P2P Politics – P2P Foundation

New generations meet new alternatives: the Commons and the Youth Initiative Program

Stacco Troncoso — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Scroll down to the videos below to see young, engaged commoners describing the state of the art in Open Coops and P2P Politics.

When talking about enclosures in the Commons, we usually think of natural or cultural resources. But there’s something else that’s vulnerable to enclosure, which I hesitate to describe as a “resource”: emancipatory imagination. One of the worst effects of capitalist realism is the endless bad-mouthing of alternatives to its toxicity. With this in mind, I’d like to share with you some extraordinary examples of imaginative prototyping exercises towards commons-oriented futures — presented by the very people who will bring them about in the face of darker possibilities.

I recently had the honor of teaching a group of 18-28 year olds taking part in an initiative called YIP, or “Youth Initiative Program”. YIP describes itself as a program for social entrepreneurs and personal growth. At first, I was hesitant about agreeing to participate. I believe “social entrepreneurship” wedges profiteering in as the payoff for taking people and planet into account — a well-meaning but doomed attempt. Still, it was a chance to speak and share the language of the commons with a decidedly different demographic than the usual P2P/Commons/eco crowd, so I accepted the offer.

On the second week of December I arrived at the Findhorn community, located on the Scottish Highlands, not sure what to expect. On the first day of teaching, I found the group to be very friendly, if unclear of what this commons and P2P stuff was all about. As we got started, one of the students interrupted me during the first presentation.

– “What is surplus?”

– “Oh, it’s the same as profit”

– “And what is profit?”

Uh oh, I thought to myself. As budding “social entrepreneurs”, I had expected them to be familiar with basic mainstream economics; I thought I’d find the ground primed for me to shoot down its misconceptions and vices. Shockingly, this was not the case. Some of the students were familiar with economics from prior interest and experience, but overall, they had focused on personal and group work rather than the realities and possibilities of the world beyond their immediate circle.

Over the following days the teaching proved a lot more challenging and involved than I had expected, but I wanted to make sure that the group understood everything.

“These are complex concepts, but I’m not going to dumb them down for you, because you are not dumb – you can get this”, I told them. And did they ever.

We soon found a rhythm, grasping the overall systems of the commons and P2P, cosmo-local production, etc. — not as something to rote memorize and parrot back, but by recognizing commoning as something commonplace in our interactions with the world, yet often made invisible.

During the second half of two of the sessions, I asked the students to prototype an Open Coop and a municipalist coalition five years into the future. If you are not familiar, Open Coops are locally grounded, yet transnationally networked cooperatives that are commons-generating, multi constituent, and with a focus on social and environmental work. If you want to find out more, read this article. Meanwhile, a municipalist coalition is an “instrumental” electoral vehicle through which diverse political actors, (Pirates, lefties, greens, occupiers, hackers, feminists, and those unaffiliated with political parties) can present themselves for election through bottom-up participative structures (find out more about municipalism and P2P politics here).

The remit for both exercises was to imagine the (successful) Open Coop or Municipal platform five years into the future. The groups would deliberate and prepare for a TED-style short presentation. In the case of Open Coops, they would explain how their projects would fit within the criteria described above. With P2P politics, they had to base their project on an existing city or town, taking local conditions into account but also allowing for transnational movement building with other locales.

I have done this exercise several times over the last few years with 30-60 year olds, mainly. What emerges is always exciting but, once the workshop is over, I don’t imagine most of the attendees going off to form their own Open Coops or Municipalist coalitions the next day. What happened at YIP was quite different. Not only had the group understood and internalised the logics of the Commons and Peer to Peer, but they flawlessly articulated exciting visions for commons-oriented markets and politics. The prototypes, which you can see in the videos below, were nothing short of staggering. They also felt realistic and doable. More importantly, the Yippies (no relation to Jerry Rubin and co… I think!) were genuinely excited about their ideas and looked forward to making them a reality in some form or another.

The videos were recorded on a whim and a cellphone cam, so the sound and image quality aren’t stellar, but the short presentations are focused and easy to follow.

Here is the video on Open Coops.

And here is the video on municipalist coalitions practising P2P politics.

On balance, it was a very satisfactory week, both for the students and myself. In a closing circle, they expressed an awakened interest in politics and economics, subjects which some of the students had previously found irrelevant or unsavoury. As one Yippie said, “I didn’t realise that what I disliked was capitalist economics, or neoliberal policies. I am now ready to explore the alternatives we’ve talked about this week”.

The experience at YIP has proven to be momentous for me, and I am now much more invested in bring Commons pedagogy to newer generations. They are decidedly not dumb. They can make this happen, but we need to do everything in our power to make sure they do. A toast: here’s to the Yippies and the futures they can co-create.

The Yippies have a crowdfund going to fund an internship to engage with global communities, biodynamic gardeners, alternative education, the arts, and social and agricultural initiatives. Please consider supporting them in this endeavour. Based on our conversations, I am certain they will take the opportunity to develop some of the prototypes shown in the videos while developing their understanding of the commons in practical ways. Thank you.

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Re-imaging Politics through the Lens of the Commons

David Bollier — Wed, 11 Oct 2017 07:00:00 +0000

This essay of mine appeared on September 21 at journal-e, published by the 21st Century Global Dynamics website, UC Santa Barbara.

The rise of so many right-wing nationalist movements around the world—Brexit, Donald Trump, the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, anti-immigrant protests throughout Europe—have their own distinctive origins and contexts, to be sure. But in the aggregate, they are evidence of the dwindling options for credible change that capitalist political cultures are willing to consider. This naturally provokes the question: Why are the more wholesome alternative visions so scarce and scarcely believable?

Political elites and their corporate brethren are running out of ideas for how to reconcile the deep contradictions of “democratic capitalism” as it now exists. Even social democrats and liberals, the traditional foes of free-market dogma, seem locked into an archaic worldview and set of political strategies that makes their advocacy sound tinny. Their familiar progress-narrative—that economic growth, augmented by government interventions and redistribution, can in fact work and make society more stable and fair—is no longer persuasive.

Below, I argue that the commons paradigm offers a refreshing and practical lens for re-imagining politics, governance and law. The commons, briefly put, is about self-organized social systems for managing shared wealth. Far from a “tragedy,” the commons as a system for mutualizing responsibilities and benefits is highly generative. It can be seen in the successful self-management of forests, farmland, and water, and in open source software communities, open-access scholarly journals, and “cosmo-local” design and manufacturing systems.

The 2008 financial crisis drew back the curtain on many consensus myths that have kept the neoliberal capitalist narrative afloat. It turns out that growth is not something that is widely or equitably shared. A rising tide does not raise all boats because the poor, working class, and even the middle class do not share much of the productivity gains, tax breaks, or equity appreciation that the wealthy enjoy. The intensifying concentration of wealth is creating a new global plutocracy, whose members are using their fortunes to dominate and corrupt democratic processes while insulating themselves from the ills afflicting everyone else. No wonder the market/state system and the idea of liberal democracy is experiencing a legitimacy crisis.

Given this general critique, I believe that the most urgent challenge of our times is to develop a new socio-political imaginary that goes beyond those now on offer from the left or right. We need to imagine new sorts of governance and provisioning arrangements that can transform, tame, or replace predatory markets and capitalism. Over the past 50 years, the regulatory state has failed to abate the relentless flood of anti-ecological, anti-consumer, anti-social “externalities” generated by capitalism, largely because the power of capital has eclipsed that of the nation-state and citizen sovereignty. Yet the traditional left continues to believe, mistakenly, that a warmed-over Keynesianism, wealth-redistribution, and social programs are politically achievable and likely to be effective.

The 2008 financial crisis drew back the curtain on many consensus myths that have kept the neoliberal capitalist narrative afloat.

Cultural critic Douglas Rushkoff has said, “I’ve given up on fixing the economy. The economy is not broken. It’s simply unjust.” In other words, the economy is working more or less as its capitalist overseers intend it to work. Citizens often despair because struggle for change within conventional democratic politics is often futile—and not just because democratic processes are corrupted. State bureaucracies and even competitive markets are structurally incapable of addressing many problems. The limits of what The System can deliver—on climate change, inequality, infrastructure, democratic accountability—are on vivid display every day. As distrust in the state grows, a very pertinent question is where political sovereignty and legitimacy will migrate in the future.

The fundamental problem in developing a new vision, however, is that old ideological debates continue to dominate public discourse. Politics is endlessly rehashing many of the same disagreements, failing to recognize that deep structural change is needed. There is precious little room for new ideas and projects to incubate and grow. New visions must have space to breathe and evolve their own sovereign logic and ethics if they are to escape the dead end of meliorist reformism.

As I explained in a recent piece for The Nation magazine insurgent narratives and projects are actually quite plentiful. Movements focused on climate justice, co-operatives, transition towns, local food systems, alternative finance, digital currencies, peer production, open design and manufacturing, among others, are pioneering new post-capitalist models of peer governance and provisioning. While fragmented and diverse, these movements tend to emphasize common themes: production and consumption to meet household needs, not profit; bottom-up decision making; and stewardship of shared wealth for the long term. These values all lie at the heart of the commons.

For now, these movements tend to work on the cultural fringe, more or less ignored by the mainstream media and political parties. But that is precisely what has allowed them to evolve with integrity and substance. Only here, on the periphery, have these movements been able to escape the stodgy prejudices and self-serving institutional priorities of political parties, government agencies, the commercial media, philanthropy, academia, and the entrenched nonprofit-industrial complex.

Why is the public imagination for transformation change so stunted? In part because most established institutions are more focused on managing their brand reputations and organizational franchises. Taking risks and developing bold new initiatives and ideas are not what they generally do. Meanwhile, system-change movements are generally dismissed as too small-scale, trivial or apolitical to matter. They also fade into the shadows because they tend to rely on Internet-based networks to build new sorts of power, affordances (structural capacities for individual agency), and moral authority that mainstream players don’t understand or respect. Examples include the rise of the peasant farmers’ group La Via Campesina, transnational collaboration among indigenous peoples, platform co-operatives that foster sharing alternatives to Uber and Airbnb, and the System for Rice Intensification (a kind of open source agriculture developed by farmers themselves).

Rather than try to manage themselves as hierarchical organizations with proprietary franchises, reputations, and overhead to sustain, activists see themselves as part of social movements working as flexible players in open, fluid environments. Their network-driven activism enables them to more efficiently self-organize and coordinate activities, attract self-selected participants with talent, and implement fast cycles of creative iteration.

System-change movements tend to eschew the conventional policy and political process, and instead seek change through self-organized emergence. In ecological terms, they are using open digital networks to try to create “catchment areas,” a landscape in which numerous flows converge (water, vegetation, soil, organisms, etc.) to give rise to an interdependent, self-replenishing zone of lively energy. As two students of complexity theory and social movements, Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze write:

When separate, local efforts connect with each other as networks, then strengthen as communities of practice, suddenly and surprisingly a new system emerges at a greater level of scale. This system of influence possesses qualities and capacities that were unknown in the individuals. It isn’t that they were hidden; they simply don’t exist until the system emerges. They are properties of the system, not the individual, but once there, individuals possess them. And the system that emerges always possesses greater power and influence than is possible through planned, incremental change. Emergence is how life creates radical change and takes things to scale.

The old guard of electoral politics and standard economics has trouble comprehending the principle of emergence, let alone recognizing the need for innovative policy structures that could leverage and focus that dynamic power. It has consistently underestimated the bottom-up innovation enabled by open source software; the speed and reliability of Wikipedia-style coordination and knowledge-aggregation, and the power of social media in catalyzing viral self-organization such as the Occupy movement, the Indignados and Podemos in Spain, the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, and Syriza in Greece. Conventional schools of economics, politics and power do not comprehend the generative capacities of decentralized, self-organized networks. They apply obsolete categories of institutional control and political analysis, as if trying to understand the ramifications of automobiles through the language of “horseless carriages.”

Instead of clinging to the old left/right spectrum of political ideology—which reflects the centrality of “the market” and “the state” in organizing society—we need to entertain new narratives that allow us to imagine new drivers of governance, production and culture. In my personal work, I see the enormous potential of the commons as farmers and fisherpeople, urban citizens and Internet users, try to reclaim shared resources that have been seized to feed the capitalist machine—and to devise their own governance alternatives. In this, the commons is at once a paradigm, a discourse, a set of social practices, and an ethic.

Over the past five years or more, the commons has served as a kind of overarching meta-narrative for diverse movements to challenge the marketization and transactionalization of everything, the dispossession and privatization of resources, and the corruption of democracy. The commons has also provided a language and ethic for thinking and acting like a commoner—collaborative, socially minded, embedded in nature, concerned with stewardship and long-term, respectful of the pluriverse that makes up our planet.

If we are serious about effecting system change, we need to start by emancipating ourselves from some backward-looking concepts and vocabularies. We need to instigate new post-capitalist ways of talking about the provisioning models and peer governance now emerging. Influencing unfolding realities may be less about electing different leaders and policies than about learning how to change ourselves, orchestrate a new shared intentionality, and hoist up new narratives about the commons.

This essay first appeared in 21st Century Global Dynamics, Volume 10, Issue 62, September 21, 2017.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 International license

Notes

1 The Digger Archives: http://www.diggers.org/digger_dollar.htm
2 Garret Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science (Vol. 162, Issue 3859, 1968), pp. 1243-1248.
For one critique of Hardin’s model, see Ian Angus, “The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons”:
http://climateandcapitalism.com/2008/08/25/debunking-the-tragedy-of-the-…

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Commons in the Time of Monsters: an Introduction to P2P Politics

Stacco Troncoso — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 08:00:00 +0000

Join me on Monday, 18th of September at Newspeak House in London at 7:00 PM for a workshop on the Commons, P2P, and Peer to Peer Politics. See you there!

Event Description

After 40 years of neoliberalization, the promised end of history has led to a decomposition of established hierarchical systems, including politics. This process has culminated in Brexit and Trump. While there are strong reactions against these, the current of political change cannot be rewound back towards neoliberalism. However, alternatives based on the logic of networks and Peer to Peer are emerging and gaining attention.

Join Stacco Troncoso from the P2P Foundation to discuss on how Commons-based peer production — the relational dynamic behind projects such as Wikipedia and Linux — can prefigure new heterarchical systems for dealing with complexity, and how the figure of the “commoner” can be seen as an emancipatory political subject. The discussion will also analyse the municipality coalitions which successfully won local elections in many of Spain’s major cities and how this process contributes to what we call a Commons Transition.

Free entrance
Event link

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Project Of The Day: City Repair Project

Nathan Slater — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 23:47:09 +0000

Mark Lakeman

I first learned about place-making from Mark Lakeman at his office in Portland. In addition to running an architecture/design business, (Communitecture) Mark co-founded City Repair Project.

City Repair takes a hands-on approach to placemaking by sponsoring the Village Building Convergence (VBC).

Hands-on placemaking programs like VBC provides three benefits:

A live project brings together organizations. (see #1. North Tabor Mandala project, below)
A live project attracts people. (see #2. Beech Street project, below)
A live project motivates action. (see #3. Right To Dream, Too project, below)

City Repair’s mission page explains their philosophy of placemaking:

City Repair facilitates artistic and ecologically-oriented placemaking through projects that honor the interconnection of human communities and the natural world.

City Repair’s history page cites placemaking program:

Our biggest annual program is the Village Building Convergence. Over the past 15 years we have facilitated 1000s of community members in their placemaking journey.

City Repair’s Intersection Repair page feature many of their live projects.

Here are three examples:

1. North Tabor Mandala

Extracted from http://www.cityrepair.org/north-tabor-mandala

2015 Description:

North Tabor Neighborhood Association in conjunction with South East Uplift was overjoyed to bring an intersection mandala into the heart of the neighborhood. In the spirit of their long term goals to bring life, culture, and vibrancy to the community, they worked with the local Portland Montessori School, whose upper elementary school children produced a design of geometric shapes, angles, and patterns.

2. Beech Street Project

Extracted from https://www.facebook.com/BeechStProject/?fref=nf Beech St. Project

December 2, 2014

Hi Neighbors! In case you missed it our little street made international news. The project and the story are inspiring community builders in Japan!.

January 23, 2016

Japanese group tour PDX Placemaking

Extracted from http://www.cityrepair.org/blog/2016/1/23/japanese-group-tour-pdx-placemaking

On 1/16 and 1/23, workers from a Japanese factory visited The City Repair Project and Propel Studio to learn about our design work to serve communities.

We presented on our work and then toured placemaking sites including the Hawthorne Hostel on SE 31st and Hawthorne and the Dialogue Dome/Cob Oven/Grazing Gardens of Portland State University.

3. Right To Dream, Too

Extracted from http://www.cityrepair.org/calendar/2016/2/4/support-right-2-dream-too-at-city-council

Calendar of EventsSupport Right 2 Dream Too at City Council!

Thursday, February 18, 2016
2:00pm 5:00pm
Portland City Hall1220 SW 5th AvePortland, OR

City Council will be discussing an item titled “SE Harrison Street Vacation and Karl Arruda Zoning Confirmation Letter and Use Agreement for SE 3rd & Harrison” which is to make way for Right 2 Dream Too to inhabit a new space. Please come out to support our villager friends!

Extracted from http://www.portlandoregon.gov/auditor/56674

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A Introduction to the Basic P2P Ideas; Part 2: P2P Politics.

Stacco Troncoso — Thu, 25 Jun 2015 13:25:43 +0000

Over the last ten years, the P2P Foundation has produced a sizeable body of material, both original and curated, but none of it is specifically designed as an introduction for newcomers and people who are not so familiar with the P2P approach. Hence Irma Wilson‘s proposal, during a trip which FutureSharp helped organize in South Africa in the two first weeks of June 2015, to produce a number of short videos. With Irma’s assistance, and the help of filmmaker Michel Taljaard, we produced four videos which are being serialised here in the P2P Foundation Blog and which will be compiled in a forthcoming Commons Transition Article.

This second video second outlines the basic political ideas of the P2P Foundation.

Photo by Pablo G Villaraco

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Theses on P2P Politics, published in “The Square”

Stacco Troncoso — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 08:29:17 +0000

The latest issue of “The Square” newspaper, edited by Ivor Stodolsky, features articles by Michel Bauwens, Nika Dubrovsky/ Feminist Pencil, Grey Violet (aka Maria Shtern), Núria Güell, G.U.L.F., Noah Fischer/Occupy Museums, Teivo Teivainen & Ivor Stodolsky, Telekommunisten and Nadya Tolokno (Tolokonnikova) of Zona Prava/Pussy Riot. Michel’s piece is entitled “Thesis in P2P Politics”

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