The post Climate breakdown: where is the left? appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Climate change is fuelling record temperatures and sweeping fires, but the progressive response is lacking.
David Powell, Head of Environment & Green Transition: The newspapers read like something from a dystopian sci-fi film about a world ravaged by climate breakdown. But it’s today, and it’s real.
Heat records are being smashed. Deadly wildfires are sweeping across Greece and far beyond; there are even some in the Arctic Circle — the Arctic, for heaven’s sake. We had our own taste, on Saddleworth Moor. The three hottest months of June ever have all come in the past four years. It’s a season in the sun for climate scientists, who are saying: this is what we expected, get used to it. A new report from Parliament’s green watchdog agrees. This stuff kills people.
We should be freaking out. But we’re not, are we? Not in our guts. Not properly. Not even, really, at all.
It’s easy enough to have pops at the Government’s increasingly Janus-faced cognitive dissonance – with ministers slipping between trying to badge the UK as world leaders on climate change while merrily giving the green light to fracking.
But where’s the UK left, right now, on climate change?
It’s not a question of knowledge. Progressives get it – intellectually speaking. You’d have to be a bit of a doofus not to. Climate change is clearly a problem. A great big, era-defining, ecology-changing, civilisation-disrupting Problem. And it makes logical sense for us as a matter of justice. We know it will make life tougher for people and places where life is already tough, and that those that who do the least to cause the problem are left on the sharp end: more likely to be displaced, or starved, or flooded, or dead.
But brains and hearts are different things. For some on the left, environmental justice remains as important to their DNA as any other type of justice: their heart always has been, and still is, firmly in it. But more generally, some things still feel a bit… lacking.
Things like this:
1. A modern, compelling narrative on why climate change really matters for the left in the year 2018.
An new progressive story on climate change in the UK is needed urgently. One that feels urgent, authentic and contemporary. One about how climate breakdown is intimately connected to the things that we worry about and the values that we hold. One about people, not systems; principles, not lines on graphs. Not a vague aspiration for jobs in clean energy, but one about work, and home, and international solidarity, and justice, and fairness.
It is, after all, fundamentally a story about the same old issues. How do economies work? Who holds power, and who doesn’t want to change? Who owns things and who doesn’t? Who lives? Who dies? Who decides?
2. Big ideas to bring climate action right into the heart of a radical policy platform.
The fossil fuel age must end. We need to leave most oil, coal and gas undug and unburned. And we need to adapt to the climate change we’re already on the hook for, reshaping how our buildings, towns, cities and landscapes work so that the poorest don’t bear the brunt.
Too much has been left to markets for too long and this has played a huge role in getting us into this mess in the first place. So tinkering won’t do it. We need to see ambitious and responsible climate action as a fundamental purpose of economic policy. Massive changes are needed to the types of investment — in people, places and kit — we unleash. It means actively intervening in what we tax, spend, support, don’t support, and how major establishment institutions like the Treasury understand their role.
We need to see ambitious and responsible climate action as a fundamental purpose of economic policy.
And all of that has to be done in a way that closes the gap between rich and poor, and takes power and ownership out of the hands of polluters. It’s no small challenge: it will take not just big ideas but the verve to sell them as part of a bigger suite of transformative economic reform. NEF’s work on greening the Bank of England, major new taxes on polluters, and frequent flyer levies are just three such proposals.
3. Getting real about the ‘just transition’.
There is far too much tiptoeing around the unpleasant reality that ending the fossil fuel age means many people will have to change jobs, and not necessarily on a timescale of their choosing. The increasing intensity of climate will ultimately force changes in policy; technology is already weakening the business case for fossil fuels.
There’s a right and a wrong way to transition industries. It mustn’t be a tale of desecration and abandonment, as it was with the coal mines in the 1980s. But it must happen, so let’s do it in a democratic and empowering way. Trade unions have an important leadership role here, as they grapple with how to respond ambitiously to climate change while representing members who have jobs (and often good jobs) in climate unfriendly industries.
Most importantly, those with the most to lose from the transition should be in the driving seat of designing, then demanding, a national plan for the skills, investment and opportunities they need. As a start, progressive politicians could establish a grassroots just transition commission in which those in, for example, oil jobs in Aberdeen or smelting steel in Port Talbot get to initiate a transition plan, working with businesses and local leaders.
NEF will focus on all three of these areas over the coming years, as part of our mission to help build an economy that works for people and the environment. There really are, after all, no jobs on a dead planet.
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]]>The post Re-Imagining the Left Through the Lens of Post-Capitalist Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Abstract
In the abstract we argue:
“Our main hypothesis in this paper is that in the current conjuncture, we are moving towards a ‘dominance’ of a ‘commons’ format for societal development. The commons format assumes a ‘third’ mode of development that indicates civil society and community as critical initiators and guardians of common value. The emerging commons model should be distinguished from both the regulation of capitalism by social-democracy, and state-centric Soviet types of socialism. Just as a full-fledged capitalist system could be seen as starting with the seed forms developed in the medieval city-states, so a future commons-centric society can be hypothesized from currently emerging commons-based seed forms. We believe that just as the revolutions bringing full-fledged capitalism were preceded by the development of capitalists and their seed forms, so a commons-based systemic change is necessarily the result of commoners developing their own seed forms. Therefore, the creation of a systemic ecology of the commons becomes an essential strategy for social change. The key approach for emancipation is no longer a redistribution of market value, or a state-centric appropriation of productive assets, but an interweaving of commons-based production and redistribution.”
KEYWORDS: Post-capitalism, commons, value exchange systems, Marxism and the radical left, social transformation
Extract
Here is an extract from the paper below. A preprint version can be found here.
“We thus see commons as thriving through interdependence across multiple scales and dimensions, with myriad communities enacting themselves as commoners who engage in the active creation, defence and management of their commons, but not to the exclusion of others. It might be said that in terms of epistemology, the emerging foundations of the commons perspective shares a radical perspective on the dynamic interconnections that exist between a multitude of forms, as well as a process orienta- tion (Bollier and Helfrich 2015). Arturo Escobar (2015, 355) discusses this relational dynamic as a ‘pluriverse … made up of a multiplicity of mutually entangled and co- constituting but distinct worlds’. Given this, there is a broader political, ecologic and economic context which needs to come with commoning.
First, we do not see any room for exclusionist approaches in our definition of commoning. Historically, labour movements centred on the White European male were exclusionist in orientation (for example the White Australia Policy had its origins in labour movements, and in the United States the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was also supported by labour unions), and in the current era we see, for example, the United States ‘alt-right’ that has emerged as a nativistic construction with an even more virulent form of exclusionism. In contrast to such an exclusionary understanding, our view might be understood as ‘cosmopolitan solidarity’, in which the activity of one particular group needs to do no harm to, complement, or even support the well-being of people universally, not just one group to the exclusion of another. As such, in this paper we put forward the idea of cosmo-localization, the notion that one community of produc- tive commoning on one part of the planet also can and should support other commu- nities of production and commoning in other parts of the world, through the development of a global design commons that democratizes production.
Second, given the ecological crisis that we face, commoning cannot be reductively defined in terms of one community’s activity if it runs counter to the overall health of the whole. A planetary ethos, a view that takes the health of our planetary life support systems as central, needs to guide what it means to enact a commons – the activity of a particular group needs to complement and support the general well-being of planetary life support systems.
Third, commons need to be aligned with a post-capitalist political program. Both nativism and ecological crisis need to be understood as, in certain ways, products of capitalism. Anti-globalization was indeed at first a radical green-left position, as demonstrated by the alliance of ‘Teamsters and Turtles’ at the Battle of Seattle and the wider global protest circuit (Kaldor 2000). For the good part of two decades these demands and cries for transformation have been largely ignored by our neoliberal policy makers, leading to both reactionary populism and a deepening ecological crisis (Ramos 2017a).
This paper begins with a simple depiction of the birth of a ‘civic/civil’ oriented commons, which has emerged concurrently and in the aftermath of the demise of state-socialism and the neoliberal assault. We then provide a theory of change – our proposition is that transformation and phase transition is based on the emergence of seed forms. We provide several historical examples, and we discuss the emergence of the commons as one such seed form. To provide a theoretical and ontological foundation for understanding the emergence of the commons as a seed form within a macrological time-scale, we discuss the work of Alan Page Fiske (1991) and Kojin Karatani (2014) and the implications of their work for an ecology of the commons and reformulation of the left. We then segue into a short discussion on this ecology of the commons as a response to civilizational overshoot and collapse. Within this context of civilizational crisis and the aforementioned theory of change, we trace the general outline of the transition, and describe the emergence of cosmo-localism, Design Global/Manufacture Local (DGML) strategies as a key element of the commons shift. In conceptualizing the practical elements of this proposed ecology of the commons, we present the German Energiewende as a proto-model for state-community co- creation, and a template for future possibilities. We then look broadly across the ontological forms of the city, the nation-state, and global transnational structures as emerging constituent and co-creative elements of such an ecology of the commons. We end with some implications for the left and the challenge of transforming the dark energies of populism.”
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]]>The post Let’s talk politics: Conference on Social Commons, Barcelona, June 2018 appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Birgit Daiber: After years of commoning in conferences, cooperation projects, networking, discussions on the diversity of experiences and designing strategies how broaden them – I think it’s time to discuss how to implement them on a political level: Commons as one dimension of initiatives to reclaim a social, ecological and democratic Europe connected with the reconstruction and democratization of public services.
Different from some of the commons networks in Europe which try to stay outside direct political debates, claiming commons as a fundamental new way of economic and social practice that is not assignable to one or the other political direction, I think commons are potentially an essentially left issue. Why? Very simple: The question of property is basic for all left politics from its (organised) beginning in the 19th century – until today. In his theory of value, Karl Marx revealed the contradiction between exchange value and use value. And this too is still relevant today. Within these two dimensions of left thinking we find the global movements of the commons. Francois Houtart says in his basic manifesto from 2011 that commons initiatives focus on use value, democratic participation and autonomy, being part of a new post-capitalist paradigm and in a short note from 2014 he is pointing out:
“Concretely, it means to transform the four ”fundamentals” of any society: relations with nature; production of the material base of all life, physical, cultural, spiritual; collective social and political organization and culture. For the first one, the transformation means to pass from the exploitation of nature as a natural resource merchandize to the respect of nature as the source of life. For the second one: to privilege use value rather than exchange value, with all the consequences with regard to the concept of property. The third one implies the generalization of democratic practices in all social relations and all institutions and finally interculturality means to put an end to the hegemony of Western culture in the reading of the reality and the construction of social ethics. Elements of this new paradigm, post-capitalist, are already present all over the world, in many social movements and popular initiatives. Theoretical developments are also produced. So, it is not a “utopian vision” in the pejorative sense of the word. But a clear aim and definition is necessary to organize the convergences of action. It is a long-term process which will demand the adoption of transitions, facing the strength of an economic system ready to destroy the world before disappearing. It means also that the structural concept of class struggle is not antiquated (fiscal heavens and bank secrecy are some of its instruments). Social protests, resistances, building of new experiences are sources of real hope.”
We are just in time, as left parties in Europe are preparing their national campaigns and their European performance for the next European elections in 2019. Election-campaigns always give the opportunity to discuss programmes and projects more intensely in public debates, and so the Common Good could become one of the core-issue for the Left. Practical initiatives and debates are already well developed on different levels in some countries – as e.g. Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy and France and Belgium and there are hundreds of examples of successful initiatives on municipal, national and international levels. Just to give some few examples:
The municipal level: most of commons initiatives are local activities, in cities as well as in rural areas. Urban Commons are prominent and well documented. Cities as Seoul (KOR), Barcelona (ES), Naples (IT), Ghent (BE) and Frome (GB) show how to realise urban commons and how municipalities can work together with commoners. There are legal competences too supporting commons initiatives. The Berlin Senate for example has the right to confiscate abandoned property (but they don’t use it yet and there is no obligation for social use).
National level: The movement for Water as a commons in Italy initiated a referendum with the result that 51% of Italian citizens voted for it. The government must act and the Parliament has to discuss new laws – a still on-going struggle. The water-movement is putting the question of Commons in the context of re-thinking the role of the public in the management of goods and services related to the universal human rights.
The “old” left idea, that the State per se would guarantee public services, failed with processes of privatization – and even when the State is still holding the ownership, goods and services are often given to private companies. It is crucial to suspend market activities from public services to ensure that profits in this sector are re-invested for public use. At the same time, public services must be democratized and there has to be public control with the participation of workers and citizens (only?) to guarantee correct functioning of the common good.
On national levels, the laws on social and common use of property and the laws on cooperatives are decisive. An interesting example is the legal structure of SCOPs in France (“Societé cooperative et participative” or “société coopérative ouvrière de production“). In 2016 there were 2680 SCOPs with 45 000 active members – and they are still on the rise.
International level: Bolivia and Ecuador included Commons explicitly in their constitutions. In 2010 the UN general assembly adopted the resolution on access to clean water as basic human right. The initiative for a fundamental declaration on the Common Good of Humanity goes beyond this – well aware that a proclamation has no legally binding character but can be an instrument for social and political mobilization, creating a new consciousness and serving as a basis for the convergence of social and political movements at the international level. Clearly it is a long-term task, but it needs to be started. Not only can the coming together of social movements like the World Social Forum and political parties like the Forum of São Paulo contribute by promoting such a Declaration, but individual countries through their representatives in international organizations like Unesco and the United Nations can also push this agenda forward.
Coming to the European Level: Since some European Parliamentarians from different political groups founded an ‘Intergroup’ on Commons and Public Services in 2014, the ‘European Commons Assembly’ developed with participants from nearly all European countries. ECA initiated conferences and various activities and published a general call: “We call for the provision of resources and the necessary freedom to create, manage and sustain our commons. We call upon governments, local and national, as well as European Union institutions to facilitate the defence and growth of the commons, to eliminate barriers and enclosures, to open up doors for citizen participation and to prioritize the common good in all policies. This requires a shift from traditional structures of top-down governance towards a horizontal participatory process for community decision-making in the design and monitoring of all forms of commons. We call on commoners to support a European movement that will promote solidarity, collaboration, open knowledge and experience sharing as the forces to defend and strengthen the commons. Therefore, we call for and open the invitation to join an on-going participatory, inclusive process across Europe for the building and maintenance of a Commons Assembly. Together we can continue to build a vibrant web of caring, regenerative collective projects that reclaim the European Commons for people and our natural environment.
How could the common good be important for European politics? Just to remind one of the prominent battles of the Left (including Greens and Trade Unions) in the years 2000: the battle against the Bolkestein-Directive. In the end it was possible to introduce the protection of public services as “services of general social and economic interest (SSIG’s) on European level. This could be a starting point for initiatives for commons tofight for the recognition of commons initiatives in different fields as basic citizens rights in Europe.
All these examples show at least the slightly fragmented situation. The political and legal conditions differ widely and there is a need to discuss demands on all levels – and there is the need to discuss them on the European level.
Opportunities for the European Left
The general interest of European Left is to re-think the role of public for goods and services with relation to universal rights and to prohibit market-logic in public services. The aim is to suspend the market from public goods and services and to democratize public services for the recuperation of public services as Common Good. This is the first dimension. The second is to re-think social and workers rights as common goods. And the third is the recognition of citizens’ initiatives as basic rights and the promotion of commons initiatives.
So, it’s a three-fold battle and it could start from the general statement:
Commons are of general public interest, thus the general demand is the political and legal recognition of citizens’ initiatives whose aim is to create, re-construct and recuperate resources, goods and services in a social, ecological and democratic way. But there are specific demands to add. As there are (just to give some examples):
- Cooperative use of abandoned land and houses. Social use of confiscated property.
- Right for workers to recuperate their companies and manage them collectively – before selling them to investors or going bankrupt.>
- Open access for all citizens to information services that are democratically organised, and free public internet.
- Collectively and self-managed funds for citizens’ initiatives and access to public funding.
- Democratization of digital radio and TV by reserving e.g. 30% of the slots for non-commercial, community etc. stations.
- Participatory re-communalization/re-municipaliyation of energy and water.
And I’m sure there are others to add…
It could be the right moment to start to discuss practical political proposals – not with the illusion to change European politics immediately, but with the intention to bring the debate into the light of a greater public.
Thank you for your attention.
About the author: As Member of the European Parliament (MEP), as director of the European Office of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Brussels, as coordinator of transatlantic and international projects and as an expert for social urban development, Birgit Daiber has been involved for over decades in the building of Europe. She is the author and publisher of a number of books and articles on European and international issues. The common good of humanity, gender-oriented civil conflict prevention and the intercultural dialogue are in the focus of her present attention.
The post Let’s talk politics: Conference on Social Commons, Barcelona, June 2018 appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post 5 Reasons to Build a Network of Small Groups, Rather than a Mass Movement of Individuals appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>So much of the lefty US political discourse is focused on a huge scale. Environmentalists want to save the planet. Progressives want to mobilise millions of people on the #OneTrueHashtag. In preparation for this trip, one of my first meetings was with an organisation who are doing great work locally, but they’re freaking out about how they can possibly expand their efforts to encompass a national scale. My advice: don’t waste time growing a nationwide bureaucracy, just stick to what’s working, and publish everything so folks can copy you.
I know Americans are going to keep building huge movements, but for what its worth, I wanted to share my reasoning for focussing on the tiny scale. This is a snapshot of my current thinking — my intention is to come back in a few months and learn how wrong I was, rather than to convince you that I’m right.
An increasing mass of people agree that long term human survival depends on us replacing the status quo with a fundamentally different set of behaviours and structures. I believe the root of that challenge is essentially cultural, and the best place to grow culture is in small groups. And until we’ve got a critical mass of activists that are embedded in a new way of thinking, relating and communicating, any mass movement is going to replicate the errors of the past.
So here goes… 5 reasons to focus on the small groups.
Reason 1: A Place to Learn New Habits
I was raised a boy in a patriarchy. Before I could even speak, I was learning epically stupid lessons about gender. Some of them are pretty harmless, like boys don’t wear nail polish. But most of them were toxic, like men don’t show vulnerability, and it’s not important to listen to women.
I was also raised White, working class, straight, cisgender, Protestant, monogamous, right-handed, English-speaking, neuro-typical, able-bodied, and carnivorous. Each of these different dimensions formed a multi-faceted container that I grew into: they all left an impression. Some of those impressions were pretty harmless, but a lot of them result in profoundly shitty behaviour.
For a long time I went through life expressing my shitty behaviour and having shitty relationships as a result. It was only once I found small, committed groups to work in, that I learned to unpick the patriarchy from my masculinity.
One example: in Loomio, we made an explicit agreement that all the work should be shared fairly, nobody should be forced to do stuff they don’t want to, and everyone’s contributions should be acknowledged. It was only after we made that agreement that I slowly started to notice a whole class of work that I didn’t even know existed: emotional labour. In the same way I was trained to not look for toys in the pink section of the toy store, I was trained to not see the work of caring, supporting, soothing, adapting, preparing, inviting, gathering, and cleaning up after. I only learned about this labour because the feminist men and women in our co-op drew my attention to it, and taught me how to do my fair share. Now we have structures that systematically distribute emotional work around the team.
In a small committed group you can choose the behaviours you want to encourage, and you can choose how much energy you want to spend helping each other learn new habits.
As I’m learning to detoxify my masculinity, I have a hunch that the same method will help me undo some of my other shitty biases too. And I have another hunch: that the same method will work for others.
So if you’re organising with people raised within oppressive structures: do you think you can design protocols of interaction that bring people out of their old toxic habits?
Reason 2: A Place to Practice Tolerance
A lot of lefty folk love to talk about tolerance, but frankly most of us are pretty crap at doing it.
I was at a co-op last week where someone corrected me for saying “illegal immigrant” when I meant “undocumented worker”, but then literally in the next sentence dismissed all Trump supporters as “crazy”.
I agree, “illegal” is a dumb thing to call people, but so is “crazy” — the point is, most of us say dumb stuff all the time! If you’re highly educated and sufficiently careful, you can learn how to purify your vocabulary, but that is no guarantee that you’re not a jerk. We need to learn how to work together, even before we are fully sanctified.
When you work in a small, committed group, you have an opportunity to prove to each other that you’re all fairly decent human beings, all trying your hardest, all willing to get better educated and to be more considerate with your language… and still occasionally say a stupid thing that hurts people.
At Enspiral we’re seeing these little “livelihood pods” emerge, like this one, this one, this one, and this one. Each is a group of 3–5 freelancers who could make a precarious living on their own, but have decided they’d be better off working together. Members of each pod pledge to share some fraction of their income to smooth out the peaks and troughs of the gig economy.
In my experience, when you are forced to collaborate to meet your material needs, you get much better at tolerating difference. You quickly learn to distinguish “let’s agree to disagree” from “if this proposal passes I have to leave the group”. This is a skill I never learned anywhere outside of small, committed groups.
I believe that one of the side effects of individualism (by which I mean, the systematic training that individual effort delivers individual returns, and that all your needs can be met by impersonal transactions) is that we’re all pretty crappy at dealing with difference. If we’re not bound to each other in some way, why should I care if we disagree? There’s no incentive to learn from difference when you can always go out and make another choice.
So if you’re organising with people who are not all exactly the same, maybe it would be useful to ask: how can we increase our capacity for difference?
Reason 3: A Place for Amateur Therapy
I believe we can structure our working relationships to provide healing.
I think we’re all traumatised, just by being born to imperfect parents in an imperfect society. Then many more traumas and setbacks are layered on top of us, depending on how lucky you were in the genetic lottery.
So I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone needs therapy, basically. Some of us are lucky enough to get professional treatment from someone who suits us, but most of us won’t.
I have a pretty shallow understanding of therapy: I think it is some combo of intimate dialogue with a trusted partner, regular recurring reflection, asking, ‘how does that make you feel?’, listening to the answer with unconditional positive regard, looking people in the eyes, nodding, and saying things like ‘mmm… mmm… I hear you.’
Maybe there’s more to it than that, but the point is, it’s a game for two or more players. So some of us pay for a professional therapist, or expect a lover or close friend to do it. Personally, I’d like all my relationships to be therapeutic, including my working relationships.
So one focus of my work with Loomio and Enspiral is to design therapeutic organisational structures. This healing happens in 1-to-1 relationships, and in big transformative events like festivals and retreats, but for sustained, reliable, ongoing treatment, I’m a huge fan of the small group.
I’ve observed that when people find a small group of people to commit too, they can grow enough trust and intimacy to become amateur co-therapists. We practice talking about our feelings in just about every group meeting. We learn from each other’s experiences. We remind each other to be careful with ourselves and with others. In our little groups we practice showing up, messing up, forgiving each other and going on together.
So if you’re organising with traumatised people, maybe it would be interesting to ask: how can you structure the work to be therapeutic?
Reason 4: A Place to Produce Living Proof
It is much easier to demand ethical behaviour from institutions, than it is to demonstrate it in our own organisations.
We’ve spent the last 5 years at Loomio proving that it is possible to manage a small software company without a hierarchy. I know our context is unique: we are an ultra-privileged little tiny bubble in the South Pacific. But by sharing our methods, we are adding credibility to the claim that it is possible to coordinate people without using coercion. I’m proud to say that more than 50,000 people have read our co-op handbook in the past 6 months — that’s maybe not “proof” on its own, but a good contribution to a growing body of work that demonstrates that the commons doesn’t always have to be tragic.
Enspiral is composed of co-ops like Loomio, and other livelihood pods learning how to organise non-hierarchically at a tiny scale. But we also are learning how to connect the small groups together and grow our self-governance practices to accommodate the next order of magnitude. We’re currently about 250 people, with a pretty robust, highly adaptive, increasingly distributed system for sharing ownership throughout the network (read about it here). With the trans-regional experiments currently underway, it’s reasonable to imagine we’ll expand this pool to include thousands of people over the next year or two. And many of us have an appetite for much bigger scale, like the Scuttlebutt crew, who are quite seriously building a social network for the Galactic Council.
So if you’re organising to end oppression, how can you demonstrate equality and respect in the way you work together?
Reason 5: A Place to Prepare for the Worst
Maybe our experiments in decentralised leadership, commons management, and self-governance are too little too late. Maybe we won’t stop the mega-deaths of WWIII or climate catastrophe. I know plenty of clear-thinking people who expect to out-live this current iteration of civilisation. From time to time I ask myself, if we’re approaching Apocalypse, what it is the best use of my time? I keep coming back to the same answer: learn how to work together, and learn how to grow commons. Maybe I’m delusional, but I gotta tell you, it feels pretty good to try. And while we’re on this tour of US activist spaces, I want to test the hypothesis that it feels good for other folks too.
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Photo by Marcos Fernandez Diaz Vj Catmac 
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]]>The post (Re)Inventing The Future with Nick Srnicek appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Episode Description
After an unplanned hiatus, the show is back with a bang. This week I am delighted to welcome Nick Srnicek to the show. Nick, and his co-author Alex Williams, has recently released a new book with Verso called: “Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work’. I bought this book as a christmas present for myself, and it didn’t disappoint – it’s just the book I have been waiting for someone to write! Indeed, I’m kinda annoyed with Nick and Alex, because it’s the book I really wanted to write! In the interview we cover the first half of the book, which takes a critical look at the functioning of the political left today, and a deep look at the history, strategy and tactics of the neoliberals as a counterpoint. I hope to have Alex back on the show in the near future to discuss the second half of the book, which is much less critique and more ‘what is to be done’. Us leftie’s need to get beyond critique, and that includes this show.
You can find Nick and Alex’s book here: http://www.versobooks.com/books/1989-inventing-the-future
You can also find their blog here: https://syntheticedifice.wordpress.com/
The music on this episode was:
- ‘The Order of the Pharaonic Jesters’ by Sun Ra and his Arkestra
- ‘USA iii: rail’ by Dan Deacon
- ‘Crying In The Chapel’ by Charles Bradley ‘Now Is The Time Of Emotion’ by Prince Rama
Photo by henk.sijgers (on when I can)
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]]>The post Liberal is not Left appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Liberals seem to be about freedom, because freedom is in their name. Indeed, historically they were all about freedom, freedom from the social strictures of monarchy and feudal power. The liberals were wealthy bourgeois who wanted the “freedom” to run the country. In the early days, many of these used populist rhetoric to catalyse the power of the general population behind their campaign. However, if you look at any of their writings, for example those of Locke, Adam Smith or Rousseau, you can see that the freedom of liberalism was intended not for everyone but specifically for an educated elite. Liberal freedom means even the queen is free to sleep under the bridge.
Once liberals had displaced hereditary feudal power and become ruling parties in the great industrial states, they changed the thrust of their emancipatory campaign. Instead of civic freedom for all, liberals used their power to entrench their economic position and began to apply another notion of freedom, free markets and free trade. To this day liberals “freedom” is principally about free markets and free trade, i.e. global corporatism and its rentier property system.
The Left, on the other hand, advocate an international solidarity economy, the evening out of the inequalities of wealth and opportunity, an economy where value is produced by each according to their abilities and for each according to their needs. The Left reject the false freedom of free markets which generate cabals of colluding monopolists who inevitably abuse their wealth to exercise inordinate political power over the many. The Left reject any form of nationalistic, racist, sexist, or any other normative discriminatory political disenfranchisement. The Left struggles for an economy where rentier title has been mutualized and the value of the productive contribution of each is set towards ensuring the best conditions of the flourishing of all.
In terms of freedom of expression, both the Left and liberals are permissive. However liberals believe in the freedom of the wealthy to make their expression heard louder than anybody else’s, and they exercise this “freedom”. Liberals also believe in the super-national privilege of corporations to silence criticism of their business as being damaging to their profitability.[1] The Left attempts to build utopian forums and other social forms of civic organisation where in principle everybody’s views can be negotiated. This highly democratic ideal is still in its infancy, it remains one of the most important sectors of social innovations of the Left.
In the US, it is said, there is a crisis of the liberal media. But the liberal media with their Purple Revolution is showing itself perfectly able to function and adapt to the new reality under Trump. Times will now only get more difficult for the disenfranchised who voted for Trump and Sanders, and the liberal media will ignore them, because MSM are the voice of free-market bankers and free trade colonial business. Wall street revenues pay the paychecks of the news anchors researchers, journalists and actors on the liberal media, it is no wonder that Bernie Sanders was given such paltry coverage, unlike Trump who blamed illegal workers and minorities for the crisis facing the US, Sanders pointed his finger squarely at the 1%, the owners of the media.
The solidarity Left economy is small, it does not have the luxury to fund massive media juggernauts which crush popular opinion into submission. Nevertheless the movement which rallied behind the Sanders candidacy was able to break fundraising records of small contributions without any benefit of MSM publicity. This is because Sanders’ message, like that of Trump, resonated the suffering and represented the conditions to the vast majority, rendered despondent under liberal austerity economics. Whereas the MSM were fine to showcase the egregious, insulting and offensive excesses of the extreme right candidate, they ignored the one which threatened to truly undermine liberal power through advocating such things as progressive taxation and banking reform.
In the US, all the Left or “progressive” media is constrained, for budgetary reasons to the margins of the Internet. Despite what we are told about the MSM being “dead”, it is still the authoritative source for news for the vast majority of people, especially the old, who still vote. Even Wikipedia, apogee of democratic erudition, is biased towards mostly liberal MSM with their condition that only “reliable sources” be used as references in articles. What are “reliable sources”? The academic publications, liberal media press and publications, or the conservative ones.[2]
The monopolization of broadcast media by a collusive wealthy oligarchy is illegitimate, as is all private rentier title. Unfortunately the Left can have no chance to politically challenge both liberals and conservatives without a truly Left media of scale. Under Trump, the majority of the American people will have it demonstrated again that their best interests will never be served by either the Democratic party or Republican party because they are two sides of the moneyed elite. The conditions of the vast majority will not improve and the emancipation of the human potential of the youth will be suppressed for another generation.
Only a truly Left and not a liberal media can coalesce the political movements which can withstand the crushing intellectual and physical assaults of the elites. We have seen during the democratic primary how independent media can play a transformative role in bringing people into and supporting communication, exchange and collaboration within a movement which truly has their interests at its core. But such media must burst into the mainstream, and this will require great economic resources. Organizations like TYT [3] demonstrate, as did the Sanders campaign, that progressive values can be supported long-term with small donations from a wide base. This model needs to be expanded and extended. In the meantime let us not confuse liberal with Left… it is not helping anyone face down the challenge from the right.
Notes
[2] see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources
[3] the Young Turks, originally a progressive political news network, now offers a wide range of programming primarily for millennials. https://tytnetwork.com/ Photo by david_shankbone
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