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

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

Some Jaw-Dropping Facts
about Insane Trade

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

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

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

1) Say NO to Insane Trade

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

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

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

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

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

2) Say YES to Local Economies

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

– Buy local food and other local products.

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

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

Frequently Asked Questions
about Insane Trade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does global trade affect the climate?

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

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

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

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

Watch and Share our Insane Trade film (3.10min)

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

Photo by ImipolexG

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aaron Fernando: It is common to see questionable policies enacted by state and local governments under the guise of economic development — policies which appear to serve the interests of private entities rather than the interests of society at large. Yet at the other end of the spectrum, real and sustainable sources of wealth, along with the many non-financial elements crucial to the health of societies, continue to be generated by individuals and small-scale producers, largely without much assistance from local governments.

Recently, the U.K.-based foundation Nesta released an interactive visualization called ShareTown, intended to help people think about what it might look like if local governments used technology and focused on both small-scale local organizations and individuals in creating positive social outcomes within a locality. Described as “an unashamedly positive vision of a preferred future in which interactions between citizens and local government are balanced and collaborative, and data and digital platforms are deployed for public benefit rather than private gain” ShareTown allows visitors to click around and explore an interrelated set of organizations, institutions, and individuals in one vision of a prosperous local economy of the future. These organizations include a makerspace, a community waste and re-use center, a childcare cooperative, a mobile library and resource center, and many others — all in some way utilizing technology and supported (financially or otherwise) by local government.

The ideas in ShareTown were derived from a workshop in May 2018 with leaders from local governments and members of the public, and discussed in light of drastic budget cuts faced by local governments around the U.K. Although ShareTown is U.K.-specific and offers links to “Reference Points,” which are existing projects, similar projects have already been sprouting up around the world. For instance, ShareTown contains a platform co-op which links freelancers with resources and protections against certain types of risks. The cooperative SMart is mentioned ShareTown, but others around the world like the Freelancer’s Union in New York City, New York, operate similarly.

However it is noted that “ShareTown is not intended as a prediction, but a source of inspiration — and provocation.” ShareTown was created by Nesta’s ShareLab, which has “a mission to grow evidence and understanding of how collaborative digital platforms can deliver social impact.” Thus, explicit in this approach is the belief that data collection and specific technological tracking and monitoring solutions will lead to positive social outcomes. This includes certain initiatives with potentially uncomfortable data-gathering, such as a mobile library operated with a mix of public and private funding which also tracks user outcomes.

In light of recent, serious data breaches like those of Marriott and Equifax, along with the reality that digital platforms and big data have been utilized by the few to manipulate the many, this technological optimism is indeed a provocation and something to be discussed. ShareTown provides a thought-provoking angle with which to think about the role of government and technology in maintaining a healthy local economy, and can be thought of in tandem with frameworks such as the Cleveland Model and the Preston Model. These two models in particular illustrate flows of money, time, and other resources between institutions and organizations without focusing on the usage of technology. Taken together, these frameworks can help both local residents and public officials think about and reframe how a locality achieves economic resilience even with limited resources.

Header image is a screenshot of Nesta’s ShareTown interactive

The post Nesta’s ‘ShareTown’ interactive shows what a cooperative, tech-enabled economy might look like appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is a really great presentation.

Photo by Ian Sane

The post David Brooks on Inclusive Community Dynamics vs Exclusionary Tribalism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We are interested in talk about “establishing the commons” at A/UK, because the concept implies a very active form of citizenship.

People may transact through the marketplace, or they may rely on the state, but they are actively responsible for a commons. It’s a resource which is both maintained and kept up by the people, but whose ownership (whatever the asset is, both material and immaterial) belongs to posterity, the future of that community, rather than either commerce or the public sector.

As Alberto Lucarelli, a professor in constitutional law in Naples says: “commons are defined by rights”, and “by the management model rather than simply the property model”:

Commons are those resources that apart from the property that is mainly public, pursue a natural and economic vocation that is of social interest, immediately serving not the administration but the collectivity and the people composing it. They are resources that belong to all the associates and that law must protect and safeguard also in virtue of future generations.

We take these quotes from a site welcome to our eyes, called Cooperative City. Michel Bauwens has just brought our attention to this 2017 blog, Regulating the Urban Commons – learning from Italy. It shows how the awareness and strategy for making urban commons came about – particularly, it seems, from a crisis in the status of a public utility: water.

This debate developed strongly in Italy as a result of the Referendum on the Privatisation of Water, which saw a victory with 95% from the position supporting water as a commons to be protected in public interest and not to be privatised.

Following this episode, which has not yet seen a clear policy developed at national level, many city administrations have brought forward this debate at local level. The concept of commons has extended from water to many other resources, both physical and immaterial.

In terms of physical spaces, open public spaces are rather unanimously recognised as urban commons and regulations in many cities have been developed to legislate the community use of urban gardens, as an example.

Such spaces do not prove to be unproblematic as even through the property remains public, the collective access and the management costs are interpreted differently across the country.

In Rome, the Regulation of Green Spaces adopted by the City Council in 2014 foresaw that all running costs, such as water, and ordinary maintenance, such cutting the grass, should be responsibility of the communities adopting the green space, where open public access must be nevertheless be guaranteed. Given the poor condition of maintenance of public green spaces in Rome, many people accepted these conditions to improve their living standards.

Within this context, the regulation of buildings appears to be far more complex, given the higher number of variables in which the civic and the Public should find terms of agreement. To respond to these challenges, some cities developed a Regulation of the Commons, that would provide a framework for civic organisations and the public administration to find agreement on the shared management and use of urban commons.

See this primer on how Bologna triggered such a Regulation of the (Urban) Commons (the actual document here):

The Bologna Regulation is based on a change in the Italian constitution allowing engaged citizens to claim urban resources as commons, and to declare an interest in their care and management.

After an evaluation procedure, an “accord” is signed with the city specifying how the city will support the initiative with an appropriate mix of resources and specifying a joint “public-commons” management.

In Bologna itself, dozens of projects have been carried out, and more than 140 other Italian cities have followed suit. This regulation is radical in giving citizens direct power to emit policy proposals and transform the city and its infrastructure, as a enabler for this.

The key is the reversal of logic: the citizenry initiates and proposes, the city enables and supports.

The Cooperative City blog also tells a fascinating tale how different cities establish their commons, out of different modern (and even ancient) traditions. Take Naples:

In 2016 seven locations in Naples were identified as commons because of the collective commitment of citizens in their regeneration after a long period of abandonment. Before such recognition these spaces were officially identified as illegal occupation of public properties, for which all people involved were subjected to legal persecution.

The innovation of what is happening in Naples stands basically in the fact that the ancient tradition of the Usi Civici (Civic Uses) applied since medieval times to the forests for people to access and harvest wood or collect food, is now applied to urban spaces.

This is the case of the Je So’ Pazzo initiative taking place in the old mental asylum in the city centre of Naples, where a group of inhabitants, many of whom youngsters, have taken over the space to provide a series of local services, such as music classes, sports facilities and many other community-run activities.

Currently the agreement with the Municipalities implies that utility costs of the space are paid by the City Council but all activities related expenses are responsibility of the users. In terms of property rights, the space remains in public ownership and users are granted freely access as long as the activities remain of public interest and open to all citizens.

What is of interest to us at A/UK, looking for movement in society that can support a new political culture of autonomy and localisation, are the moment of opportunity that open up in top-down structures – whether it’s a national debate that has constitutional implications. Or a municipal philosophy that suddenly shifts, due to pressure from below, to a situation where “the citizenry initiates and proposes, the city enables and supports”.

We remain convinced that this happens best when there are self-generated and rich “citizens networks”, sustaining the full human agency of their participants, formulating agendas that more established power structures have to take notice of.

The story of Italian political life is as complex and trouble as it could be at the moment – but this is an example of how change can happen at very different paces.

The post What Italian cities can teach us about how to establish urban commons – and their value appeared first on P2P Foundation.

To understand them and what they’re fighting for, it’s important to understand the system they’re challenging.

Our money system is underpinned by national central banks and treasuries that issue foundational “base” money. This includes the physical cash in our wallets and also reserves, the special forms of digital money that commercial banks hold in their central bank accounts, which are inaccessible to us.

These commercial banks then boost the money supply by issuing a second layer of money on top of the central bank money layer, through a process called credit creation of money (sometimes called “fractional reserve banking”) to create commercial bank money, which we see as bank deposits in our bank accounts.

The details are subtle and complex ― especially at the international level ― but the interaction of these players issuing money and taking it out of circulation makes the money supply expand and contract as if it were breathing. Monetary reform groups target different elements of this. Here are five of them.

1. Government Money Warriors

Stephanie Kelton, professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University, is one of the leading lights of modern monetary theory.

We say that the sun rises, but in reality the sun stays fixed and the illusion of sunrise is created by the Earth turning. Modern monetary theory argues that a similar delusion occurs in our thinking about government money ― we often claim that a federal government “raises money” through taxation and then spends it, but actually it is government institutions that originally issue money by spending it into existence and then withdrawing it from circulation by demanding it back in taxation. If the government issues money, then why would it have to raise money by asking for it back?

The idea that a federal government can run out of money like an ordinary household or business is an illusion, argue advocates of modern monetary theory. A government can only run out of money if it either does not issue its own sovereign currency (like the European nations, which have opted for the euro) or if an artificial political limit has been placed on how much money it can issue. In the latter situation, governments must first recall money via tax (and other means) before reissuing it elsewhere.

This is why modern monetary theory advocates are incredulous about conservatives who want to block spending on education and health care by saying we don’t have the money to pay for it. “Governments with monopoly control over their currency can always pay for their policy priorities,” says Pavlina Tcherneva, an economics professor at the Levy Economics Institute at New York’s Bard College.

Under modern monetary theory, if there are unemployed people who want to work and material resources for them to work with, a federal government can issue new money without causing inflation because the increase in money supply will be met with an increase in production. “The goal is to use the public purse to serve the broad public interest without accelerating inflation,” said Stephanie Kelton, professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University and former senior adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

2. Bank Money Reformers

Bank money reformers want to target the powers of commercial banks to create money.

Other reformers target the commercial bank money system. They argue it creates economic instability, over-indebtedness and concentration of power in the hands of banks ― the very banks that led us into the 2008 financial crisis.

Bank money reform groups include the American Monetary Institute, Positive Money, and the International Movement for Monetary Reform.

Commercial banks create new money when they issue loans. The moderate wing of the bank reform movement argues that, because the government grants them this privilege, banks should be subject to greater democratic scrutiny over their lending. The hard-line wing believes bank creation of money should be banned altogether.

The movement to curtail bank money is politically more diverse than modern monetary theory; it’s been supported by certain libertarians, including the late economist Murray Rothbard, neoclassical economists such as Irving Fisher, as well as left-wing proponents, such as the U.K.’s Green Party, which believes bank money-creation leads to environmental crises and corporate domination.

Their prescriptions are not uniform: Positive Money, a research and campaigning organization in Britain, calls for the power to create money to be granted exclusively to a democratic, accountable and transparent public body, creating a “sovereign money” system in which we might all have our own accounts at the central bank. This is distinguished from full-reserve banking, which would require your bank to have the reserves to fully back your account.

3. Cryptocurrency Crusaders

The Bitcoin logo on display at the Consensus 2018 blockchain technology conference in New York City on May 16.

Cryptocurrency crusaders not only reject both national and bank money systems, but also reject the entire concept of credit money (money that is “created from nothing” through law or social agreement), calling for it to be replaced with “commodity money” (money that is “created from something” through production). They have inherited the baton from “goldbugs,” who called for gold to be money.

The movement, which began with Bitcoin, argues that the best money system is one that’s outside of human politics. This comes from a philosophical tradition that says systems should be governed by the boundaries of God, physics or math, rather than laws set by politicians. With gold, for example, these natural boundaries would be geology: how much gold can be found and extracted. In Bitcoin’s case, the boundary comes from the fact that the digital system sets a hard limit on how much digital money can be issued and then forces participants to “mine” it as if it were a commodity.

Because Bitcoin hard-liners believe true money is a limited-supply good that must be extracted through production, they claim that fiat money ― created by banks or countries ― is artificial or deceitful money under the control of corrupt powers. There’s a puritanical edge to these cryptocurrency crusaders, who mistrust human institutions and trust in an abstract ‘godlike’ order of mathematics and markets.

While theories like MMT hinge on collective human political institutions, crypto crusaders see politics as foolish. This distrustful attitude shows: The movement sometimes seems as much at war with itself as with the fiat money system, with bitter in-fights between supporters of different crypto-tokens.

They are, however, the richest of all monetary reformers, with many crypto users having ironically become millionaires in the fiat currency they claim to dislike so much.

4. The Localists

A note worth 10 Brixton pounds, an alternative currency in London, is illustrated with an image of David Bowie.

There’s a whole history of alternative non-government money prior to cryptocurrency. These original alternative currency variants include mutual credit systems, timebanks (where time is used to measure how many credits you earn), local community currencies, such as the U.K.-based Brixton pound, and systems like the Swiss Wir, a currency used between businesses.

The tradition is also skeptical of large-scale government-bank money systems, but rather than calling for them to be replaced by a robotic algorithm, they believe small-scale communities should take control to issue money locally.

Unlike cryptocurrency advocates, they have no problem with money being “created out of nothing.” Rather they have a problem with who gets to do that and at what scale. They believe large-scale systems alienate people and dissolve close-knit communities.

A mutual credit system like Sardex in Sardinia, for example, does not reject the idea of money expanding and contracting, but it brings together an island community to decide on what terms that occurs.

While the other movements are outspoken, local complementary currency enthusiasts are often humble and below-the-radar, working for low pay to build resilient community structures.

“Local currencies change how money is issued,” says Duncan McCann of the New Economics Foundation, “how it circulates and what it can be spent on in order to re-localize economies, encourage environmental behaviour, and promote small businesses.”

The crypto-credit alliance looks to merge older, alternative currency systems with blockchain technology.

5. The Crypto-Credit Alliance: Mutual credit meets blockchain technology

This is the least-known or developed of the movements, but is perhaps the most exciting. Nascent initiatives, such as Trustlines, Holochain, Sikoba, Waba and Defterhane, seek to hybridize older alternative currency systems like mutual credit with the blockchain architectures that underpin cryptocurrencies. They share common ground with both modern monetary theorists, who also see commodity money as regressive, and cryptocurrency advocates, who wish to bypass the government.

Cryptocurrency unleashed a lot of creativity, but much has been wasted on toxic speculation. On the other hand, localist mutual credit movements have powerful ideas but often struggle to get heard or to spread. Crypto-credit innovators are exploring the creative possibilities of merging these two to solve flaws in both.

Originally published in the Huffington Post

The post These 5 Rebel Movements Want To Change How Money Works appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is appealing to the liberal mind — it provides an apparent middle ground and removes the need to question the logic of the global economy. We can continue on our current trajectory if we make the “right” reforms and get the “right” kind of technology.

The hope of green growth is embedded everywhere, from the majority of domestic economic plans to major international policy schemes like the Paris Climate Agreement and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. By uncritically supporting these policies, we are unwittingly perpetuating the neoliberal fantasy of infinite growth on a finite planet.

The Logic of “Green Growth”

In some ways, the math is quite simple. We know that the Earth can only safely sustain our consumption at or below 50 billion tons of stuff each year. This includes everything from raw materials to livestock, minerals to metals: everything humans consume. Right now, we’re using about 80 billion tons each year — roughly 60 percent more than the safe limit. In order for growth to be “green,” or at least not life-destroying, we need to get back down to 50 billion tons while continuing to grow GDP.

A team of scientists ran a model showing that, under the current business-as-usual conditions, growth will drive global resource use to a staggering 180 billion tons per year by 2050. That’s more than three times the safe limit. This type of economic growth threatens all life on this planet.

In the hopes of finding more optimistic results, the UN Environment Program conducted its own research last year. The team introduced various optimistic assumptions, including a carbon price of $573 per ton and a material extraction tax, and assumed rapid technological innovation. They found that even with these policies, we will still hit 132 billion tons of consumption per a year by 2050.

In a recent article in Fast Company, Jason Hickel, a leading economic anthropologist, argues that there is no evidence to support green growth hopes. He concludes that although we will need all the strong policies we can get — carbon taxes, resources extraction taxes, more efficient technology, etc. — the only way to bring our economy back in line with our planet’s ecology is to reduce our consumption and production.

This is the core problem that no one wants to address. This is the taboo of Western civilization — the ground zero of values. It is the reason we make up fictions like green growth.

In order to start imagining and achieving real alternatives, we first have to dispose of the false solutions and distractions that pervade the discourse on social change. Right now, it is incumbent on the progressive movement to challenge green growth or any other prophylactic logic that keeps us bound within the ideological concrete of growth as our only option.

Growth as Distributed Fascism

Our global economy is a Ponzi scheme. We have a debt-based economic system that requires growth to exceed interest rates in order for money to be valuable. The World Bank and others tell us that we have to grow the global economy at a minimum of 3 percent per year in order to avoid recession. That means we will double the size of the global economy every 20 years.

For capital holders — rich countries and the rich within countries — this makes complete sense. They disproportionately benefit from the growth system. Growth is the source of their power. It is what keeps them not just rich, but ever-richer — which means ever-more powerful. They are where they are in this system because their interests align with the “Prime Directive” of the system: more capital for its own sake. The reason the people currently in power are in power is because they believe in growth, and because they are good at delivering it. That is the sole qualification for their jobs. Of course, they are not going to be able to see the problems growth causes; they are, by job-definition and personal identity, growth-fanatics.

As for the rest of us, we are tied into this system because growth is the basis for our livelihood, it is the source of our jobs, and our jobs are what allow us to survive in the debt regime.

It’s a tightly woven system that requires our collective complicity. Although we may know that every dollar of wealth created heats up the planet and creates more inequality, we are tied into the system through necessity and a set of values that tells us that selfishness is rational, and indeed, the innately and rightly dominant human behavior we must orient around. We’re coerced into a form of distributed fascism where we as individuals extract more, consume more, destroy more and accumulate more, without ever being able to step back to see the totality of a more holistic worldview.

Post-Growth as Localism

So, what must be done? The first place to start is to challenge the growth dependency of the current operating system. Then we start looking for the antidote logic. Capitalism is characterized by its imposition of monolithic values — the final outcome of the “American Dream” is for everyone to live as consumers in pre-fabricated houses; leveraged by Wells Fargo mortgages; living off Citibank credit cards; wearing Nike shoes; distracted by Facebook, Google and Apple products; drinking Nestle bottled water; and eating Monsanto laboratory foods, while bobbing our heads to Miley Cyrus or Jay-Z.

The antigen to monoculture is polyculture — many ways of being and living. This requires a transition to localism, which is another way of saying ways of life in which we are connected to our environment, so we see and understand the impacts of our consumption. Localism creates contexts in which we can look into the eyes of the people who make our clothes and grow our food, so that our choices can be informed by their impact on human relationships and well-being, not just convenience and a price tag.

This means working to strengthen local communities and create far more self-sufficient economies. Luckily, we have on hand ready guides and knowledge in the Indigenous cultures that have survived longest on this planet, and whose way of organizing and being are in greatest harmony with the biosphere. It means actively opting out of globalized industrialism as much as we can, by creating interdependence through sharing and cooperation, rather than dependence on economic trade and extraction.

At a national level, we could start by ditching GDP as an indicator of success in favor of more holistic measures, like the Genuine Progress Indicator or a Bhutanese style Gross National Happiness, which are built around life-centric, intrinsic values and take account of negative externalities like pollution and resource degradation. We could roll out a new money system that doesn’t necessitate endless growth and debt. And we could put caps on material use, so that we never extract more than the planet can regenerate.

This type of post-growth thinking must become the central organizing principle of society the way “self-determination” was the operating principle of post-World War I society (at least in rhetoric). Localization should be the rallying cry of both nation-states and communities alike who are nimble and brave enough to transcend the shadows of scarcity and self-interest. Localism requires a sensitivity and attunement to local contexts, geographies, histories and cultures. It requires us to contract new types of relationships with each other, with ourselves, with the state, and with Nature itself.

There is no traditional blueprint for these types of economic models. This may seem daunting. But our current trajectory is even more daunting. Unless a politically significant mass of people actively rejects the false god of growth and chooses a different path, our current economic system will crash under its own weight and take most life as we know it with it. As the late British economist David Fleming reminds us, “Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.”

Alnoor Ladha is a co-founder and executive director of The Rules, a global collective of activists, writers, researchers, coders and others focused on addressing the root causes of inequality, poverty and climate change.

Photo by Aimée Wheaton

The post From “Green Growth” to Post-Growth appeared first on P2P Foundation.

So I’ve been ending my talks with specific, actionable suggestions for how companies of all sizes and stages can become more sustainably profitable in the current environment. It amounts to a 12-step program for getting off the addiction to growth. If you need to grow in order to survive, then you’re not a real business – you’re just a brand name on debt.

Here’s the quintessence of the recommendations to be gleaned from hearing my talks, reading my book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, or listening to my TeamHuman podcast. Of course, if you read the book you’ll see the arguments for why these strategies will work, and how they expose the false assumptions we’ve been working under for a few centuries, now. But here are the basic principles.

1. In all decisions, optimize for the velocity of money over the accumulation of capital. How do we keep money moving instead of piling up? If you are sitting on money that can’t be deployed, you are taking too much out of the system.

2. Make them rich. Make your customers, suppliers, partners, and even your competitors rich. If you drain the value from your marketplace, your customers won’t have money to spend with you. If you squeeze your suppliers on margins, they will be looking to do business with anyone else at the first opportunity. If you make everyone who comes into contact with you wealthy, they will want to keep working with you.

3. Employ bounded investment strategies. Think of the US Steelworkers, who invested their retirement money in construction projects that also put steelworkers to work. Or their subsequent decision to invest in projects that hired them to build nursing homes for their own parents. This triple and quadruple dipping is not a conflict of interests, but the leverage that comes with bounded investing. With boundaries, you can generate the cyclone effect required to enhance the velocity of money. Don’t earn ten dollars once; earn one dollar ten times.

4. Push for a tax policy that promotes revenues instead capital gains. Shareholders are addicted to growth of share price because dividends are taxed higher. Reverse the tax code to promote flow over growth. Dividends and payroll should be tax incentivized; passive capital gains, discouraged.

5. Organize as Platform Cooperatives.  Think Uber, where the drivers own the company. Even if they’re getting replaced by autonomous vehicles, they are going to own the company for which their labor served as the R&D and machine learning.  Labor must participate in ownership of the means of production, instead of simply getting a redistribution of spoils after the fact through taxes. Coops like Winco beat shareholder companies like Walmart wherever they compete.

6. Local crowdfunding. If you run a bank or credit union, instead of giving 100k loan to a small business, give 50k contingent on their ability to raise the other 50k from the community, through advance-sale discount coupons. Customers pay $100 for $120 of pizza at the restaurant when it finishes expansion. Locals invest in their community and Main St, instead of outsourcing investment to the S&P, and draining local coffers.

7. Develop favor banks and local currencies. An economy is people with needs and people with skills. They shouldn’t be hampered for lack of a means of exchange. Local currencies and favor banks allow for the exchange of value without borrowing at interest from a central treasury. This also means local businesses in the chain can transcend the artificial growth requirement.

8. Cooperative businesses cooperate. Do everything open source, open API, and without “trade secrets.” Maintaining secrets shows you believe your company’s best innovations are in the past. Sharing secrets means you know your best innovations lie ahead, and that you benefit from everyone being smarter. It positions you as the center of competence in your field, dedicated to promoting a culture of learning and innovation.

9. Larger companies can enact economic experiments as local, limited trials. No need to turn the whole ship. Sell the ideas to the CEO or Board  as public relations stunts, then use their success to promote them throughout company. Walmart can introduce an aisle of locally produced goods; supermarkets can open parking lot to farmers market on Sundays; banks can offer local crowdfunding apps. Promote disruptive ideas as if they are just one-offs, not the radical game-changing innovations they really are.

10. Run your company like a family business. Family businesses do better in every metric than shareholder owned businesses. They make more money in the long run, have better-paid employees, more stability, less damage externalized to the community or environment, and so on. They are concerned with legacy, the family name, the relationship of their own families to communities in which they live, and the company itself as the inheritance they are bequeathing subsequent generations.

11. Develop new metrics for success other than growth. Put them down on paper. How prosperous is the community in which we are operating? How many unsolicited resumes from qualified candidates are coming in? How well are our suppliers doing? Do our frontline employees feel they are being supported by the company?

12. Your goods and services are your product – not your stock. Don’t build a company to sell it to someone else; build it to run it, yourself. Companies are not disposable. An “exit strategy” is for Ponzi schemes. The world is connected. The environment is limited. The economy is circular. There is nowhere to run.

Before emailing me for references for all this, please know that you can find everything in my book Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. You can even just get it at the library, and use the index to find the answers you want.

Photo by naturalflow

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Going local puts more focus on what’s really important: friends and family, community, good food, clean environment.

This 2-minute animated video from our friends at Local Futures offers a succinct and accessible intro to localization.

As the narrator explains, localisation fosters community, creates more and better jobs, reduced inequality and cuts pollution. In this way it is the perfect antidote to corporate globalisation.

In the current political climate, we’d like to note that nationalism is not in any way the same as localization, and that corporate globalisation is not in any way the same as global cooperation. As the old sustainability maxim says, think global act local!

The post Going Local: the Solution-Multiplier (A short introduction to economic localization) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

(34 MINS) Yochai Benkler – Democratic capitalism is in crisis. Brexit and the Trump nomination marked victories for xenophobic economic nationalism that would have been unimaginable in these two bastions of free trade, globalization, and liberal pluralism a decade ago. They reflect one trajectory of rebellion against the era of oligarchic capitalism that began in 1973 and crashed on the shoals of the Great Recession. The urgent task of the moment is to define a clear alternative. Platform cooperativism is at the cutting edge of defining that next ideological framework, the set of ideas, institutions, norms, practices, and beliefs that will allow us to understand the present stage of market society and to re-embed markets in social relations in ways that will produce a more egalitarian, open, and politically stable market society. Work on the commons and cooperation, on collaborative and learning organizations, FOSS, peer production, and a broader set of disciplines and practices that have developed over the past twenty years provide the foundations of a more decentralized, self-governed, socially-embedded model of market society. It emphasizes the diversity of motivations, institutions, and organizational forms, it recognizes that power in markets is as endemic as it is in the state, and seeks to construct systems that are resilient to these forms of power and allow their participants to engage in self-governance and continuous experimentation, learning, and adaptation in communities of practice. This emerging view of market society is in direct competition with more technologically-deterministic, still-neoliberal conceptions of how market society will develop in the coming decades as well as the resurgent xenophobic nationalism that challenges the very foundations of open society. .”

Discussion

Trebor Scholz: “Yochai Benkler’s talk, in particular, stood out. In his Saturday-morning lecture, he presented platform cooperativism as an attempt to “build a coherent intellectual framework to offer an alternative to the failed ideology of the past forty years.” He is clear: “platform cooperatives will neither kill nor be killed by investor firms,” but there is sufficient room in the current market situation so that platform co-ops can strive. Benkler, a professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, situates platform cooperativism as a “core location for the development of new ideas in the pursuit of an open social economy.” For those less steeped in social economy studies, the term “social economy” refers to economic activities amongst the community. It is located between the economies of the private and public sectors.

Yochai Benkler begins with an account of two ideological periods in politico-economic history — that of managerial capitalism, beginning around World War II and ending during the inflation crisis of the early 1970s, and that of oligarchical capitalism, the period in which neoliberal thought and the Washington Consensus were central. The actuality of a Washington Consensus represents the claim that there is an optimal organizational form such as the investor-owned firm, which upstarts are then called upon to adopt to succeed “in the teeth of the market.” Benkler foregrounded that, ideologically, the actuality of the Washington Consensus depended on ideas such as the reduction of the economy to the self-motivated individual, the reality of predictable, calculable risk, and the importance of planned, controlled, and ultimately stable ventures. For Benkler, however, the victory of the Trump and Brexit campaigns is indicative of a general collapse of the neoliberal model and thus an opening which will be filled by a new economic understanding. He relates these political wins in part to the inequality caused by the extreme and unmatched extraction of wealth by the top 10% in the U.S. and the UK.

Benkler is skeptical about two particular visions of what might replace neoliberalism. First, there are the likes of Peter Thiel who argue for a new age of techno-libertarianism wherein technological development can run its course unimpeded by the state, with deregulation allowing markets to reward talent and accelerate us into a fully-automated Star Trek economy. Benkler did not name Thiel, but Peter Thiel does illustrate this point in his book Zero to One. Here, he argues that only through deregulation, monopolistic genius can be free to innovate us into a post-scarcity future. Second, there are proponents for what Benkler calls “nudge progressivism,” a return to the managerial capitalism of the mid-20th century, only updated and made more efficient by big data analysis.

For Benkler, these two imaginary successors fail to take into consideration the social embeddedness of systems, which is becoming central to all sorts of academic disciplines including sociology, economics, and management science. This “social embeddedness” indicates that we can no longer reduce the motivations of economic actors to rational self-interest, but must also acknowledge the existence of varying, socially-constructed drives and desires. There is a need to look beyond homo economicus to homo socialis, as Benkler puts it.

What Benkler proposes as an alternative future is a network pragmatism which seizes the space for experimentation. Rather than believing ourselves unfailing, he claims we must embrace our fallibilism, understanding that our success will come not from the perfect execution of a pre-planned attempt, but rather a rapid iteration which utilizes the knowledge generated by our applied inquiries to drive us forward and upward.

He stresses that local communities do know best about their needs if only given the chance for reflection through practical experience: trial and error and trial again. It is, he says, precisely this experience which is denied to these communities when they engage with investor capital, which immediately subjects any attempt to the logic of the “tyranny of the margin,” the need to compete in the market, to maximize profits. To produce flexible organizations which can continually adapt and innovate as circumstances change and our knowledge grows, Benkler suggests that we look to methodologies that have already proved successful. These could include institutional analysis and development framework developed by political economist Elinor Ostrom, as well as tech-sector models like commons-based peer production, free and open source software development, and even lean startup models. One challenge will be to determine how platform co-ops can exist as what Scholz calls “soft enclosures” that insulate populations from economically and politically hostile surroundings while also contributing to the commons. Platform co-ops like Fairmondo and Loconomics Cooperative are already sharing their code base and by-laws.

For Benkler, network pragmatism is fundamentally about the embrace of the diversity of organizational forms. This pursuit of an “organizational bricolage” resonates with our understanding that platform cooperatives are but one practical near-term alternative. They are part of this bricolage of the solidarity economy, the pro-commons movement, and various other successful organizational forms including B-corps, non-profits engaged in economic production, philanthropic LLCs, and, central to our community, platform co-ops.” (http://platform.coop/stories/happy-new-year)

Photo by Creativity103

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