In recent years, many researchers and social activists from very different countries, like myself, have rediscovered the notion of the commons as a key idea to deepen social and environmental justice and democratise both politics and the economy. This reappropriation has meant questioning the vanguardist and hierarchical visions, structures and practices that for too long have characterised much of the left. This concept has resurfaced in parallel with the growing distrust in the market and the state as the main suppliers or guarantors of access to essential goods and services. The combined pressures of climate change and the crisis of capitalism that exploded in 2008 (a permanent and global crisis, which is no longer a series of conjunctural or cyclical recessions) force us to reconsider old paradigms, tactics and strategies. This means discarding both the obsolete models of planning and centralised production at the core of the so-called ‘real socialism’ of the last century and the state capitalism that we see today in China and a few other supposedly socialist countries, as well as the equally old and failed structures of present-day deregulated capitalist economies.

At first, the concept of the commons was disseminated by progressive intellectuals inspired by the work of Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, in 2009. Ostrom, an American political scientist, was a progressive academic, but could hardly be classified as a radical thinker or as a leftist activist. In the last decade, academics and activists from very diverse ideological families of the left have reviewed her contributions and have engaged in intense theoretical debates about the potential of the commons, based on the analysis of many inspiring prefigurative experiences currently underway.

Ostrom’s main contribution was to demonstrate that many self-organised local communities around the world successfully managed a variety of natural resources without relying on market mechanisms or state institutions. Currently, it is possible to identify various perspectives in the theoretical debates around the commons, but in general they all converge on the importance of a third space between the state and the market (which should not be confused with the Third Way outlined by Anthony Giddens and adopted by politicians as dissimilar as Tony Blair in Britain, Bill Clinton in the United States, or Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Brazil as a hypothetical social democratic alternative to socialism and neoliberalism).

Nowadays, a quick search in Google about the commons results in millions of references. Most definitions tend to characterise commons as spaces for collective management of resources that are co-produced and managed by a community according to their own rules and norms. We (TNI) have recently published a report on the commons in partnership with the P2P Foundation, in which we refer to this concept as the combination of four basic elements: (1) material or immaterial resources managed collectively and democratically; (2) social processes that foster and deepen cooperative relationships; (3) a new logic of production and a new set of productive processes; and (4) a paradigm shift, which conceives the commons as an advance beyond the classical market/state or public/private binary oppositions.

In Latin America and Spain, those of us interested in this field of activism and research must overcome a linguistic obstacle, since the translation of the concept of the commons from English into Spanish is not always easy or appropriate. This problem also appears in other parts of the world, so we often use the original English word to avoid confusion. Some of our friends and comrades use the concept of bienes comunes, but this term refers to ideas linked to the old economy or the social imaginary propagated by the church and other conservative institutions, without capturing all the richness, complexity and potential of recent theoretical developments and empirical processes around the commons. Obviously, the production of meaning in this field has already spread beyond the Anglo-Saxon world and there are already many people in countries of the South involved in this type of processes. That’s why the P2P Foundation and other friendly organisations have added a new word to the Spanish dictionary, procomún, while others (like myself) prefer to use the word comunes, which derives from a literal translation of the original term. From a similar perspective, many European or African activists prefer to use the English term instead of bens comuns (Portuguese), beni comuni (Italian), biens communs (in French), or gemeingüter (German).

Are the concepts of ‘the commons’ and ‘the public’ synonymous?

This question is the axis of heated theoretical debates, since it alludes to the old discussion about the nature and role of the state. The defenders of the commons who are most disillusioned with the left in government in several Latin American countries, particularly those linked to the fundamentalist autonomist current (like many of my friends in the Andean region, mainly those who are involved in struggles around the rights to water or energy) are convinced that the state should not assume any role and that the social order should be restructured by transferring political and economic power to self-organised local communities. Other researchers and activists (including myself, something that’s not surprising having been born in a country as state-centric as Uruguay) retort that such a contradiction is artificial and that we should at the same time expand the reach and influence of the commons – for example, by creating and interconnecting new types of authentically self-managed cooperative enterprises– and democratising or ‘commonising’ the state – for instance, incorporating workers and users into the management of existing state-owned enterprises or creating new public-public partnerships for the provision of essential public services.

My friend Michel Bauwens, a Belgian social activist internationally recognised as one of the most creative and influential thinkers in this field, often highlights the importance of what he has characterised as the partner state. From his (and mine) perspective, the state is perceived not as the enemy, but as an entity that could provide local communities and self-organised workers with the institutional, political or economic power that would be required for these processes to reach their maximum potential in the framework of the political and economic transition that we need. It also means, among several other possibilities to be considered, the provision of financial or in-kind support for cooperatives or other initiatives inspired by the notion of the commons.

The idea of the ​​partner state is in line with some relatively recent theoretical debates among Marxist thinkers. Today, and especially after a series of counter-hegemonic governments that we have had in Latin America, we’re already very aware that the contemporary state is not simply that “committee for the management of the common affairs of the bourgeoisie” that Marx and Engels referred to in the Communist Manifesto. Neither Marx nor Engels were interested in developing a unified or integral theory about the state, so we should not interpret their statement (from the year 1848!) literally,. In the 1970s, Nikos Poulantzas and other non-dogmatic thinkers began to rethink the institutional framework of capitalist societies and argued that the state should be understood as a social relationship and not as an abstract entity floating above conflicting social classes, and added that the transformation of state institutions could be possible in the context of a “democratic way to socialism” (opened by the government experience of Popular Unity in Chile and brutally repressed by a military coup in 1973). More recently, Bob Jessop has shown how, although the state has a strong structural bias towards the reproduction of social relations, it’s also influenced by the totality of social forces, including counter-hegemonic struggles. My perspective of analysis on the state and the commons is very influenced by Jessop, and also by David Harvey, when he argues that a big problem on the left is that many – pointing to John Holloway and other proponents of the thesis of “changing the world without taking power” – think that the capture of state power wouldn’t be of much importance in emancipatory processes. We must recognise the incredible power accumulated in the institutions of the state and, therefore, we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of state institutions; in particular when there’re opportunities to enable the expansion of the commons.

To those who are interested in deepening the knowledge of contemporary theoretical debates on the state and the commons, I would recommend reading our comrade Hilary Wainwright, the British political economist with whom I co-coordinate the TNI New Politics Project. A few years ago Hilary wrote a beautiful book, Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy, where she argued the need to ‘occupy’ state institutions while, in parallel, we organise ourselves to create and connect new political and economic institutions rooted in local communities and workers’ collectives. Her books, the one mentioned here and more recent ones, are based on the detailed investigation of positive examples of commons-related initiatives across the Globe.

In recent years, within the framework of our New Politics project, Hilary, myself, and many other activist-scholars from different regions of the world have tried to make sense of a substantial shift in emancipatory thinking. Until not long ago, the economic policy of much of the left included the proposal of nationalisation of key industries. Nowadays, and maybe influenced by the recognition of the failures or shortcomings of nationalisation in places like Venezuela (where in recent years there’s been a recentralisation of political and economic power in the hands of the bureaucrats and military that control the reins of the state, with very negative in terms of lesser autonomy and influence for popular organisations and with very bad indicators in the management of nationalised companies) many of us are more interested in the design of a new economy based on cooperative relations, in which state institutions would play a facilitating and protective role. We emphasise the importance of public ownership of public services and productive infrastructure, but only as long we ensure a significant level of decentralised ownership and management; for example, in the provision of water and energy services and in the production of a vast range of goods through networks of self-managed ventures.

This perspective also means a deeper and more serene examination of the ambivalent consequences of the scientific and technological changes currently underway. We already know that the emerging forms of organisation and control of information and communication technologies and distributed production constitute a very contested space, in which a few transnational corporations (I’m thinking of Uber, Airbnb and other examples of the wrongly called ‘sharing economy’) financialise and benefit from precarious workers, the users of social networks and independent software programmers – with negative impacts on unions’ power and on the quality of work – but we should also be able to recognise that the same technological developments could be beneficial for the (re)creation of truly solidarity, democratic and self-managed forms of ownership and management. Around the world, we can see the emergence of a new generation of workers who use their technological knowledge to launch new enterprises and networks based on the principles of the commons and coordinate and collaborate among themselves, transcending economic sectors and geographical borders, and being ethically (and increasingly also politically) aware of the new social and economic order they’re creating.

How would you appraise the so-called ‘pink tide’ in Latin America vis-à-vis the commons?

My personal perspective on these issues has evolved, as I tried to understand the arguments of comrades from other Latin American countries who posed a very strong critique of the statist political culture prevalent in some political and academic circles of the region. Like many Uruguayans, it was hard for me to assimilate the positions of compañeros like Pablo Solón in Bolivia, Edgardo Lander in Venezuela, Arturo Escobar in Colombia, Maristella Stampa in Argentina, or Eduardo Gudynas himself in Uruguay. They (and many others) are strong critics of ‘development’, and in particular of its ‘(neo)extractivist’ component. In short, my critique to them focused on two aspects: their staunch criticism of the state, and their inability to formulate alternatives or proposals to transcend the reality that they criticised. With the passage of time, and after many and agitated discussions with Pablo and Edgardo in workshops at the World Social Forum, seminars of our New Politics project and other similar spaces, I could understand that their criticisms of the state (not always so homogeneous nor so acidic as I perceived them) were not that far from my own criticism of the Latin American left, and I also ended up realising that indeed there were proposals embedded in their criticisms.

My position on these issues has also been influenced by my increasingly pessimistic interpretation of the outcomes of our progressive of left governments. After having followed very closely the processes of Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, and to a lesser extent also those of Bolivia and Nicaragua, I think we should ask ourselves up to what point is it possible for the left to get involved in government without losing autonomy and our utopian perspective. In other word: is it possible to operate within the state apparatus without being caught in the demobilising logic of institutional power? Unlike some of the friends I mentioned before, I don’t have a single or categorical answer to such question. I still believe that the state has a very important role to play, but I’m also convinced that it is now imperative for the left to get rid of its obsolete state-centric vision and open up to fresh perspectives like those of the commons.

For the Uruguayan left, such transition could be difficult, if we consider the heavy weight of the state in our society, politics, economics and culture. A significant difference between Uruguay and most other countries in the region is its long tradition of strong and efficient state-owned companies, which are highly appreciated by the population. In Uruguay, people perceive the state as a catalyst for development and guarantor of equity and social integration. On the other hand, the transition could be made easier if we consider the already high significance of workers’ and housing cooperatives. I grew up in a mutual-aid housing cooperative, so I might not be entirely objective. And we know that not all cooperatives are well managed or are internally democratic or participatory, but when we compare the reality of the Uruguayan cooperative sector with other countries of the region and the world, it’s clear that we already have a very fertile terrain for the development of the commons.

From a purely theoretical or ideological point of view, many components of the current global debate around the commons wouldn’t be a novelty for the Uruguayan left. If we look at several parties that compose the ruling coalition Frente Amplio(Broad Front), we realise that parties as different as the Progressive Christian Democrats (PDC, the advocates of the thesis of socialismo autogestionario, self-managed socialism), the People’s Victory Party (PVP, in line with their libertarian roots), or the Socialist Party (PS, with their proposal of transition from co-management to self-management, which the party has been advocating since 1930, when it demanded workers’ control of the economy) have been for a long time formulating programmatic ideas that transcend the limits of statism.

In other countries of the region, it would seem that the proposal of the commons would be more compatible with the governmental discourse. In fact, the proponents of the commons in Europe often refer to the concepts of vivir bien (living well) or buen vivir (good living), which came from Latin America. These concepts became popular on a world scale as a supposed alternative paradigm to capitalism. The concepts of suma qamaña and sumaq kawsay have their roots in the economic and societal models developed over centuries by the indigenous peoples of the Andean and Amazonian regions, prioritising forms of production more horizontal and in harmony with nature. The translation (or ‘export’) into other languages and cultures is problematic, but in the countries of origin the significance of these concepts can be debated as well. Bolivia and Ecuador, during the governments led by Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, incorporated the notions of living well and good living in their respective constitutions and policy guidelines, but the policies implemented have not always been coherent with the spirit or with the letter of the new legal and institutional framework. In Ecuador, in the framework of the very radical turn to the right performed by president Lenin Moreno in recent months, the discourse of buen vivir (which sounds beautiful and guarantees a left patina) is being used to provide justification for an impending wave of privatisation and corporatization of public services. In Venezuela, there was also much talk around self-management and people’s power, and considerable resources were allocated to the creation of cooperatives and associative ventures of a new type, but in practice very little progress was achieved; the rentier model based on the exploitation of a single resource – oil – deepened during the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, and its current exhaustion is the most important factor to explain the political, economic and social crisis that the country suffers today.

What are the organisational and programmatic challenges of the left for the integration of the idea of the commons into its political platform?

To answer this question, I should start by clarifying that I do not believe that the promotion of the commons should be the only strategy of the left. I believe that we must embrace the emancipatory vision of the commons, but without forgetting the role of the state and the need to respond to the very urgent problems of large sectors of the population. I agree with the criticisms of the hegemonic model of development and support the struggles against extractivism. I also tend to agree with many elements (not the whole package) of the emerging theorisation around the concept of degrowth – which is already very influential among European left circles, but not very significant within the Latin American left. But I disagree with visions such as Escobar’s when he speaks of “underdevelopment” as a mere “narration”, presenting it as an abstract concept that the colonialists would have elaborated and spread for the colonized to repeat. We can’t ignore the terrible rates of poverty, exclusion, and poor access to basic goods and services that still affect millions of Latin Americans. Our region should be incorporated into the global fight against climate change, and we must promote new forms of organisation and production that preserve the ecological balance, but we must also respond to social demands in the context of a quite likely deterioration of the economic situation in the short or medium terms. In that sense, I believe that the impulse to the commons must be framed within a broader strategy of growth, different from that offered by predatory and savage capitalism.

Thinking about the specific conditions of Uruguay, and based on data and projections published by local researchers, it should already be evident that the promotion of mega-projects like the huge paper mills run by Finnish corporations, or the already privatisation of the wind segment of the energy sector, don’t constitute the most appropriate developmental strategy. I would have preferred that the effort made by the government to convince us that the attraction of direct foreign investment and the liberalisation of trade are the right path would have been accompanied by serious studies sustained by reliable information to appraise the pros and cons of two different strategies: supporting large private investment on the one hand, and the promotion of the local and popular solidarity economy on the other. What would be the impacts of redirecting the tax exemptions and the large explicit or covert subsidies received by large transnational corporations if all that money were used to support cooperatives and other associative enterprises rooted in the national economy? I don’t have concrete answers to these queries, but I know that other Uruguayan economists and social researchers also raise similar questions and could provide objective and relevant information to deepen this exchange.

How to incorporate the commons within a political project that aims at the de-commodification of public services?

In Latin America we have many valuable examples of de-commodification of public services, past and present, that we should reconsider in the framework of current exchanges around the commons. A few years ago, during the heyday of what we then praised as the Bolivarian ‘revolution’, I worked in Venezuela and I was able to appreciate very closely the emergence of multiple processes of popular self-organisation in which millions of people participated. I’m referring to the mesas técnicas (people’s technical committees), the consejos comunitarios de agua(community water councils), the consejos comunales (communal councils) and the comunas (communes). Unfortunately, most of these processes are no longer in existence or in terminal crisis. Individualism and competition has been stronger than solidarity and cooperation in the responses to the crisis that Venezuela is experiencing today. This is a sad realisation, which forces us to question ourselves about the reasons and the conditions that made possible the erosion of processes that many of us considered very strong and even irreversible. A large part of the communal and participatory initiatives that had emerged in the most fecund years of the Venezuelan transition have gone into rapid regression when faced with the loss of the resources provided by the state (of which they had become dependent), in the context of the terrible deterioration of the social and economic situation. I think that many lessons can emerge from Venezuela, both on the potential of the commons and on the fragility of processes of this type. It also forces us to rethink the limits of ‘revolutionary’ political projects that are excessively focused on the state.

At the international level, and taking as a basis for analysis the European reality – which is the one that today I know better, since it’s my place of residence, activism and research – I believe that Latin Americans could ‘import’ some interesting ideas from current European exchanges on alternatives to commodification and corporatization. The side of the European left most active side in the promotion of the commons is that linked to struggles around the right to the city and the citizen platforms that won local office in several Spanish cities. Today, an important part of the European left perceives the city as the privileged space for political, social and economic experimentation, without seeing cities as isolated entities or at the margin of processes aimed at changing the state on a national scale, but recognising their growing significance in the new regional and world order. It’s not by chance that the fight against climate change or for the recovery of public services are led by networks of progressive local governments. Barcelona En Comú, the citizen coalition that now governs the Catalan capital, in particular, is a very powerful source of inspiration of regional and world importance. The political influence of Barcelona today is comparable to the hope that Porto Alegre, Montevideo and other Latin American capitals had been generated in the 1980s and 1990s, when the left began to experiment with participatory budgeting and other innovative policies for the radicalisation of democracy at the municipal level. Barcelona is today a laboratory for the design and testing of multiple initiatives inspired by the principle of the commons.

Another possible source of inspiration could be the current program of the British Labour Party. Since Jeremy Corbyn became party leader, Labour has become much more radical than our Frente Amplio and most other left parties in Latin America and Europe. The Labour Party has a proposal for renationalisation that’s much more advanced than similar initiatives applied or proposed anywhere else in the world. In the specific case of the energy sector, Corbyn and his party propose to bring back the sector into public hands, so that the country’ energy becomes environmentally sustainable, affordable for users, and managed with democratic control, as stated in the programmatic manifesto launched last year. But renationalisation, from this perspective, does not simply implies that the state retakes control by going back to the obsolete state-owned companies of the past, but rather the combination of different forms of public ownership and management. In short, Labour proposes not merely to re-nationalise companies that had been privatised during Thatcherism and Blairism, but to reconvert the big banks and other financial institutions that during the crisis had been saved from bankruptcy with public monies into a network of local banks based on mixed ownership (state and social), or the creation of new municipal utilities. The party is committed to create new municipal utilities, inspired by some socially-owned companies already in operation – such as Robin Hood Energy in Nottingham – or by popular campaigns – such as Switched On London – that propose the de-privatisation of power through the launch of new public enterprises, rooted in a more democratic type of management based on the active participation of users and workers, being environmentally sustainable, and securing services with affordable rates for the entire population.

Originally posted at the Transnational Institute Website

Lead image by Roger Cunyan. Additional image by Isabella Jusková.

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What is the definition of capitalism? What is the history of the word “capitalism”? Who were the Boston Anarchists? What is “vulgar libertarianism”? Are there alternative social structures that we do not acknowledge because we are stubborn and stuck in our ways? Is post-capitalism occurring?

Further Reading:

Center for a Stateless Society website

Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism, by Kevin Carson

Reposted from Libertarianism.org. Click here to see the original post (includes a transcript)

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Over several sunny days in June 2018, a diverse group of 60 activists and researchers from 30 countries convened for a multi-day meeting to discuss the collective building of post-capitalist futures. The meeting provided the opportunity for a rich exchange of perspectives and experiences, as well as deep discussion and debate. The goal of the meeting was not to achieve consensus both an impossible and unnecessary endeavour but rather to stimulate mutual learning, challenge one another and advance analyses.

One session of the meeting – Transformative Cities – was held not as a closed discussion but as a public event attended by 300 people at which prominent activists and academics engaged with municipal leaders and politicians on the role cities can play in building post-capitalist futures.

In line with the meeting, this report does not intend to advance one line of analysis, but rather summarise some of the key ideas and issues discussed and debated (not necessarily in the order they were articulated). To summarise necessarily means to leave things out. It would be impossible to fully capture the incredible richness of the discussion that took place, but hopefully this report provides a valuable sketch.

The Age of Monsters Our Capitalist Authoritarian Present

Capitalism in chronic crisis

Any discussion of the post-capitalist future must begin with an analysis of the current economic, social and ecological context and the ‘monsters’ we now face. Most of the world is experiencing the brutal realities of extreme forms of capitalism. Inequality has surged to new heights, with an estimated $32 trillion stowed away in tax havens by wealthy corporations. Multinationals are taking over government and societal functions, aided by a trade and investment regime whose goal is to secure corporate power over judicial and legislative arenas and to increase profit thwarting the best plans of governments with the threat of expensive lawsuits. The goal is to privatise everything. Trump both disrupts but also reinforces this model putting in place the most extreme deregulation agenda while also advancing a nationalist agenda that seeks to replace the ideology of ‘free trade’ with ‘bullying trade.’ In this and other things, he may not be unique, but simply part of a new norm.

This year (2018) marks the tenth anniversary of the financial crisis, but we must recognise that the ‘financial crisis’ is not time-bound: capitalism is in a constant state of crisis. Of the most interconnected companies in the world, nearly all are financial. They are at once large and extremely vulnerable: when one collapses (as Lehman Brothers did), they could all collapse. Given that another financial crash is inevitable sooner or later, it’s critical that we are ready to explain it and show that crisis is a permanent part of the logic of capitalism. The dominant economic model continues to externalise environmental impacts. Climate change is now irreversible. We are in a new stage of capitalism and a new geological time, the Anthropocene characterised by repeated environmental crises. Capitalism is now undermining the earth’s natural systems, creating a scenario of chronic crisis. Yet the drive for profit is leading to ever more expropriation and environmental degradation, with the financialisation of nature representing the peak in the processes of enclosure. The ecological dimensions of capitalism may raise the question as to whether we have reached the limits of capital expansion.

The issue of population and mass migration has also risen in the political agenda within Western countries. In the 1970s, population was discussed largely in terms of hunger and changes in agricultural production. Now population is framed by populist right politicians in terms of the threat of mass migration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, or from Central America to North America. Instead of blaming the capitalist system, and in the context of prevalent austerity policies, many politicians in Europe are blaming refugees for people’s precarious living conditions. Authoritarianism is on the rise in places like Italy, Hungary and Turkey with proto-fascist forces surging everywhere.

The ‘fourth industrial revolution’

Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forums argues we are in the midst of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ with rapid technological developments transforming the economy and society. Whether it is third or fourth revolution, rapid technological change has certainly created a new theatre of struggle: technology’s potential and its dangers depend on how it is used and who has access. Five giant companies have emerged (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook) that are now the most powerful corporations in terms of market capitalisation. Their US $3 trillion is equal to all the co-operatives in the world.

Tech companies have inserted themselves between the state and people by controlling technological infrastructure, the roads of the twenty-first century. For example, Facebook sought, albeit unsuccessfully, to provide free internet in India under the condition that the company become the internet platform for the country. Tech giants can be seen as a cartel that has seized the means of production, in which people and their communications are the product. The falsely labelled ‘sharing economy’ consists of companies like Airbnb and Uber which have created a new form of subordination and seized control not just of people’s labour, but also their capital people’s homes and cars.

This corporate model requires unprecedented knowledge of people’s behaviour and communications and therefore has helped constructed a new system of surveillance capitalism. It has also turned the neoliberal idea that information-based price signals make for an efficient economy on its head. The accumulation of huge amounts of micro-data about people is changing the nature of how the capitalist system works. Airlines charge people a different price based on information accumulated about them. Non-human agents are now buyers and sellers in markets, and algorithms are replacing humans.

Technology is increasingly touted as a means to ending poverty. Missing from this narrative are the structural causes of poverty and inequality and any critique of the market. For the Gates Foundation and U.S. tech firms in Africa, lack of access to the markets is the problem and technology development is the solution. They ignore the potential loss of jobs to new waves of automation the replacement of workers by robots and machines in sectors like logistics and banking. Or the ways that automation can exclude people, for example with the drive for a ‘cashless’ society providing major benefits to financial firms but making daily living ever more difficult for people on the economic margins. They also obscure some of the environmental costs of technology. For example, the expansion of blockchain technologies such as bitcoins that rely heavily on servers powered by coal.

Similarly, some corporations continue to push for large-scale technological manipulation of the Earth’s systems as a solution to climate change. There is a risk of an attempt at the UNFCCC in 2020 to end the geo-engineering1 moratorium established in 2010 by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.

Inequality and war as the fundamental long-term reality in people’s lives

It is important to note that while certain trends have accelerated, the reality of dispossession and violence has long been a reality for much of the world. There is a danger of a western leftist nostalgia for a post-war European past that ignores that the social democracies of the West were made possible by imperial looting. The sale of neoliberal individualism as a solution was also only made possible by ongoing economic exploitation of labour in former colonies, post-Soviet countries and now in the West too. The story of Kenya in the last 40 years, for example, is not one of increased unemployment, but of a population that has never been employed millions of people who are excluded from the economy. Today’s neoliberalism has its roots in the liberalism of the Enlightenment, in which participation in the ‘sacred’ space was limited to white male slave- owners. In today’s context, that sacred space is reserved for the global elite – largely male and largely white. Any post-capitalist order dedicated to restorative justice will need to address and provide the reparations and restitution of this exploitative past and present.

Inequality is the fundamental reality for people’s lives across the globe. The Occupy movement succeeded in popularising the notion of the 99% and 1%. Even in the U.S., the wealthiest country in the world, 41 million people are living in poverty and another 140 million are just one pay check away from catastrophe. There is a significant population mostly people of colour who are permanently unemployed. For the 99% in America, as elsewhere, it is not possible to speak of a financial crisis that is ‘over’. As capitalist crises expand, War is emerging as the norm. In the United States, more than half of the discretionary budget goes to an increasingly automated military that makes use of robots and drones. As a consequence, fewer Americans are dying in combat, but there is no decrease in the number of people being killed by the U.S. military. Gaza serves as the new model for pacification and control. It is being used as a site to experiment with new military technology. The population has been deemed surplus: what happens to them doesn’t matter. Direct political resistance is met with violence. Anti-war mobilisation has tended to be separate from struggles for economic and environmental justice, but this is a false dichotomy. Social and ecological injustice is created by wars and fuels wars, with dispossession and exclusion facilitated by arms and security firms in the West and paramilitaries in the South.

Failures of the Left

As we think about post-capitalist alternatives, we have the imperative to analyse and learn from our own actions of social movements and political parties we have supported and allied with. Over the past century, there have been multiple examples of the left assuming political power Russia, China, South Africa, Latin America and failing to deliver or replicating systems of oppression. In Latin America, the ‘pink tide’ governments made important steps to reducing poverty but largely failed to structurally transform their economies and left office with social movements weaker rather than stronger. In Europe, the radical left is growing, but is divided and without clear answers on European integration or immigration. In Germany, for example, a huge internal debate is taking place inside Die Linke (the Left Party) over whether the party should focus more on the ‘German’ working class and less on the rights of refugees and LGBTs. Similar divisions were seen in the UK in the opposing positions on Brexit by the left. Meanwhile in Greece, the anti-austerity stance of the party Syriza was defeated by the Troika despite the overwhelming ‘No’ vote by its population in the referendum in 2015.

The Next System

Power and principles in a post-capitalist future

Around the world, people are creating models of a post-capitalist future and engaging in prefigurative experiments to hegemonic shifts. What principles, values and drivers need to be at the core of the ‘next system’? How do these diverse next system proposals redistribute and transform (or not) power among different types of actors: capital, the state, a ‘partner’ state, labour, citizens, communities, the market, the commons?

As part of its New Systems project, the U.S.-based Democracy Collaborative has developed a framework to look at this question based on an analysis of a wide variety of ‘new systems’ possibilities and proposals, mainly focused on the global North. (They draw on their own on-the- ground experimentation in Cleveland, where three locally-owned cooperatives, the Evergreen Cooperatives of Cleveland, have been incubated and supported by procurement from large, local ‘anchor’ institutions (hospitals and universities).

The framework identifies three theories of change that underpin the variety of new systems proposals. At the one end are social democracy and radical localism, which can be described as countervailing strategies of containment and regulation of the current system. In these proposals, power lies with capital and the corporatist state. Similarly, in proposals like Sweden Plus and Steady State Ecological Economics, power continues to lie with capital and the state, but substantial shifts are envisioned. This can be described as combining strategies of containment and regulation with some systemic elements.

At the other end of the spectrum is evolutionary reconstruction: new institutions can be built, scaled up and can ultimately displace the current system. This theory of change drives a variety of the new models emerging today, including worker-owned, localised economic democracy; commoning; and public and socialised economic democracy. For example, the UK city of Preston is now working to relocalise procurement based on the Cleveland model, which has been embraced as a positive model by the national Labour Party, inspiring it to set up a Community Wealth Building Unit to learn from and expand similar initiatives across the UK.

Cooperation Jackson in the US city Jackson, Mississippi focuses in particular on organising under- and unemployed members of Black and Latino communities and helping build worker-organised and worker-owned cooperatives. The group presents its vision of a new society in concrete, practical ways and works to share these with other municipalities.

However, it is important to note that not all solidarity economies are progressive in nature. There is already a strong tradition among the right in Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe of organising solidarity economies of a distinctly fascist flavour. Hungary’s right-wing populist government is currently starting pension cooperatives to help ‘good Hungarians’. Solidarity economies certainly mutualise resources and values, but the question is for whom and at what scale.

Self-organisation and counterpower

A systemic crisis needs systemic alternatives. The goal of a new system must be broader than just replacing the capitalist system; it must also replace the anthropocentric system, the extractivist system, the racist system, and the patriarchal system. So what is a systemic alternative? The shift from dirty to clean energy, for example, is not in and of itself systemic. There must also be a shift in who controls and produces the energy. One measure of a systemic alternative is whether it empowers social movements and facilitates communities’ self-organisation. Another is whether it replaces extractive, exploitative means of production with regenerative ones that promote wellbeing globally.

The recent experiences and failures of the ‘pink tide’ in Latin America provide important lessons. Bolivia’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) government is one of the few to have survived the electoral backlash (and without the violence and chaos now afflicting Venezuela and Nicaragua), but even so, it is notable that indigenous communities and social movements were much stronger in Bolivia before Evo Morales and MAS were elected to power.

In Bolivia, as in other pink tide countries, the left reduced poverty but did not move to systemic alternatives. Economic power largely remains with the same elites as before. People from the movements thought they had taken control of the state, but instead were captured by it. Their goal became re-election, and with that came an increasing reliance on clientelism.

This trajectory can be seen in relation to energy. To its credit, the Bolivian government semi- nationalised the energy industry increasing the taxes paid by transnational corporations and giving the state-owned energy company a much larger role. But the goal became creation of the largest state-owned energy company. Small communities were prohibited from producing solar energy to sell to the grid, and thereby denied their own source of income. Giving real power to the community would have meant accepting less profit. The Bolivian case shows that state power has its own logic. In other words, if we assume engagement with the state is necessary, it must be radically transformed. When social movements put people in government, it is crucial to maintain and build autonomous counterpower outside the state.

The recent experience in Catalonia raises different but also important questions. There, the government went beyond the law to do what nationalist movements were asking of it. Although the movement was extremely powerful, capable of organising general strikes and powerful actions, it did not have the police or the army. It could not match the naked force of the Spanish state. Many of Catalonia’s elected officials including its vice president and several ministers are now in prison. These two different cases Catalonia and Bolivia remind us, á la Foucault, about power and the differences between force and coercion: the first eliminates the agent, while the second eliminates agency.

Democratisation of money

Democratisation of money must be a key element in the next system. ‘Economic man’ – the classic economic conceptualisation of people as rational, self-interested agents – is disembodied from biological time and ecological time. The body and the environment are both externalised in its formal accounting, although they bear the costs of unsustainable economic activity. It is also a debt-based system that invariably ends in crisis.

The reality of money production is that banks are not lending money, they are creating new money, which means there will always be a shortage between how much they put in and how much they want out. States, too have created money – as we have witnessed through the vast influx of capital provided by quantitative easing programmes in which trillions of dollars have been injected into the financial sector, chiefly supporting banks rather than investing in public services, essential infrastructure and a just energy transition. Overall, public money has been hijacked by commercial banking and speculative investors.

The question of the state’s role in post-capitalist monetary systems is key. There are many models and much discussion and debate about the best target the state or the commercial banking system for transforming monetary systems. One possibility is the democratisation of public budgets in which democratised, public control would replace the state system. Budgets would be built based on public need and would include a longer cycle of budgeting and public consultation. Democratisation would go further than ‘participatory monitoring/budgeting’: communities would both set the amount of the budget and decide how it is allocated. A monetary policy committee would decide how much the private sector can absorb and help determine tax (retrieval) rates.

Public ownership and transition

The demand for democratic control is also at the heart of a growing wave of local initiatives globally looking to de-privatise and regain public control of energy, water and other public services. TNI’s research in Reclaiming Public Services showed that there have been at least 835 (re)municipalisations of public services around the world since 2000.

This does not mean a return to the former models of bureaucratic state (national or local) control. Rather in many cases communities are seeking to develop new models that engage and involve workers and citizens. The shape of this varies though based on the political and economic context. In Croatia, demands for democratisation of public services have been a strategic way of preventing privatisation and asserting better democratic control over public companies. Activists are therefore calling for better monitoring of spending, more regular meetings with citizens and an independent supervisory committee. In Greece, the context of austerity though has meant local authorities have become eviscerated in their capacity to renovate public services. Citizens have therefore focused on developing community-based systems of solidarity to provide education and healthcare for all that often bypass state structures.

Energy has been a particularly important focus for developing post-capitalist alternatives, given the central role energy plays in the capitalist economy and the urgent need to transform our energy systems to prevent worsening climate change. Energy democracy provides a framework to democratise part of the economy and shift power with a big “P” – transforming society by means of shifting power in the power sector. Activists from Mauritius, South-Africa, Bolivia and the US shared how they have used demands for energy democracy and sovereignty to challenge private energy oligopolies and pollution affecting low-income communities, to demand a rapid just transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy and to explain the necessity for a democratisation of the economy.

Campaigners in a coalition called Power Shift in Mauritius managed to stop a coal plant by means of a hunger strike and by uniting middle class citizens, social movements and unions. They have advanced in its place energy proposals that would be based on solar generation in the countryside, helping to build connections between urban activists and rural sugar-growers. This is leading to new resistances in other arenas, for example against private grabbing of public beaches.

In South Africa, engaging unions has been key. Renewable energy was reframed as a threat to coal and steel workers, but movements have been active supporting union calls for a socially-owned renewable system. This notion of a just transition is critical to not only fight climate change, but also ensuring that workers and the most affected people are at the heart of the next energy system, in order for it to be just and democratic.

An aggregation of next systems?

To what extent will the next system be an aggregation of next systems? In the U.S., the context of decentralised government and an advanced stage of capitalism means that there are places ripe for new strategies and alternatives and others that are not. Local, small-scale initiatives can provide a means to get past the immense power of adversaries. In some contexts, the state can play a positive role alongside of local ‘next systems’, if they understand their role as facilitating and supporting such endeavours. While in other contexts the state – and national legal frameworks – are one of the key obstacles to transformative local practices.

Can we re-imagine the role of the state in a way that facilitates community self-organisation? In a non-hierarchic peer to peer (P2P) state, for example, the act of commoning could become the defining principle of the state. The nation (civil society) is a collection of commoners. P2P can create the conditions to optimise the specific what (resource), who (community) and how (rules) of commoning. Linux and Wikipedia are good examples: they provide the infrastructure, but they do not control the community. The potential is an economy that can be generative towards people and nature, by for example, enabling local manufacturing based on global design, which makes production not only more ecologically viable, but also better suited to community needs.

Emancipatory Futures

What must be done to embed emancipation at the core of the Next System? The experiences of the feminist movement and feminist organising, thinking and theory, offer important guidance here. The left has often asked the feminist movement to postpone its emancipatory agenda to wait until socialism or communism is in place. But new structures often simply replicate systems of domination. The MAS movement in Bolivia, for example, was very patriarchal before it came to power. It should come as no surprise that it replicated this in the government. Movements are also adversely influenced by the systems in which they function, even when they seek to change them. This can be seen, for example, in the external – often donor – pressure to professionalise organisations, which can create a separation between employed staff and the people and communities they work with. In order to transform society, social movements themselves must be transformed.

A promising example is emerging in the U.S. right now. The Poor People’s Campaign is resurrecting the intersectional movement built by Martin Luther King a half century ago, linking systemic racism, poverty, militarism and climate change. The campaign, which targets state governments, started with local community meetings involving a wide range of impoverished communities from indigenous people to war veterans. Significantly, the movement did not emerge from left, but from the faith-based movement. Led by two preachers, it uses the language of morality, rather than electoral politics.

The goal need not and perhaps cannot be to ‘unify’ movements around a single issue. The feminist movement speaks in terms of cross-movement organising, an approach that acknowledges that tensions can exist within and across movements. Transformative cross-movement organising focuses on the creation of emancipatory spaces and then joining other spaces in solidarity and humanity. An example is the ‘feminisms’ social movement in Spain, which features a diversity of women with different approaches, shared leadership and the exploration of new ideas. On March 8th 2018 feminists succeeded in organising a massive general strike focused not only on highlighting gender inequalities, but also the need to curb consumerism. ‘We strike to change everything’ as the slogan went.

Breaking the boundaries of imagination

A key step is to recognise and break through systems that limit the imagination. The feminist movement has shown that there are other ways of imagining human relationships. A new vocabulary can be used and different types of knowledge black feminist thought or migrant women’s experiences, for example can be valorised, prioritised and transmitted in creative ways, such as art and storytelling. In the Association for Women’s Rights in Development’s (AWID) methodology used to imagine feminist futures, imagination is the reality. A fantastical feminist village is created to articulate emotional, social and systemic alternatives. A similar transformative, emancipatory process plays out in real eco-villages, where the act of commoning forces people to reconfigure and critique relationships with themselves, nature, and ‘economic man’. It is often difficult, sometimes psychologically traumatic work, even for those with radical politics and particularly for those who have been socialised in capitalist systems.

Liberating our imagination enables us to challenge the limiting notion that capitalism and the nation-state are the only logical, possible systems. This is relevant to the question of the state’s role in emancipation. People’s experiences and ideas about the state diverge widely. Class, locality, race, gender, history all shape these perspectives. For some, the state is always present and must therefore be engaged, albeit carefully and with recognition that it is contradictory territory. Yet for others, this does not resonate. The Soviet state, for example, doesn’t even exist anymore. In Georgia, there is no functioning state to speak of. Survival is entirely dependent on the family, but people would prefer a progressive state to have a role. Taking the nation-state for granted or assuming that it is natural is to limit the imagination.

And what of the state’s role in emancipation? In his history of Black Reconstruction in America, African-American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois saw the state as a means, albeit limited, to open up space. He recognised that the state could not provide freedom, but that not being in chains was better than being in chains. Aside from post-1804 independent Haiti, in which former enslaved people took power, advanced a universalist vision, and inspired movements across the Southern hemisphere, there are precious few examples of the state being emancipatory. Insights from the women’s movement are useful in thinking about the state, power and emancipation. There is an important distinction to be made between power as domination (power over) and power to transform (power to). The former can be used to describe the state, with its power over resources and capital, which may provide distinctive levers of power. The latter expresses people’s own transformative capacity, the fact that the system depends on their contributions. In London, for example, social movements organised against proposed property development along the Thames in the mid-1980s. When the Labour Party gained control of the municipality, it used its power to stop the development and support movements to build an alternative. But the party didn’t create transformation; the social movements did. The distinction between power over and power to may provide a way to understand the ability of the state or political parties to facilitate (or not) transformation.

Radical movements of resistance and transformation

Agency, resistance and collective structures

Around the world, new forms of agency are emerging. Numerous intersectional political struggles are merging resistance with transformative processes. In Greece, for example, a grassroots, anti- racist solidarity movement emerged to both resist the Troika regime and to create new, collective, autonomous, solidarity structures to respond to people’s immediate needs. The movement goes well beyond a response to austerity in that it recognises crisis as a permanent new condition. People in the movement are reflecting on new institutions and new forms of politics. Self-organisation is a critical component of this as it connects the personal and the political. The movement is creating its own material structures of power and spaces where power is redefined. It is defending local spaces and promoting new practices of health, education and economy.

Some of these new structures, which pre-date the refugee crisis, were formed by the anti-racist movement to put migrant communities and Greek people on the same level to fight isolation, self-blame and embarrassment. The movement aims to create new and different social fabrics in communities, and involves diverse groups of people, including those without work, precarious workers, women, pensioners and migrants. It has revitalised living memories of Greek family networks, communal structures and solidarity structures that once existed. It is engaging and empowering people to create their collective solutions. The movement insists on a democratic approach, which means that the people in the community, not the activists, decide what issues they want to address.

Restoring political agency

Restoring agency is similarly critical to the movements in Croatia. After severe impoverishment and de-industrialisation in the 1990s, followed by the recent process of EU integration, people lost their sense of agency. EU elites treated Croatia as backward, in need of help and with neoliberal economics as its only salvation. But the left is now being re-born: a new generation of leftists have come of age who cannot be associated with the discredited former regime and are no longer constrained by the anti-communist discourse of Post-Socialist Europe. Diverse social movements ecological, cultural, student occupation, right to the city, refugee solidarity are engaged in joint efforts. A lot of work has been done to build the transactional capacity of civil society; the next step is building mobilisation capacity. In the Croatian context, people are very distrustful of politics. Despite scepticism about engaging in electoral politics, the movements recently organised a municipal platform to run the Zagreb local election, which succeeded in putting four people on Zagreb’s city council. The aim is not to become an electoral actor, but to use electoral politics alongside other strategies and to develop political involvement.

Occupying territory while demanding rights

In Brazil, the urban Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST) involves 72,000 families in 32 occupations around the country. MTST emerged out of the agrarian landless movement (MST) and, like MST, considers itself a territorial movement. MTST is demanding that land serve its social function in accordance with the Brazilian Constitution, drawing attention to the fact that many human rights like decent living conditions, access to health care, and education are dependent on having a place to live. The movement is resisting real estate speculation in a context in which 1% of the population owns 30% of the land. In addition to occupation tactics, MTST engages in demonstrations and strikes, and targets the government. In the run-up to the World Cup in 2013, for example, MTST united with other movements and had some important successes, including a decrease in the price of public transportation.

But as with social movements in other ‘pink tide’ countries, the political context including the 2017 parliamentary coup against Roussef and the imprisonment of the former leftist Workers’ Party president Lula da Silva has been difficult and complex. (MTST in early 2018 protested Lula’s imprisonment by occupying his apartment, the purported reason for his imprisonment as it was falsely claimed he had won the apartment through a corrupt kickback).

The lesson from Brazil is that voting is not enough. As with the Bolivian experience, counterpower must be maintained. Since the coup, rights have been dismantled, impunity is rampant and a new anti-terror law deems social movements terrorists. MTST responded by thinking about new forms of participatory governance and uniting leftist movements in a platform called Vamos! (let’s go). The focus is on ideological education and political empowerment. Vamos! insists that everyone should participate in democracy, starting with meetings to set goals for the next president and the government on various issues, including gender, health, education, diversity. More than 500,000 people contributed to the online platform.

Power or counterpower, force or process?

The differences between these movements in Greece, Croatia and Brazil begs the question: what do we mean by counterpower? Of course, one possibility is to see it as a way to accumulate force to resist adversaries or remove them from power. But it is also important to consider the kind of power constructed in the process. Counterpower can be seen as a process in which pre- formative structures and ways of relating to each other are created. The struggle is not to take power but to build it. It may be preferable to speak about power rather than counterpower: building power goes beyond countering something, but about defining the political society we want a new hegemonic model.

At the same time, the full, complex story of these cases also begs the question: which power are we dealing with and at what level? In Greece, the ECB and the finance ministers of the eurozone simply refused to negotiate with Yanis Varoufakis, the democratically elected finance minister. In Croatia, the EU, with Germany in the driver’s seat, provides the social and economic blueprint to be followed. In Brazil, a democratically elected parliament supported by real estate speculators waged a coup against a democratically elected president. International financial power may be eclipsing that of the nation-state. And nation-state power may eclipse local power. For example, in Europe and the U.S., urban movements have welcomed refugees creating ‘sanctuary cities’ and the like but immigration rights are not a local-level competence. The challenge is that compartmentalised counterpower can be easily crushed. Even if they are not crushed, anti-systemic initiatives can end up inadvertently reinforcing rather than undermining capitalism. In Jackson, Mississippi, for example, its efforts to create community land trusts may have contributed towards trends of increasing land prices that force people to relocate.

For some, the answer lies in being aware and active at all levels local, national and international. For others, the emphasis is on preparing the ground, so institutions are in place when top-down power structures ultimately implode.

Preparing the ground: the transformative city

A key question is how can we scale up grassroots struggles to confront global forces like corporate and financial power? Cities will certainly be a core arena of struggle, as cities are not just local arenas but global too given they emerged as a result of globalisation, privatisation, and, most importantly, the rise of global finance. They both encapsulate global processes such as the ‘grabbing’ of cities by corporate and financial firms and the concomitant rise in expulsion, poverty and inequality. Yet throughout history, they have also been unique spaces where people without power can build cultures, economies and make their own histories. Cities have always endured and outlived more formal, closed systems. Today’s urban activism is therefore critical: people need to be organised and ready when the current ‘grab’ comes to an end.

Cities have a special role to play in ‘preparing the ground’ for transformation. Cities like New York and Oakland, California and Cadiz, Spain are forging ahead in tackling climate change. Local governments in some countries have been able to push back against neo-liberal plundering in their territories and develop alternative economies such as communal gardens. Municipal and ‘fearless city’ movements are growing worldwide and are using networked and horizontal structures to scale up their power, assert solidarity and exchange lessons. For urban activists, local transformation, when done right, has the potential to provide solutions to systemic, global problems. Local, grassroots activists can prefiguratively fight for their issues, meaning they can already do what they want the world to look like. This is the approach of Code Rood, a grassroots collective in the Netherlands that is using civil disobedience and other strategies to fight for climate justice while experimenting with resilient forms of sustainable living. The key is that local efforts are connected around the world; that practices of social innovation can be shared and replicated.

As discussed above, the question of institutional political power and its risks is relevant to these municipal movements. As with state power, so too with city power: for example, the new city government in Amsterdam led for the first time by the Green Left party intends to join other ‘fearless’ cities movement, fight for a just energy transition, tackle polarisation and re-define the relationship between government and citizens. But its ability to deliver on its good intentions depends on its ability to overcome entrenched power, its courage to oppose false market- led solutions, and its openness to constant dialogue with social movements and civil society organisations. Strong activism is vital for giving politicians both the leverage and motivation (i.e. sustained political pressure) to realise transformative change.

What can’t be left out of the discussions around cities, however – nor states for that matter – are the politics of natural resource exploitation on which they depend. Even progressive cities are often thriving from processes of extraction and dispossession in rural areas – whether it is food systems dependent on land dispossession, poorly paid migrant labour, soil erosion and toxic pesticides or dams providing energy and water to cities yet built on appropriated indigenous lands. Similarly states can develop progressive policies on the back of exploitation. This has clearly been the case in Latin America. Venezuela, for example is currently opening up 10% of the country to transnational mining in the name of funding social services.

Constructing a post-capitalist hegemony

Public policy to facilitate transformation

Tame it, smash it, escape it or erode it? Diverse thinkers from Marx to today’s John Holloway, Hilary Wainwright and Erik Olin Wright theorise a range of necessary, possible or impossible routes to ending capitalism. How can we build a post-capitalist hegemony in support of radical transformation and at what level? Concrete experiences inform a diversity of perspectives on the question. Reciprocally, the severity of the situation for many people their immediate struggle to survive reminds us that ideas must translate into concrete action.

In Uruguay, for example, the leftist government has sought to democratise institutions and to develop initiatives focused on the country’s large population of poor people. Industrial tripartite councils were created that gave workers a seat at the table with multinationals and bureaucrats. Workers were involved in defining the plans for key sectors and actively involved in how the government negotiated foreign direct investment. Alongside this, a national development fund was created to support development of worker-owned cooperatives, while the Plan Juntos (the Together Plan) aimed to address extreme poverty and vulnerability. Families in irregular settlements (on unsecure land) were supported to build their own houses, with support from technical staff who were required to live in proximity to the communities. But the houses were not the goal: the purpose of people’s participation was to support a process of transformation, and not to legitimate the policy. The goal was to move from a focus on symptoms to causes and to shift from individual experiences to structural and collective responses.

Or the need for autonomy?

Experiences in Bolivia, where communities have developed hundreds of autonomous community- managed water systems, provide a different perspective. Bolivian communities have long self- organised to address their needs and problems, including not only water but also security and garbage. They did not wait for the state to provide such services. Contrast this to the appealing narrative by President Evo Morales, which held that everything was bad before he came to power and that his ‘government of the people’ would solve the country’s problems. The consequence has been the demobilisation and fragmentation of what was a very strong movement. Behind the narrative lurked a new form of domination. From this vantage point, it seems that the focus should be on solutions that come from the people, with emancipation being not a goal, but a way of life. In Bolivia, people are not thinking in terms of ‘post-capitalism’ but in terms of autonomy and self-determination. They are not asking the state to solve problems, rather for it to respect the organising that is already happening.

Seizing the means of narrative production

As the Bolivia example shows, narrative power is critical. Corporations and elites are currently exerting enormous control over the news. Algorithms and social media are spreading misinformation, narrowing people’s perspectives and polarising society. Behind the myth of ‘free’ news is the exercise of power. But a media that serves the public can play a crucial role in bringing about post-capitalist transformation. Similarly, other cultural actors opinion-makers, the creative sector, designers and makers can be valuable and strategic allies as fellow commoners. They can help forge and strengthen cultural norms, ethics and values that support post-capitalist efforts.

A media that serves the public would be transparent about sources of funding and information. It would be participatory and engage in dialogue with citizens. And it would tell inspiring stories, connect to ideas, and motivate people into action. It would facilitate a process of transformation by challenging people’s biases and assumptions, bringing them different perspectives, and showing that another world is not only possible but already here.

NOTES

1. Geoengineering refers to a set of proposed techniques that would intervene in and alter earth systems on a large scale recently, these proposals have been gaining traction as a “technofix” solution to climate change. http://www.etcgroup.org/content/un-convention-still-says-no- manipulating-climate

The analysis in this report is written by Paige Shipman and Nick Buxton, but is the collective work of Achin Vanaik, Agnes Gagyi, Ana Mendez de Andes, Ashok Subron, Brid Brennan, Ben Hayes, Brett Scott, Brian Ashley, Christophe Aguiton, Christos Giovanopoulos, Daniel Chavez, Danjela Dolenec, Dany Marie, David Fig, David Sogge, Edgardo Lander, Erick Gonzalo Palomares, Fiona Dove, Firoze Manji, Gisela Dutting, Hakima Abbas, Hilary Wainwright, Inna Michaeli, Irene Escorihuela, Joachim Jachnow, Joel Rocamora, Kali Akuno, Laura Flanders, Lavinia Steinfort, Lyda Forero, Mabel Thwaites Rey, Marcela Olivera, Mary Mellor, Mary Fitzgerald, Myriam van der Stichele, Nuria del Viso, Pablo Solón, Phyllis Bennis, Renata Boulos, Sacajawea Hall, Saskia Sassen, Satoko Kishimoto, Sebastián Torres, Selcuk Balamir, Sol Trumbo Vila, Stacco Troncoso, Susan George, Tamás Gerocs, Thomas Hanna, Tom Henfrey, Vedran Horvat, Yuliya Yurchenko, Sopiko Japaridze. It does not mean that everyone agrees with everything written here, but it is an agreed summary of the discussions.

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Both organisations are inspiring individuals in local, regional, national ‘communities of interest’, and ‘communities of practice’ to cooperatively design solutions toward a more sustainable human future (beyond the binary of Liberal/Labour fuelled toxic economics & exclusive capitalism), out of necessity.

In this interview between Michel and Redland City Councillor, Paul Bishop, Michel explores some powerful themes that are rising within our collective human global capacity, in an historically predictable response to the systemic international crisis that is impacting humanity as we enter a ‘climate of change’, that many now refer to as ‘The ’.

Michel describes the nascent unfolding of rigorous, empathic, rigorous responses (which many individuals are applying toward this change) as something palpable, an event that is actually… ‘a Renaissance’.

Watching this video, viewers can themselves gain a sense of perspective, and realise that while we have much work to do as we navigate historically unchartered territory together, our future work as caring global citizens is being inspired by faith, hope and love.

Please feel free to share with others who care.
Best wishes,
Paul (& Michel)

commonstransition.org/changing-societies-through-urban-commons-transitions/

Photo by brozkeff

The post Michel Bauwens on empathic, rigorous responses to the Anthropocene appeared first on P2P Foundation.

During my research I have encountered several sources which have mentioned the work of the Catalan Integral Cooperative and its philosophy of “Open Cooperativism”. Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation especially promote this organization and its approach, and even helped to fund and publish an in-depth study of it, authored by George Dafermos in October 2017. Dafermos spent several months working alongside members of the CIC and conducting interviews with members. The aim of this report, “The Catalan Integral Cooperative: an organizational study of a post-capitalist cooperative”, which is the main source I am drawing from, was to answer the questions “What is the CIC?” and “How does it work?”. As I will show, the answers to both of these questions are rather more complex than you might think, and after reading the report, left me with more questions than I started with.

What Is It?

To understand the CIC and what supposedly makes it a “post-capitalist” cooperative in more than ambition, Dafermos says that the “revolutionary activist” character of the cooperative is essential, as is an understanding of its “Open Cooperativism” philosophy, which distinguishes it from both conventional businesses and mainstream cooperatives. According to Dafermos, “the main objective of the CIC is nothing less than to build an alternative economy in Catalonia capable of satisfying the needs of the local community more effectively than the existing system, thereby creating the conditions for the transition to a post-capitalist mode of organization of social and economic life.”(Dafermos, 2017). This mission is what, in my opinion, has lead to the complex organizational structure of various committees, self-employed members, exchange networks and autonomous initiatives, as members experiment with different facets of the economic and social transition from capitalism.

A traditional business-oriented worker cooperative would look at a market, search for a good or service that they could provide and build their business up from there, eventually expanding into other markets if possible. This is the “lean-startup” approach which currently dominates entrepreneurial circles in North America and elsewhere. The CIC takes this supposedly conventional wisdom, and does something entirely different, instead rapidly prototyping and supporting multiple, often wildly dissimilar business models (from hackerspaces to organic farms) and projects at the same time, with the goal of experimenting with and disrupting as many industries as possible and promoting open cooperativism within their sphere of influence.

The main work of the CIC core membership is to facilitate and fund the expansion of these projects through the system of democratic committees and assemblies the CIC uses to govern itself via consensus processes. These committees are

• Coordination – General administration and internal organization of CIC. Closest thing you’re going to find to an “executive” anything with the CIC
• Reception – Onboarding and training of new members
• Communication – outgoing comms, promotion, handling information requests, inter-cooperative networking
• IT – manages CIC servers, website and software development & support for all members
• Common Spaces – Facilities management for the AureaSocial building in Barcelona which CIC uses as its headquarters
• Productive Projects – facilitates connecting members to jobs and promoting cooperative projects
• Economic Management – provides support to self-employed members as well as manages the finances of CIC as a whole.
• Legal – Legal support to the CIC committees and its many at-large members
• Catalan Supply Center – a regional food and craft industry distribution network made up of “rebosts” or local pantries managed autonomously by various groups. The committee mostly focuses on managing the supply chain for this network as a cooperative public service.
• Network of Science, Technique and Technology (XCTIT) – develops, prototypes and licenses machines and softwares use by CIC projects and affiliated cooperatives.

Basic Income

The members of these committees, according to Dafermos, see themselves less as business-owners and more as activists. So that they have adequate free time to effectively participate, the cooperative supports members financially with a limited “basic-income” salary, paid both in Euros and a local electronic currency called “ecos”. The basic income is meant to be distributed on a basis of need for members to participate fully, and is adjusted accordingly. The highest reported amount for a member’s basic income was 765 Euros + 135 ecos per month. I did not find in the report a breakdown of how many members receive basic income, but based on the participant numbers for each committee, as of late 2017 at least 45 people recieve a good deal of their income through the program. And that is just for management. Many more people are supported by the cooperative’s many projects and programs, either in self-employment or one of many “Autonomous Projects of Collective Initiative”. The basic income program was launched after the start of CIC. Previously all members were volunteers.

Auto-Ocupados

Being self-employed, operating a private practice or a small business in Spain can be prohibitively expensive or otherwise unavailable to those without legal status or financial means to pay the fees on registration and invoicing (the minimum fee is 250 Euros per month). One of CIC’s main services is to manage legal entities that self-employed individuals and collective autonomos in Catalonia can use to surmount these barriers. All of their invoices are processed through the cooperative system, which uses membership fees of 75 Euros (adjusted for income) every three months to sustain itself. There are around 600 self-employed members, but few of them choose to be closely involved with the organizational work of CIC.

Territorial Economic Network

This component of the CIC includes some 2,500 members engaged in various kinds of work connected to the economic system managed by the CIC. The primary unit of this network is the local exchange network and its various nodes, including the consumer-run rebosts (pantries) of the Catalan Supply Center, assemblies who manage the production and distribution of ecos digital currency and the “autonomous projects of collective initiative”, independent projects and businesses that the CIC is involved in through active membership, collaboration and financial/material/legal support. These include

• A cooperative office building, AureaSocial used by CIC as its headquarters and shared with various other cooperative ventures within the CIC’s network
• CASX, a financial cooperative dedicated to providing support and interest-free financing to cooperative ventures, and ultimately aimed at attracting widespread consumer investment through a cooperative savings program
• SOM Pujarnol, a rural bed-and-breakfast and housing cooperative
• Calafou, a settlement occupying an abandoned industrial village which now produces machine fabrication, professional music recording, handmade soap, lodging and software and event hosting for concerts, festivals and conferences
• MaCUS, a collaborative machine shop which supports artists, traditional and modern craftspeople and livelihoods by allowing access to a wide range of industrial machines, including everything from a woodshop to a music studio and 3-D printers.

Aerial View of Barcelona

Inside one of the workshops of Calafou

Monthly transactions within the alternative economic network

Cooperative Public System

The CIC ultimately aims to promote the development of a “Cooperative Public System” outside the official control of the Spanish and Catalan governments as well as the capitalist market. It seeks to transition systems such as Food, R&D, Education, Housing, Health Transportation and more to a commons-based management and ownership system. Currently, the Catalan Supply Center and XCTIT are the most fully-realized aspects of this goal.

There is No Catalan Integral Cooperative

One of the most interesting facts that turned up in Dafermos’ report is the fact that although the CIC has developed a highly diverse network of legal entities to aid its projects, the CIC itself has no legal status and does not officially exist. Dafermos claims the reason for this is so that the core members have more flexibility when it comes to dealing with the state and its various bureaucratic requirements.

How Does It Work?

According to the Dafermos report, the rough financial breakdown goes like so:

Income Sources

• Member fees (50%)
• Tax refunds from self-employment loophole (50%)
• Donations (minimal)
• Revenue (Unclear in the report how much this accounts for)

Expenses

• Basic Income to CIC members
• Funding for various projects

Most of the economic activity is carried out in a decentralized fashion by the CIC’s various projects and legal entities it manages, leaving an extremely minimal financial burden for the cooperative itself, which may explain why it is able to sustain itself while supporting so many other projects. It relies on reciprocal support and benefits from the diverse cooperative institutions it collaborates with to reproduce itself. As a cooperative, it emphasizes the need for “cooperation among cooperatives” and proves that with a robust enough network, highly experimental forms can be developed into viable organizations.

Decisions are arrived at within the committees through consensus-based democratic processes, and the general membership is organized through assemblies for coordination, which operate on similar principles. Assemblies are organized for individual projects, as well as for coordination between projects. Some committees and assemblies have limited authority over others, such as the financial committee and CASX, which make decisions about funding and have a direct say in each other’s operations, while others are completely autonomous from the main cooperative.

Why Does the CIC Work?

By most conventional standards among cooperative businesses, it shouldn’t. And yet it does, and even appears to be growing through its own organizing and support from the governments of Barcelona and Catalonia. Why is the CIC succeeding where many other politically-motivated cooperatives have failed?

Open Cooperativism

The CIC is founded on the principle of Open Cooperativism, which states that in order to counter isomorphic tendencies (isolation, commodification and protection of intellectual property, exploitation of non-members and the environment) in cooperatives bound to the market system Co-ops must agree to

• “work for the common good” rather than just their membership
• Utilize multi-stakeholder governance
• Use and produce “commons”-based goods in their production and licensing (rather than proprietary means of production)
• Collaborate globally with the intention of leading an economic transition away from capitalism while focusing on local production and development.

Without this framework, it would be hard to imagine an organization like the CIC existing. Intense focus on collaboration and inter-cooperative reciprocity is what keeps something as decentralized as the CIC afloat.

Clever Exploitation of Tax Loopholes

Apparently, a significant portion of the income comes from tax refunds earned through the self-employment program on each member’s invoices when processed by the state.This is part of the CIC’s larger principal of Economic Disobedience. One of the CIC’s founding members, Enric Duran, became famous for taking out nearly a half-million euros in collateral-free loans from 39 banks and giving it all away in donations to anti-capitalist organizations. After announcing what he had done, Duran fled the country and went on to found FairCoop, an organization based on open cooperativism that focused on promoting global initiatives through legal, financial and technological tools.

Organizing the Self-Employed

Many have talked about organizing the self-employed and so-called independent contractors, but few have succeeded. CIC’s model proves that an extremely broad cross-industrial cooperativism may have some important updates to older models of industrial unionism, which have had a very difficult time organizing the increasing numbers of precariously employed workers in formal and informal jobs.

Diversity of Institutions

The strength of CIC comes from its widely diverse reciprocal networks of exchange. By not relying on any single income source tied to revenue, they are able to exist and experiment with relative freedom compared to more business-oriented cooperatives. Many post-capitalist and mainstream economic transition theories assume that a shift towards less and less formal employment is likely, and a further decentralization of formal employment is already occurring with video-conferencing and telecommuting becoming popular. Many worker cooperatives and labor unions are struggling to adapt to this new paradigm of labor atomization. The CIC’s response is to optimize the countervailing tendency to labor atomization, which is the general growth of the social network across industrial and shop-floor bonds and using that as its primary tool for developing the forms of a future fair and sustainable economy.

• Dafermos, George.The Catalan Integral Cooperative: an organizational study of a post-capitalist cooperative. P2P Foundation, 2017. http://commonstransition.org/the-catalan-integral-cooperative-an-organizational-study-of-a-post-capitalist-cooperative/
• Catalan Integral Cooperative (website) https://cooperativa.cat/en
• International Cooperative Alliance Co-operative identity, values & principles. https://ica.coop/en/whats-co-op/co-operative-identity-values-principles
• Kassam, Ashifa Spain’s ‘Robin Hood’ swindled banks to help fight capitalism. The Guardian, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/20/spain-robin-hood-banks-capitalism-enric-duran
• FairCoop (Website) https://fair.coop/
• Faber, Sebastiaan and Seguín, Bécquer. Welcome to Sunny Barcelona, Where the Government Is Embracing Coops, Citizen Activism, and Solar Energy.
  The Nation, 2016. https://www.thenation.com/article/welcome-to-sunny-barcelona-where-the-government-is-embracing-coops-citizen-activism-and-solar-energy/

Photo by debora elyasy

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This is what is happening in cities globally, but there is a dearth of reporting and analysis of this. This gap is addressed by the important book of Krzysztof Nawratek, who looks at commoning in the city, and how it is overcoming the rule of capital in many different contexts. The book refers to a conservative thinker of the beginning of the 19th century, who was already struggling with the dehumanizing, mechanizing and quantifying effects of the rule of capital in time.

Book of the day: Total Urban Mobilisation. Ernst Jünger and the Post-Capitalist City.

By Krzysztof Nawratek. Palgrave Pivot, 2019.

Description

In this book Krzysztof Nawratek explores the possibility of a post-capitalist city, and in so doing, reclaims and develops the idea of total mobilisation as originally formulated by Ernst Jünger. Nawratek formulates the idea of ‘accumulation of agency’ the ability to act, to replace the logic of capital accumulation as a main driver of urban development. He argues that this ‘accumulation of agency’ operates already in contemporary cities, and should not be seen as essential element of capitalism, but as a conceptual gateway to a post-capitalist world.

• Defines the conditions required to discuss post-capitalism and post-capitalist city models beyond a Marxist intellectual framework

• An innovative approach within urban theory examining the idea (‘project’) of a post-capitalist city from a non-Marxist perspective

• Explains how the logic of accumulation of agency, which operates in contemporary cities, should not be seen as essential element of capitalism, but as a conceptual gateway to a post-capitalist world

• Valuable resource for academics and postgraduate students within disciplines connected to urban issues, in particular human geography, urban planning, architecture and urban design

Excerpt

Cities are spatial and temporal entities where elements of this post-capitalist world are already emerging. Commonist initiatives, co-operatives, and various new democratic models of economic and political institutions are thriving in thousands of cities across all continents. We cannot expect, however, the new post-capitalist world to emerge out of a “parliament of mayors” or “network of microcities”, but from a global institutional platform allowing to democratically share benefits and resources, and to accumulate dispersed agency. Following Karatani’s line of thought, the mode of exchange C (global capitalism) triumphed over mode B (national state economic model) because it was able to accumulate agency as an ability to act. Post-capitalism (mode of exchange D) will overcome current global economic systems when its ability to mobilise the power to act is stronger than that of capitalism. Mode B has been dominated by mode C because of its limited scale, but also a limited ability to convert plundered and then distributed resources to fulfil the needs and aspirations of local populations. Global capitalism is not really global; it operates only on the very thin surface of world of life. It is an exploitative regime, syphoning wealth from the poor to the rich. Capital is scared of anything beyond its comprehension, of anything new and unexpected, anything what cannot be easily translated into countable amount of money. Anything that exists beyond its reach is a potential threat.

Cities have the ability to harvest the potential of their residents and infrastructure; they are also a highly interdependent second layer of nature. Residents can operate as mediators between diverse socio-political, spatial, and economic orders, and this is the very reason why cities must not be seen as autonomous zones, but rather, as highly diverse plexuses in global networks and planes. They are polyphonic narratives in a project of the new global All-under-Heaven post-capitalist Empire. When, at the end of his life, Junger writes about the modern world being dominated by technology and capitalism, he “…does not exonerate and does not excuse. To take any stand on solid ground would likely mean a trench or a grave. The true realist, therefore, will leap and look, yet never land anywhere”. Junger does not write about post-capitalist cities, but warns readers that very often, “…technology is pursued not to accelerate progress but to intensify power.” Therefore, a post-capitalist city cannot be built as a technological extrapolation of contemporary capitalism, which must be rejected through tactical “…deliberate elusiveness, wrapped in meditative uncertainty”. A post-capitalist city is a forest we can live in and live outside of, a forest we can stroll through. The forest that does not need us to grow. A city of agency is a place where Junger’s anti-alienation strategy is fully realised.

Yves Citton on the Three Aspects of Post-Capitalist Strategies

“First, post-capitalism will not have to be invented from scratch out of nothing. There are already practices, solidarities, post-capitalist relations that have been set up both locally (AMAP – Association for the Maintenance of Peasant Farming -, ZAD, neighborhood associations) and globally (sensitivities and legislations).

Second, post-capitalism is not about breaking up a system that has passed into a future system. The story to be considered is one of a superposition of strata, rather than as a succession of states. Capitalism will remain present as a stratum on which another stratum will unfold, some lineaments of which have already been in place for decades or centuries.

Finally, it is perhaps in the most “advanced” developments of capitalism that one has to find the keys to what will be built on it, and partly against it.”

(translated from the french, https://chronik.fr/yves-citton-post-capitalisme-sera-quen-deja-quen-feront-demain-collectifs-activistes-artivistes.html )

Photo by National Science and Media Museum

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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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Massimo De Angelis is a thinker very much in the autonomist tradition; he mentions being a student of Harry Cleaver. This comes through loud and clear in his focus on the self-activity of ordinary people, and on the centrality of their self-created and -governed institutions as the kernel of a postcapitalist successor society.

For De Angelis, the defining feature of common goods is not any inherent quality of the goods in question. It is the objective fact of commoning, that is being currently governed as a commons by its members.

By and large, the commons imply a plurality of people (a community) sharing resources and governing them and their own relations and (re)productive processes through horizontal doing in common, commoning…. [I]n the last few years we have witnessed several cases of alignment of social movements to the commons, a commons which offers great potential….

…I believe there is a social revolution in the making that, if recognised and able to attract more energies from people around the world, could give us a chance to embark on a process of transformation towards postcapitalist society. My underlying conception of revolution is aligned to that of Marx which sees social revolutions — that is, the growth of alternative modes of production — as the material condition for any political revolution. A radical transformation of our world implies that people come together into communities that develop these alternatives to the logic of capitalism, multiply them and interconnect them: I understand commons to be such alternatives.

A huge portion of our lives takes place within the commons, particularly those social functions involving the reproduction of labor power and of the larger social fabric.

We are generally born into a commons, even if it only consists of interactions with our parents or carers, siblings and friends…. Values practices, such as loyalty to friends, conviviality, mutual aid, care, and even struggles, are developed in the commons.

As soon as these networks of social cooperation develop into systemic patterns in neighborhood associations, cooperatives, social centres, food networks and social movements(and given the development of communication and information technologies), these commons-based forms of social cooperation have the potential to expand and reshape their boundaries, renew their social compositions, develop multicultures of horizontality, destabilise official science… and give rise to commons ecologies, that is, plural and cooperating commons with institutions and arrangements we cannot predict.

As George Caffentzis writes in his cover blurb, De Angelis does for the commons what Marx did for capital. He posits the commons circuit (C-M-C) alongside Marx’s circuit of capital (M-C-M).

While for Marx the commodity is the elementary form of capitalist wealth, so for me common goods are the elementary form of wealth of a postcapitalist world.

De Angelis criticizes Marx for largely focusing on capital, to the neglect of the role that the commons play in social reproduction under capitalism.

The commons circuit, C-M-C, is a “selling-in-order-to-buy circuit.” The difference between the two circuits is that “[t]he first has at [sic] its goals the satisfaction of needs, and money here is a mere means for the satisfaction of these needs. The second has as its goal the realization of money: the means becomes here the end.”

This selling-in-order-to-buy circuit is nothing more than a membrane of exchange between commons and capital systems, the boundary separating commons from capital. As a subset of a larger commons circuit, the simple selling-in-order-to-buy circuit only appears as contingently necessary, and different commons may be distinguished by the degree of their dependence on capital’s monetary circuits.

* * *

The point is that unlike the capital circuit, the simple commodity circuit is just a means, hence scalable, depending on the external context, to the structure of needs and desires and the resources that can be mobilised in non-commoditised forms (through for example pooling, gift circuits or administrative transfers).

Hence the commons, by growth, can reduce its need for interaction with the circuit of capital via the cash nexus, and incorporate more and more basic functions of life into itself.

The commons are constrained by the fact that they coexist with capital and the state.

It is up to the commons, therefore, to develop their own politics to attempt to shift these constraints….

The commons and capital circuits have coexisted since the beginning of capitalism, with the boundary and correlation of forces between them constantly shifting. The “structural coupling” between the two circuits “allows one system to access and use the complexity of other systems.” The correlation of forces at any given time determines the comparative power of the commons circuit and capital circuit in setting the terms of their mutual interface through the cash nexus, and whether the boundary between them is such that capital on net uses the commons as a means to its own ends more than the commons uses capital, or vice versa.

…even if it is true that capital can co-opt commons, the opposite is also true: the commons can access the complexity of capital systems for their own development.

* * *

Commons and capital are two distinct, autonomous social systems; that is, they both struggle to ‘take things into their own hands’ and self-govern on the basis of their different and often clashing, internally generated codes, measures and values. They also struggle to be distinct autopoietic social systems, in that they aim to reproduce not only their interrelations but also the preproduction of their components through their internally generated codes and values. They do this of course, in a clear, distinctive way. Capital can reproduce itself only through profit and its accumulation, which ultimately imply the exploitation of labour, the creation of divisions among the working class, and the trashing of nature. Commons can reproduce through commoning, doing in common, which is a social process embedded in particular values that defines a sharing culture in a given time and context, through which they reproduce resources and the community that comprises them…. Commons are generated in so far as subjects become commoners, in so far as their social being is enacted with others, at different levels of social organization, through a social practice, commoning, that is essentially horizontal and may embrace a variety of forms depending on circumstances…, but ultimately is grounded in community sharing. Capital, by contrast, tends to objectify, instrumentalize and impose hierarchical order….

…[T]he commons and capital/state are often linked, coupled through the buying-and-selling site of the market, that is, the ‘economy’. Both capital and the commons buy and sell, although with different priorities and as parts of different movements…. Capital buys in order to sell at a profit… or as means of production, to turn resources into commodities…. Commons, on the other hand, tend to sell commodities in order to buy means of sustenance and reproduction. For example, some members of a household sell their labour power to gain an income in order to be able to purchase the goods necessary for reproduction of the household; or an association engages in petty trade to fund itself; or a social centre sells beer at a concert to purchase the materials to build a kitchen. Buying in order to sell and selling in order to buy are two opposite praxes…, the former governed by a life activity ultimately wasted in accumulation and the latter governed by the needs and desires of reproduction…. In other words…, while reproduction of labour power is a feature of the commons production of the commodity labour-power sold to capital, capital does not necessarily control (or controls only in part through the state and the education system) the labour of reproduction which is fundamental to the commons.

…Furthermore, the environment of present-day commons is dominated by capital loops, the circuits of capital that all wish to enclose and all wish to turn into a profitable enterprise and overwork or destitution for others. If we were to take the large, bird’s-eye view of history, of the original accumulations of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in South America, Africa, Asia and Europe up to the most recent transition from the post-1945 Keynesian deal to neoliberal, several books could be written about the co-evolution of capital and the commons, about how commons sustained the enclosures of the former by regenerating newer forms in different areas, and how capital has regenerated itself under the impulse of commoner struggles on the shop floor, in neighbourhoods, in bread or antiracist riots or women’s struggles.

I would add that books could be written — and I think a couple actually have been by Kropotkin at least — on how the commons was the fundamental basis of human society from the first neolithic open field villages until the rise of class differentiation and the state, and that successive systems of class exploitation and class states since then have been parasitic layers extracting surpluses from the commons.

With the rise of hyper-efficient small-scale means of production not amenable to centralized capitalist control, and the revolution in networked many-to-many communications, we’re entering a new transition period in which the productivity of the commons is becoming too great for capital to successfully enclose or parasitize upon, and in which the commons will ultimately reabsorb the whole of life and leave the parasitic economic classes and their state to starve.

De Angelis refers to the stocks of common goods that accumulate within commons systems and are available to them for internal use as “commonwealth.”

Like capital, commonwealth is thus a stock, but unlike capital the flows it generates possess different goals and it is enacted through different practices. However, like any other systems including capital, its flows aim at going back to stocks, reproduce them, replenish them and enrich them…

He advocates a synergy between the commons and the new social movements, such that

…they are weaved [sic] in virtuous cycles with their own task: the social movement to shift the subjective and objective constraints set in place by state and capital, and the commons to expand in this new space with new commons-based modes of production.

* * *

The strategic problem faced by postcapitalist commons is here how to extend the boundaries of their operations, through development, boundary commons and commons ecologies [i.e. uniting different commons into larger interconnected systems], to include the ecological and capitalist systems with which they interrelate.

He argues that the most critical area of expansion of the commons is “all those activities that serve the immediate purpose of reproducing life….” like “accessing healthy food, housing, water, social care and education.”

How can commonwealth be used to create a new commons system, one that increases the incidence of alternative modes of production, and increases the independence of commoners from capitalist systems…? How can commonwealth be used in order to increase the power of the commons vis-a-vis capital?… Capital can reproduce itself only by putting to work the physical, mental, and affective energies of people for its own purpose: accumulation…. Capital can mobilise social labour and subject it to its measure, to its valuing of things, through different means…. But the one thing upon which the power of capital is ultimately based, the one thing that enables it to deploy all the other means of its power, is its withdrawal of the means of existence, its ability to control, manage, distribute and shape the meaning of resources that are directly responsible for sustaining human and social life: water, land, food, energy, health, housing, care and education and their interrelated cultures in the first place. An increased ability to govern collectively these resources, to democratise their reproduction, to commonalise them by keeping state and market at bay, are conditions for emancipation for all in all other spheres of life and for make [sic] these spheres of life into a type of commonwealth that is enabled to feel a distance from capital…. To have access to these resources would allow people and communities not only to grow more resilient, to share conviviality and enjoy life, but to build a common social force to expand their power vis-a-vis capital….

In summary, commons that make use of the commonwealth more directly linked to (re)production of bodies and the earth is a condition for the expansion of commoners’ empowerment vis-a-vis capital, and a condition of the reduction of the degree of dependence on capital markets…. It corresponds to the development of a sphere of autonomy from capital…, that allows movements to construct a powerful ground upon which all other struggles can be waged for all sorts of other commonwealth uses.

And the intensification of capitalist crisis and further proletarization “creates the conditions for the flourishing of reproduction commons….”

This fundamental stratum of commons would, in turn,

be such a crucial strategic asset that they would form the material basis of a new commons renaissance in many spheres, building its foundation on these reproductive commons. This is because not only would they give us the benefit of new communities, new cultures, and new methods of establishing wellbeing, security and trust within complex organisation, they would also protect us from the whims of financial markets, and especially, increase our security and power to refuse the exploitation of capitalist markets. The more that capital can blackmail us into poorer conditions, higher insecurity and ever-more gruelling work rhythms, the less we have the power to refuse its logic. Conversely, this power grows the more we have alternative means for our reproduction.

The Parliamentary Enclosures of common pasture, wood, and waste in the UK were carried out to facilitate the kind of blackmail De Angelis writes of; they were motivated by the fact that independent access to the means of subsistence enabled labor to accept or refuse wage labor on its own terms. In the propertied classes’ press of the late 18th century capitalist farmers complained that, because of access to subsistence from pasturing livestock on the commons, gathering food and firewood from common woodland, and the possibility of the landless cottaging on the waste, the rural laboring classes only felt the need to work for wages intermittently. Because of their ability to fall back on the commons, they could not be forced to work as long or as hard as their employers wished.

The commons circuit’s analog to capital’s expansionary circuit is “boundary commoning.” As more activities and sources of sustenance are incorporated into the commons on a non-commodity basis, and the necessary inputs of those activities in turn are recursively incorporated, the boundary between circuits shifts in favor of the commons circuit and incorporates a larger share of society, the balance of power shifts from the capital circuit to the commons circuit and the commons has increasing say over the terms on which it interfaces with the capital circuit.

This parallels the writing of Jane Jacobs and Karl Hess on import substitution — in both cases starting with repair, gradually expanding piecemeal via the production of selected spare parts, and culminating in the production of entire ecosystems of goods — as a way of achieving community

Through commoning, the commons not only can develop new forms of social cooperation with other commons to meet new needs, or increase the non-commodity… diversity of its resources…, it can also establish new markets (such as participatory guarantees or some aspects of fair trade), and bring to the markets goods that fill an old need in new ways, with attention to environmental issues, producer ][pay, quality or minimisation of distance travelled of goods. Commoning also produces local supply chains to reduce the dependence of an area on capitalist commodities and revitalise a local economy. Commoning can thus organically articulate existing skills and resources over a territory, helping a depressed region to realise the wealth that resides hidden with it.

De Angelis denounces the “fallacy of the political,” which sees radical change as an abrupt process brought about through the seizure of political power. Rather, it is a long-term process that involves “the actual production of another form of power” by building commonwealth over time and expanding it at the expense of the capital circuit. He quotes Marx on the “beginning” of “the epoch of social revolution.”

This conception obviously implies that for a historically defined period, both commons and capital/state cohabit the social space, their struggles and relative powers giving shape to it, with the result that unevenness and contradictions are many, as well as strategic games to colonise the other’s space with one’s own values and decolonise one’s own space from the other’s values. The struggle is therefore continuous.

He calls for a social revolution based on the “multiplication of existing commons,” and “coming together and interlacing of the different commons so as to leverage social powers and constitute ecology and scale” and “growing commons powers vis-a-vis capital and the state.”

The process of social revolution is ultimately a process of finding solutions to the problems that capital systems cannot solve…. This implies the establishment of multi-scalar systems of social action that reproduce life in modes, systemic processes, social relations and value practices that seek an alternative path from the dominant ones and that are able to reproduce at greater scale through networking and coordination….

* * *

The effect of a significant number of commons ecologies in a single area is intense: it produces a new culture, norms, networks of support and mutual aid, virtuous neighborhoods and villages. For sustained social change to occur, commons ecologies need to develop and intensify their presence in social space up to a point where they present a viable alternative for most people. This point is the point of critical mass.

“Territorialisation” — building up an interlinked ecology of commons, and particularly those involving survival and subsistence, in recuperated areas — is especially important.

I suggest we should take Marx’s warning about radical transformation beyond capitalism seriously, when he says in Grundrisse that if we do not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.

The corollary is that the formation of the successor society will be an open-ended process, not the blueprint of any vanguard leadership, and its form will emerge from the self-creation of the commoners as creative subject.

It is only when a class of social subjects emerges out of a new mode of production that they helped to shape, sustain and develop that there emerges a new social force to contrast with capital and the state, to deeply transform them, even to commonise them and abolish their worst aspects.* Thus the class for itself that Marx contrasts with the class in itself defined by capitalist exploitation, is the class of struggling commoners, the new subjectivity empowered by the new ecology of social systems they have set in place and intertwined: the commons.

His mention of abolishing the worst aspects of capital and state echoes ideas found in similar thinkers of shifting the nature of states (ranging from Saint-Simon’s substitution of “administration of things” for “governance of people” to Proudhon’s “dissolving the state in society” to Orsi’s and Bauwens’s Partner State) and corporations (experiments in self-management, open-sourcing IP, etc.) even under the existing system, in order to make them somewhat less extractive and hierarchical, and lay the groundwork for a fundamental alteration in their character when the larger system they are a part of reaches its tipping point. The nature of the corporation or state agency is determined by the nature of the larger system of which it is a part (e.g. the evolution of craft guilds from a cooperative ethos at the height of the Middle Ages to an essentially corporate capitalist model dominated by large masters engaged in the export trade in early modern times). The legacy institutions that are able to negotiate the transition process and survive with some degree of organizational continuity in the successor society may still have the same names, but they will be largely different in substance.

A commons movement is not simply a movement against the valuation processes and injustices of capital as well as the hierarchies of the state, but a movement that seek [sic] to commonalize many functions now both in private and state hands, especially those functions that have to do with social reproduction, and that define the quality and the quality of services available….

Aside from the strategy of creating commons from the ground up…, another strategy is to commonalize its existing private or public systems and transform them into resilient organisations, which in turn imply [sic], much deeper democratisation and cooperation, namely basic commons coordinates.

The objective to turn more and more spheres of societies into sustainable and resilient spheres thus coincides with that of adopting commons as a central kernel of the architecture of a new mode of production integrating many types of modes of production….

Commonalisation means to shift a public or private organisation into a commons or, more likely, into a web of interconnected and nested commons giving shape to metacommonality, with the overarching goal of resilience….

For a public institution or private corporation, commonalisation does not mean that a given final result is optimal, but that a process has begun along which there is a collective effort, through the commoners’ democratic management of constraints, costs, and rewards, to increase all sorts of commoning across different social actors involved in the corporation or public service….

1. the parameter of democracy: democratisation of a state service or a corporation along a scale that has as its two opposite poles management versus direct democracy…;
2. maximum accountability and transparency and the ability to recall every public servant… and other stakeholder involved in the production of the service;
3. opening the boundaries between different types of practices and subjects thus allowing maximum cognitive diversity as well as increasing the porosity of the system boundaries to a variety of subjects, knowledges and practices….

He mentions Barcelona en Comu as an example, with such experiments in direct democracy and transparency as participatory budgeting, open policy proposal wikis, etc.

Likewise, he refers to the commons being able to make use of capital on favorable terms “because there is an echo of the commons inside capital or state systems, and thus it is possible to define meta-commonal relations across capital, state and commons.” It is important to remember that state agencies and capitalist corporations are not monoliths; they are governed by hierarchies precisely because the individuals and social groups within them all have interests that may not coincide with the official goals of the organization or the interests of its leadership, so that it becomes necessary to resort to power relations in order to enclose their cooperative interactions — interactions that may function, internally, on the basis of something like Graeber’s “everyday communism” — as sources of value for the organization.  Authoritarian institutions are always subject to concupiscence, the kind of “war within their members” that St. Paul described in the individual. The commons sector can often hope to find friendly individuals and subcultures within the “Belly of the Beast.”

De Angelis sees a cybernetic principle called Ashby’s Law, or the Law of Requisite Variety (“in order to have a system under the control of a regulator, the variety of the regulator must match the variety of the system”; “the greater the variety of the system in relation to the regulator, the greater is the need of the regulator to reduce the system’s variety or increase its own variety”) as both a source of hope and a strategy for victory.

State regulations like health and safety rules are often a means by which capital artificially simplifies society by suppressing the commons, either by imposing administrative costs on the commons that small-scale production cannot absorb, or forcing it into illegality and thereby marginalizing it. For example: “Different households are discouraged from trusting each other when they cannot share at a school party their cakes and biscuits made at home, but instead have to show that they have purchased the product.” Likewise organic certification regimes with such high costs that only relatively large producers can afford them, effectively keeping small producers from legally using the “organic” label. The commons sector has in some cases responded by devising its own certification regimes enforced along Ostromite lines by the participants themselves, although the formal legality of such practices varies from location to location and the attitudes of local political authorities.

To achieve victory the commons sector must increase its internal capacity to self-regulate, while overloading its variety relative to the regulator in order to overload the latter with information.

Here a sub-system of society is comprising a set of self-regulation of the commons…. This wider commons ecology, defended and enlarged by social movements, reduces the power to regulate complexity of the state/capital regulator, who is left with the increasingly impossible task of matching society’s variety in order to regulate. This is the case when commons movements outflank the state and capital.

I would note here that a self-governed system’s regulatory capacity is inherently greater in variety relative to the internal matter to be regulated because the complexity and enforcement costs of regulation are directly proportional to the conflict of interest between regulators and regulated. This is even more so if the self-governed system is largely stigmergic or permissionless, on the model of Wikipedia or open-source software design. A commons ecology that decentralizes and modularizes the complex subsistence and reproduction activities of the spheres of capital and state, and reorganizes them on a permissionless basis, will render them far less complicated than their authoritarian counterparts.

In addition, new technologies of decentralized and small-scale production that make the commons increasingly efficient relative to state and capital also have the effect of increasing the complexity of the commons relative to state regulators. For example, the enforcement of industrial patents traditionally assumed very low transaction costs because most production was carried out by a few large manufacturing corporations, consisted of a few major variations in product design, and was marketed through a handful of major retail chains served by a centralized distribution network. When the product ecology expands by orders of magnitude to include a whole host of open-source designs or pirated proprietary ones available as CAD-CAM files on a micro-manufacturing version of The Pirate Bay, and they’re produced for neighborhood consumption by hundreds of thousands of garage factories run by workers cooperatives of a few people each, the transaction costs of enforcement become astronomical.

Finally, in the event that state and corporation attempt to render the commons more governable by forcibly simplifying them (making them more legible, in James Scott’s terminology), the enforcement of such measures is itself a form of regulation that can be thwarted by making the task of enforcement more complicated than the regulators can cope with (in particular, technologies of evasion or circumvention like encryption).

The disruptive effect on the regulator’s ability to cope with complexity can be greatly intensified, as well, when commons-based social movements engage in the kinds of leaderless swarming or saturation attacks described by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt.

If commons movements become the expression of a political recomposition that is one with a mode of production to expand, to develop and to set against the dominant mode of production, then we have acquired a common sense-horizon, not one that establishes a future model, but a present organisational unit that seeks to evolve and have a place in the contemporary cosmopolitan and globalised world because its power resides in diversity, variety and complexity….

A society is in movement because a large part of it is constituting itself in terms of a growing web of interactive commons, capable of sustaining livelihoods… and of deploying its social force not only to resist enclosures but to sustain and expand its commons. In short, emancipatory social transportation is predicated not only on increasing complexity, but also on the multiplication of commons governing such a complexity.

Somewhat similar to Negri’s and Hardt’s choice of “multitude,” De Angelis prefers “commoners” to “workers” as a name for the subject engaged in constructing a postcapitalist society, because it includes “the self-activity of this class in so far as the many-faceted (re)production of livelihoods outside capital,” and “captures both an underpinning relation to capital and a quest for the production of alternatives.” And, I would add, Marx saw the working class’s ultimate task as abolition of itself as a class; this is an ongoing task at present under capitalism, as part of the construction of the successor society here and now.

He identifies, as one of the ideological barriers to the emergence of commoners as a growing class subjectivity, the idea of the “middle class.”

…which I define not as a homogeneous social group, with a given level of income, but as a stratified field of subjectivity disciplined to a large degree to the norms of behaviour of a modern society in which capital has a fundamental role in organising social production through disciplinary markets, enclosures, governance and its profit-seeking enterprises. In other words, ‘middle-classness’ is constituted through an idea of the betterment and order achieved within the boundaries of the capitalist system.

This is especially true, I think, of the United States, which in many ways as a settler society on the frontier of Western capitalism has become simultaneously the savior of old-world capitalism and — with such components of the American ideology as “American Exceptionalism” and “the American Dream” — an intensification of its most toxic tendencies. Building class consciousness against exploitation is probably harder in America than anywhere else in the developed capitalist world because of this internalized tendency of ordinary people to see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” To see this, one need only go to any tweet or Facebook post critical of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, and look at the dozens of replies from sycophantic dudebros outraged at the blot to their escutcheon.

Among other important points, finally, De Angelis stresses the need for intersectionality within the commons as a source of unity.

Photo by nikita_nikiforov

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AureaSocial’s entrance

SELF-MANAGEMENT SPACE OPEN TO THE WORLD FROM 2O11

We date back to 2011 when the Cooperativa Integral Catalana (CIC) was consolidated after a year of work and having actively participated in the mobilizations of the 15M, a movement formed by people who are free and independent from the political parties, which made the possibility of practicing self-organization resonate in the minds and consciences of many people and made it possible to remember that only people save people.

In this context, we found that the CIC’s permanent assembly began to run a space which a family with close affinity to social movments had ceded to them, to stop the Banco Popular from evicting the property. This bank was attempting to halt the mortgage agreement that they had with this family business.

As it was all done confirming to legality, after some time the court of Barcelona issued a judicial resolution where the Xarxa Integral de Profesionals y Usuaries SCCL, a cooperative tool of the CIC became the holder of the rental contract until 2023.

Here began a new stage based on self-management, which meant without subsidies nor from the state neither any regional or municipal aid of any kind.

During all this time, Aurea Social, a local of 1400 squaremeters located in the Poblet neighborhood (Sagrada Familia) is linked to, related with and  visited by all kinds of activists, communication and media channels, researchers of many different fields coming not only from Catalonia and Spain but from all over the planet earth.So much so that we have received visits and invitations to explain our self-managed experiences to places all over Europe, America, Asia, Africa and even Oceania.

Anthropologists, Sociologists, Political Scientists, Journalists, Universities, Cooperative Federations from all over the world have visited and communicated with us. We have been in touch with many different people, even with those who have not invented anything but have simply decided to make reflections, decisions and action for a way of life with parameters opposed to capitalism from a constructive and inclusive attitude with those people and collectives who understand that the real revolution is not possible without an individual and collective transformation based on mutual support, assembly, and horizontal and non-hierarchical organization

In this journey we have tried to be honest and sincere with ourselves and we have promoted and continue to promote individual and collective self-managed projects and the concept of the common as theoretical and practical reference.

In fields such as Health, Housing and Education we have collaborated with many people who wanted and felt the need to manage their lives from the sovereignty and not from the submission to the criteria of the system. Not everything has been a success, precisely in these aspects that we have been most self-critical and we have observed that our proposals in this respect without the necessary resources were simple intentions.

For this reason, the bet of giving shelter to productive projects throughout Catalonia when many of them were not viable within the capitalist system,within the networks generated by the Integral Cooperative became possible, it could be said that in these years we have put our legal tools at theservice of more than two thousand projectsto many different types of activities that one can imagine…

This is where our self-management strategy has proven most effective.

We have promoted a social economy outside the capitalist system in social currency that has moved the amount of 400,000 units only in last year

Today, after 7 years we are at a crossroads.

The Capital is once again putting pressure on the self-managed organizations and on our spaces.

We want to make a call to all the organizations of activists, self-managemened projects, anti-authoritarians, foundations, grassroots organizations, popular and libertarian associations from all over the world to support Aurea Social in this moment of attack of the Bank (Banco Popular /Santander) and the Capital against the self-managed spaces.

Now more than ever we need your support and not only your political but also your financial support to face this attack that wants to expel the Cooperativa Integral from a neighbourhood of Barcelona where we the witnesses that another way of life is possible.

We have generated an oasis of self-management in the midst of a capitalist, gentrified and submissive context with the forms and customs of domination that we neither share nor promote.

We need spaces where freedom of expression can be guaranteed, where in order to be free it is not necessary to be submissive to the authorities that are daily violating civil rights in Catalonia and in the Spanish state, in the present situation and in the future it is very important to maintain liberated spaces that do not depend on the state or in any of its instances in order to ensure that the culture of freedom is not threatened by the economic power of Capital.

We, therefore urge you to participate within your best ability in the crowfunding that we have set in motion which aims to raise funds for the collectivization of AureaSocial so that it does not become the property of the Bank.

Union, Action and Self-Management!!!

Photo by Fotomovimiento

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The current rhetoric around the blockchain hints at problems with the techno-utopian ideologies that surround digital activism.

A blockchain is essentially a distributed database. The technology first appeared in 2009 as the basis of the Bitcoin digital currency system, but it has potential for doing much, much more—including aiding in the development of platform cooperatives.

Traditionally, institutions use centralized databases. For example, when you transfer money using a bank account your bank updates its ledger to credit and debit accounts accordingly. In this example, there is one central database and the bank is a trusted intermediary who manages it. With a blockchain, this record is shared among all participants in the network. To send bitcoin, for example, an owner publicly broadcasts a transaction to all participants in the network. Participants collectively verify that the transaction indeed took place and update the database accordingly. This record is public, shared by all, and it cannot be amended.

This distributed database can be used for applications other than monetary transactions. With the rise of what some are calling “blockchain 2.0,” the accounting technology underpinning Bitcoin is now taking on non-monetary applications as diverse as electronic voting, file tracking, property title management, and the organization of worker cooperatives. Very quickly, it seems, distributed ledger technologies have made their way into any project broadly related to social or political transformation for the left—“put a blockchain on it!”— until its mention, sooner or later, looks like the basis for a dangerous drinking game. On the other side of things, poking fun at blockchain evangelism is now a nerdy pastime, more enjoyable even than ridiculing handlebar moustaches and fixie bicycles.

So let me show my hand. I’m interested in the blockchain (or blockchain-based technologies) as one tool that, in a very pragmatic way, could assist with cooperative activities—helping us to share resources, to arbitrate, adjudicate, disambiguate, and make collective decisions. Some fledgling examples are La’Zooz, an alternative ridesharing app; Swarm, a fundraising app; and proposals for the use of distributed ledgers to manage land ownership or critical infrastructures like water and energy. Many of these activities are difficult outside of local communities or in the absence of some trusted intermediary. However, I also think that much of the current rhetoric around the blockchain hints at problems with the techno-utopian ideologies that surround digital activism, and points to the assumptions these projects fall into time and again. It’s worth addressing these here.

ASSUMPTION #1: WE CAN REPLACE MESSY AND TIME-CONSUMING SOCIAL PROCESSES WITH ELEGANT TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS

Fostering and scaling cooperation is really difficult. This is why we have institutions, norms, laws, and markets. We might not like them, but these mechanisms allow us to cooperate with others even when we don’t know and trust them. They help us to make decisions and to divvy up tasks and to reach consensus. When we take these things away—when we break them down—it can be very difficult to cooperate. Indeed, this is one of the big problems with alternative forms of organization outside of the state and the market—those that are not structured by typical modes of governance such as rules, norms, or pricing. These kinds of structureless collaboration generally only work at very local kin-communal scales where everybody already knows and trusts everyone else. In Ireland, for example, there were several long-term bank strikes in the 1970s. The economy didn’t grind to a halt. Instead, local publicans stepped in and extended credit to their customers; the debtors were well-known to the publicans, who were in a good position to make an assessment on their credit worthiness. Community trust replaced a trustless monetary system. This kind of local arrangement wouldn’t work in a larger or more atomized community. It probably wouldn’t work in today’s Ireland because community ties are weaker.

Bitcoin caused excitement when it proposed a technical solution to a problem that previously required a trusted intermediary—money, or, more specifically, the problem of guaranteeing and controlling money supply and monitoring the repartition of funds on a global scale. It did this by developing a distributed database that is cryptographically verified by an entire network of peers and by linking the production of new money with the individual incentive to maintain this public repository. More recently this cryptographic database has also been used to manage laws, contracts, and property. While some of the more evolved applications involve verifying precious stones and supporting interbank loans, the proposal is that this database could also be used to support alternative worker platforms, allowing systems where people can organize, share, or sell their labor without the need of a central entity controlling activities and trimming a generous margin off the top.

The blockchain has more in common with the neoliberal governmentality that produces platform capitalists like Amazon and Uber and state-market coalitions than any radical alternative.

Here the blockchain replaces a trusted third party such as the state or a platform with cryptographic proof. This is why hardcore libertarians and anarcho-communists both favor it. But let’s be clear here—it doesn’t replace all of the functions of an institution, just the function that allows us to trust in our interactions with others because we trust in certain judicial and bureaucratic processes. It doesn’t stand in for all the slow and messy bureaucracy and debate and human processes that go into building cooperation, and it never will.

The blockchain is what we call a “trustless” architecture. It stands in for trust in the absence of more traditional mechanisms like social networks and co-location. It allows cooperation without trust, in other words—something that is quite different from fostering or building trust. As the founding Bitcoin document details, proof-of-work is not a new form of trust, but the abdication of trust altogether as social confidence and judgment in favor of an algorithmic regulation. With a blockchain, it maybe doesn’t matter so much whether I believe in or trust my fellow peers just so long as I trust in the technical efficiency of the protocol. The claim being made is not that we can engineer greater levels of cooperation or trust in friends, institutions, or governments, but that we might dispense with social institutions altogether in favor of an elegant technical solution.

This assumption is naïve, it’s true, but it also betrays a worrying politics—or rather a drive to replace politics (as debate and dispute and things that produce connection and difference) with economics. This is not just a problem with blockchain evangelism—it’s a core problem with the ideology of digital activism generally. The blockchain has more in common with the neoliberal governmentality that produces platform capitalists like Amazon and Uber and state-market coalitions than any radical alternative. Seen in this light, the call for blockchains forms part of a line of informational and administrative technologies such as punch cards, electronic ledgers, and automated record keeping systems that work to administrate populations and to make politics disappear.

ASSUMPTION #2: THE TECHNICAL CAN INSTANTIATE NEW SOCIAL OR POLITICAL PROCESSES

Like a lot of peer-to-peer networks, blockchain applications conflate a technical architecture with a social or political mode of organization. We can see this kind of ideology at work when the CEO of Bitcoin Indonesia argues, “In its purest form, blockchain is democracy.” From this perspective, what makes Uber Uber and La’Zooz La’Zooz comes down to technical differences at the level of topology and protocol. If only we can design the right technical system, in other words, the right kind of society is not too far behind.

The last decade has shown us that there is no linear-causal relationship between decentralization in technical systems and egalitarian or equitable practices socially, politically, or economically. This is not only because it is technologically determinist to assume so, or because networks involve layers that exhibit contradictory affordances, but also because there’s zero evidence that features such as decentralization or structurelessness continue to pose any kind of threat to capitalism. In fact, horizontality and decentralization—the very characteristics that peer production prizes so highly—have emerged as an ideal solution to many of the impasses of liberal economics.

There’s zero evidence that features such as decentralization or structurelessness pose any kind of threat to capitalism.

Today, Silicon Valley appropriates so many of the ideas of the left—anarchism, mobility, and cooperation—even limited forms of welfare. This can create the sense that technical fixes like the blockchain are part of some broader shift to a post-capitalist society, when this shift has not taken place. Indeed, the blockchain applications that are really gaining traction are those developed by large banks in collaboration with tech startups—applications to build private blockchains for greater asset management or automatic credit clearing between banks, or to allow cultural industries to combat piracy in a distributed network and manage the sale and ownership of digital goods more efficiently.

While technical tools such as the blockchain might form part of a broader artillery for , we also need to have a little perspective. We need to find ways to embrace not only technical solutions, but also people who have experience in community organizing and methods that foster trust, negotiate hierarchies, and embrace difference. Because there is no magic app for platform cooperativism. And there never will be.

Rachel O’Dwyer | An essay originally anthologized in Ours To Hack and To Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet | OR Books | August 2017| 6 minutes (1,600 words)

Originally published in Longreads.com

Photo by Ars Electronica

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