #metoo tweets in 85 countries, encouraging women in every walk of life to come forward publicly to denounce sexual harassment. Many men have been forced to resign from positions of power and influence, and there seems to be finally a consensus that sexual harassment must stop. This shift is not an accident or the credit of a few journalists, but the result of decades of tireless campaigning by women’s organizations worldwide fighting for equality.

3. FRENCH LAW ON MULTINATIONALS

At a time when corporate power has become seemingly impregnable, French campaigners showed that transnational corporations can be defeated. In a four-year-long campaign, they mobilized for a new law, approved in March 2017, which recognizes the responsibility of parent companies for human rights violations committed by subsidiaries, subcontractors and providers. The law was passed in the face of considerable corporate opposition and is a major step forward in the fight against impunity of transnational corporations, addressing the legal complexity of their supply chains that has made it so difficult for affected communities to get justice. The law has also given a boost to ongoing efforts to create an international binding treaty on transnationals at the United Nations.

4. PRIVATIZATION IS BEING ROLLED BACK, COMMUNITY BY COMMUNITY

After many years of failed privatization projects, communities worldwide are successfully fighting off privatization and bringing privatized services back under public control. In 2017 in Cali, Colombia, a public sector workers union succeeded in defeating the proposed privatization of the municipal-owned telecommunications company, and then set up a public-public partnership (PuP) with a Uruguayan national public enterprise to improve the service. In another case, Indonesia’s Supreme Court ruled this year that privatisation of water is a violation of human rights and annulled an agreement between Jakarta’s city-owned water operator, PAM Jaya, and two private companies. More than 835 communities worldwide have brought their public services back under public control in recent years.

5. TRUMP’S AGENDA FACES MASSIVE POPULAR RESISTANCE

Donald Trump’s election was one of the most disturbing nights in modern memory, but it hasn’t gone so well for him since. From the Women’s March during his very first day of office, Trump’s presidency has faced unprecedented popular resistance. In the first week, his blanket ban on Muslims from six nations was met with spontaneous protests at more than 20 major international airports across the U.S. and has since been blocked repeatedly by the courts, though it is now being temporarily enacted. Popular movements involved in fighting white supremacy, corporate greed and militarism have reported a massive surge in engagement and support. Meanwhile, a sustained movement organized by citizens nationwide helped prevent the GOP from rolling back Obamacare, and a young, progressive electoral movement is strengthening ahead of 2018 midterms.

6. GAMBIAN AUTOCRAT OVERTHROWN

Military leader Yahya Jammeh, who ruled Gambia with an iron fist for 22 years, was forced to step down at the beginning of 2017 after losing the 2016 election. Jammeh predicted he would rule for a billion years, but young Gambians came out in large numbers and used social media to mobilize votes for his opponent, Adama Barrow. Jammeh tried to overrule the election results, but fierce opposition from trade unions, professional associations and pressure from outside states forced Jammeh to relinquish power.

7. ALMOST TWO-THIRDS OF AUSTRALIAN VOTERS SAY YES TO MARRIAGE EQUALITY

Australia became the 25th country to legally embrace marriage equality in 2017 after voters overwhelmingly voted in favor of changing the definition of marriage to include same sex relationships in an advisory referendum. Australia’s parliament then approved a bill almost unanimously. Popular and legal support for gay rights may seem unsurprising now, but it is worth remembering that just 20 years ago, there was not one nation that treated same sex relationships equally to heterosexual ones.

8. FARMER REBELLION IN INDIA

In November, tens of thousands of peasants and rural laborers from 20 states, representing more than 180 peasant organizations, gathered in Delhi for an unprecedented show of strength against the reactionary Modi government. Facing rising production costs, increased droughts and falling incomes, the farmers demanded debt relief, better prices and effective crop insurance schemes. While the government did not immediately respond to their key demands, the united platform is likely to have a growing impact as farmers take the campaign across the country in 2018 and 2019.

9. GUATEMALA RISES UP AGAINST INSTITUTIONALIZED CORRUPTION

Since 2015, a series of mass protests against corruption have rocked Guatemala. These came to a head in September 2017 when President Jimmy Morales attempted to expel a Colombian investigator with the U.N.-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala. Indigenous communities have played a leading role in the protests and are also engaged in an ongoing fight with Congress to approve a constitution that recognizes greater indigenous autonomy. In October, a national strike led by a coalition of social movements in 20 cities demanded the resignation of Morales in addition to calling for land reform and nationalization of the energy sector.

10. RISE OF MOMENTUM AND TRANSFORMATION OF U.K. LABOUR PARTY

In 2017, a grassroots campaign that had first mobilized behind the left candidate Jeremy Corbyn to make him leader of the Labour Party, again showed its power when it substantially increased Labour’s vote in the General Election, almost ending the ruling party’s majority. The movement, called Momentum, made up of 30,000 active members, showed how an organized grassroots operation could defy rightwing mass media and win seats. The movement has made the Labour Party the biggest membership party in Europe, with a platform committed to bringing privatized services back under public ownership, abolishing university tuition fees and ending fracking. Momentum is now widely recognized as the most vibrant element of the party.

These stories and others are taken from a recap of the year by Transnational Institute, a progressive research institute committed to building a just, democratic and sustainable world.

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