From Democracy at Work

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[S1 E1] Primitive or Original Accumulation Prof. Harvey talks about how capital came to power, the brutality and the violence with which capital came to be, and what it is.

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Transnational corporations have become the dominant force directing our world. Humanity is accelerating toward a precipice of overconsumption, and the large transnationals are the primary agents driving us there. We’re rapidly losing the earth’s forests, animals, insects, fish, even the topsoil we require to grow our crops. The earth is becoming denuded of its bounty as every living system ­is ransacked for resources—not to mention the looming emergency of climate breakdown. As a result, twenty thousand scientists have recently issued a public warning to humanity, while prominent academics consider the collapse of civilization this century to be a serious threat.

Changes in our personal consumption patterns are important, but are ultimately inconsequential compared with the impact of the transnationals that have come to dominate our global economic and political system. Of the world’s hundred largest economies, sixty-nine are now corporations. Political parties in many of our so-called democracies are funded in large part by billionaires, while government cabinet positions are staffed by corporate executives. International bodies setting global policy are infiltrated by corporate agents so successful at entrenching corporate power that even those governments that still prioritize their people’s needs can no longer make autonomous decisions without risking crippling lawsuits from the transnationals whose interests they threaten. Meanwhile, countries and cities compete with each other to beg their corporate overlords for investment dollars, even it means undermining public services and legal protections for their own populations.

Environmental groups, recognizing where ultimate power resides, try to pressure corporations to improve practices through the threat of public shaming, with some appreciable results. However, these attempts are necessarily constrained by the very structure of big corporations, which exist to enrich their shareholders regardless of the consequences. The common goal of corporations around the world is to monetize human activity and what’s left of nature’s abundance as rapidly and efficiently as possible. The overriding purpose of the world’s powerful institutional force is thus directly at odds with a flourishing earth or a viable future for humanity.

Having spent the first part of my career in the heart of the capitalist system, consulting to major international banks and corporations, I developed a sense of the underlying forces that direct the centers of financial power. These ideas are my distillation of what I believe could be effective levers for humanity to take back some control from the increasing hegemony of corporations and billionaires.

If we are to avoid disaster, our global economic system with its gaping inequities and deranged consumption will eventually need to dismantled and replaced by one based on life-affirming principles rather than wealth maximization. These suggestions, even in aggregate, wouldn’t do that. They represent mere tweaks in a system that ultimately needs to be completely transformed. But like a modest trim tab that helps redirect an ocean liner, perhaps they could begin to curb the destructive force of transnationals and redirect their enormous power toward a more sustainable path.

1. Triple bottom line required for corporate charters

A fundamental reason for the rapacious behavior of transnational corporations is their drive to maximize shareholder value above anything else. While there is no explicit requirement for this in the standard corporate charter, a century of case law has entrenched this principle into the behavior of large corporations to the point that is has become the de facto standard of operation. As a result, if corporations were people, they would be considered psychopaths, utterly devoid of any caring for the harm they cause in the pursuit of their goals.

It is easier, however, to change a corporation’s values than those of a human psychopath. All you need to do is change the legal basis of their charter. Instead of pursuing shareholder interests alone, they could be re-chartered with the explicit purpose of achieving a triple bottom line of social and environmental outcomes as well as financial—sometimes known as the “triple Ps” of people, planet, and profit.

This alternative corporate value system is already available through chartering as a benefit corporation or certifying as a B-Corp, and has been adopted by over 2,000 corporations in over fifty countries around the world—including several multibillion-dollar transnationals.  My proposal is that, instead of being a voluntary step taken by a select few, this would be a requirement for all corporations above a certain size.

Overnight, the intrinsic character of the corporation would be transformed. Currently, CEOs and corporate boards are faced with continual pressure to grow their earnings at all cost. If they chose to make a humane decision, such as not to exploit a copper mine because of the consequent pollution, they could expect to be sued by shareholders, and possibly acquired by a more ruthless competitor. However, if they were legally required to achieve a triple bottom line, they would weigh up decisions in a more balanced way, as a rational person might. With the board responsible for all three bottom lines, they would have to consider the risk of being sued if they caused excessive pollution, or if they were callous to the needs of the communities where their plants were located.

Currently, large corporations boast of their corporate social responsibility departments that are supposed to care about issues such as employment practices of their suppliers, sustainability of their raw materials, environmental impact of their packaging, gender balance and ethnic diversity in the workplace, and investments in local communities. Suddenly, they would have to stop paying mere lip service to these issues and take them as seriously as marketing costs, revenue growth and distribution channels—the things that CEOs actually worry about when they go home at night.

2. Charter renewal required every five years

Changing the corporate charter requirement might not, however, be enough by itself to halt the relentless pursuit of profits by large transnationals. After all, executive pay packages consist of dollars rather than goodwill, and those dollars are linked directly to the share price, which is driven by shareholders’ expectation of financial returns. If they could get away with it, they might continue their rapacious practices, while trying harder to look like they’re meeting the other two bottom lines.

That’s the reason for my second proposal, which is to require that corporations, which currently enjoy what’s known legally as a “perpetual existence,” get their charters renewed every five years. If they failed to meet pre-established criteria on their two non-financial bottom lines, they would not be permitted to continue in business. Currently, if a company can’t meet its financial obligations, it’s forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings and the value of its stock generally tanks to zero. Under my proposal, executives would also have to consider the risk of declaring “social bankruptcy” or “environmental bankruptcy” as they made their business decisions.

As in currently regulated industries such as banking, the final step of losing their charter would not have to be immediate. If a corporation failed to meet its basic parameters, it could be given a warning, with a time period set to fix things. However, the mere threat of this happening would lead corporate executives to make sure they were well above the criteria required to keep their charter.

Corporations are, of course, highly adept at using their financial resources to influence regulatory bodies through bribes and other mechanisms. To avoid this, panel members responsible to renew the charter would be representatives of the communities and ecosystems covered in the company’s scope of operations. Their task would be to weigh up the findings of experienced independent auditors on the company’s performance. To minimize corruption, the panel could be chosen by a process of random selection called sortition, just a like a trial jury is chosen in our legal system.

3. Tax stock trades based on the length of the holding period

Powerful as they are, even corporations have their masters: their shareholders. But don’t think of the typical shareholder as a Warren Buffet type, sitting back in his leather armchair perusing his holdings. Instead, corporate stocks are subject to the frenetic activity of financial markets, where split-second computer algorithms govern much of the trading. Investment firms spend hundreds of millions of dollars enhancing their computing networks to shave as little as three milliseconds off the timing of their trades. The hyper liquidity of global markets means that investors are obsessed with short-term market trends, which leads corporate CEOs, forever anxious about their stock price, to focus their time horizon on the next quarterly earnings report. Financial valuations apply discount rates to future earnings, which means that an investment paying off thirty years in the future can be worth as little as five percent of its future payoff in the present. Under these conditions, why would any CEO care about the state of the planet—or even their company—thirty years from now?

During the 2016 US election campaign, Bernie Sanders proposed a Financial Transaction Tax to pay for free college tuition, setting the rate at 0.1% of the transaction. In Europe, discussions are under way to apply a similar EU-wide tax. My proposal increases the tax rate by orders of magnitude, and differentiates based on the length of the stock holding. For example, the tax rate might look like this:

• 10% if the stock is held less than a day
• 5% if less than a year
• 3% if less than 10 years
• 1% if less than 20 years
• Zero if more than 20 years

The effects of this single step would be enormous. The financial services industry would be transformed overnight. High frequency stock trading and same-day traders would disappear. The short-term orientation of the stock market would be replaced by carefully considered long-term investment decisions. A typical mutual fund, which in the US currently turns over its portfolio at the rate of 130% a year, could no longer afford to do so, and would have to change its investment decision-making based on sustainable returns. The tax could be waived for individuals experiencing a life-changing event or for simple hedging techniques where, for example, farmers need to lock in the price of their produce at a future time.

The result would be a massive shift away from destructive extractive industries and toward sustainable businesses. For example, the fossil fuel industry is recognized to be vastly overvalued as a result of its “unburnable carbon”: the amount of fossil fuels in the ground that can never be burned if the world is to keep climate change below the 2° rise agreed at COP21 in Paris. A recent study estimates the overvaluation as high as $4 trillion. Investors, however, play a game of musical chairs, hoping they won’t be the ones left holding the stranded assets. This proposed transaction fee would incent them to dump fossil fuel investments immediately for opportunities in renewable energy with longer-term payoffs.

4. Cap on billionaire’s assets over $5 billion

As corporations have taken increasing control of the global system, they have catapulted founding shareholders and their heirs to previously unimaginable pinnacles of wealth.  The combined wealth of the world’s 2,754 billionaires is now $9.2 trillion, an amount that has doubled in the past six years, and increased tenfold since the beginning of this century. The magnitude of this wealth is difficult to conceive. The top six billionaires own as much as the lower half of the entire world’s population. Taken together, the world’s billionaires would represent the third largest economy in the world, behind only China and the United States, with wealth equivalent to the GDP of Germany and Japan combined.

There is no legitimate rationale for this outrageous concentration of such wealth in a few individuals. The argument that the founders of Microsoft, Amazon, or Facebook deserve such excessive wealth is no more valid than the belief of the ancient Egyptians in the divinity of their Pharaoh, or the Medieval notion of the divine right of kings. Mark Zuckerberg, aged 33, currently owns over $70 billion. If someone had singlehandedly miniaturized the transistor, developed the logic for computer code, invented the PC, and come up with the internet, then maybe they’d deserve having close to that amount as a reward for the value they created. But all Zuckerberg did was figure out a way to connect people up in a network that became a bit more popular than other networks, and because of the internet’s scale effects, he was the lucky one who hit the jackpot. Zuckerberg merely took advantage of all the other infrastructure work that led to the internet, painstakingly pieced together by millions of people over decades, which has been the real value creator for the world.

In response to this excess, my proposal is to cap billionaires’ wealth at, say, $5 billion. It’s an arbitrary amount, still obscenely high and presumably more than enough for those who argue that people should receive ample financial rewards for success. Beyond a certain level of wealth, however, what drives these people is power and prestige. This could be tapped by requiring them to donate their excess wealth to a trust over which they could retain some influence.

Such a trust, however, would need to have some strict criteria. While the billionaire could influence the trust’s priorities, he would not have control over its activities. The current Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, while a step in the right direction, is under the total control of the Gateses and Warren Buffet. The foundation set up with much fanfare by Mark Zuckerberg is viewed by experts as little more than a fancy tax dodge.

Each trust would need to avoid interference in a country’s political system and be dedicated to life-affirming activities, the scope of which could be based, for example, on the principles of the Earth Charter, a framework for building a just, sustainable and peaceful global society endorsed by over 6,000 organizations.

The positive impact that these trillions of dollars could have on human and natural welfare would be prodigious. Imagine a country the size of Germany and Japan combined dedicated entirely to serving human and natural flourishing. It would have the resources to end extreme poverty, increase regenerative agriculture to over a billion acres worldwide, educate hundreds of millions of girls through the Global South, disseminate up to a billion clean cookstoves, and much, much more.

The billionaires of the world, meanwhile, would continue to enjoy enormous wealth, and when they jet to Davos to hobnob with other luminaries for the annual World Economic Forum, they could finally have something worthwhile to boast about.

5. Declare a crime of ecocide at the International Criminal Court

Even with all these constraints, the powers of transnational corporations would remain enormous, and there would still be times when, through willful negligence or intentional bad faith, corporate action causes massive environmental damage. A UN study, which remained unpublished, found that the world’s largest companies had caused over $2 trillion of environmental damage, which would cost a third of their overall profits if they were forced to pay for it. Because of their extensive political influence, even their most damaging activities go unpunished. This leads to my final proposal: to declare a crime of ecocide at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The ICC is an independent judicial body set up by international treaty, the Rome Statute, in 2002 to prosecute war crimes, genocides, and crimes against humanity. While it continues to face serious challenges to its enforcement powers, it has had the effect of putting tyrants everywhere on notice that they can no longer act with impunity. If ecocide—the loss, destruction, or severe damage of an ecosystem—were declared a crime by the ICC, this could have a similarly daunting effect on those corporate tyrants who currently know they can get away with devastating the world’s “sacrifice zones” where they are pillaging the earth’s resources for profit.

There is a campaign, Eradicating Ecocide, already under way to make this happen. A model law has been drafted, and an Earth Protectors Trust Fund has been set up to permit common people everywhere to become legal Earth protectors. If a two-thirds majority of the Rome Statute signatories were to approve this as an amendment, it would become enforceable globally. Suddenly, corporate boards and CEOs everywhere would realize they are no longer above the law.

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There is a strange paradox to consider about these proposals.  One the one hand, notice how limited they are in scope. Even if they were all implemented overnight, the global system would not be overturned. People would still go to work and get paid, food would still be on the shelves of the grocery store, the same governments would still be in power, and the internet would still work. The gaping structural inequities of our current world order would continue unabated, and we’d still be consuming far more than our planet can sustain. Ultimately, we need a complete transformation of our global system if our civilization is to survive intact through this century.

On the other hand, it doesn’t take a political genius to realize that these ideas are so far from mainstream thinking that they have virtually no chance to be adopted any time soon. They would be considered too radical for even the most progressive mainstream politician to endorse. What does this tell us about our current political dialogue? To me, it suggests that our conversations are too severely constrained by what we’re “allowed” to think in terms of how our system works. We need to cast our gaze outside the norms that our billionaire-controlled mainstream media permits us to consider.

Imagine a world where these ideas (or others like them) began to be seriously entertained. How would they even be enforced? The only way corporations could be brought to heel, or billionaires compelled to give up their excess billions, would be a concerted effort led by the United States in conjunction with the European Union, and joined by the preponderance of other countries.

This, of course, could only happen if grassroots demand for these ideas spread so powerfully that politicians had to take notice. This is not such an unrealistic scenario, given the worldwide disavowal of the dominant capitalist model: most Europeans have a higher opinion of socialism than capitalism, and even in the US, the overwhelming majority see big business as unethical and unfair.

Then, there is the potential “trim tab” effect of adopting these ideas. Even though these proposals alone wouldn’t fundamentally transform our system in the way that’s needed, they might set changes in motion that could eventually take us there. There may be other ideas more effective than these, and of course each proposal contains within it complications that would need to be worked out carefully. However, my hope is that these ideas invite a new mode of political dialogue, along with a recognition that even in the darkest times, realistic pathways exist toward a thriving future for humanity and the natural world.

When the Occupy movement failed to achieve its initial promise, many people pointed to its lack of specific demands as a reason for its demise. If and when the next radical grassroots movement emerges, which may be sooner than you expect, let’s make sure they have an array of ideas such as these in their quiver to focus public opinion on actual political deliverables.

There are very few people who really want to see our civilization collapse. If these proposals eventually did get implemented, perhaps even the executives of the transnational corporations might sleep better at night, knowing that they can become part of the solution rather than a force of destruction.

Jeremy Lent is author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, which investigates how different cultures have made sense of the universe and how their underlying values have changed the course of history. He is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering a sustainable worldview. For more information visit jeremylent.com.

The post Five Ways to Curb the Power of Corporations and Billionaires appeared first on P2P Foundation.

At one point I said, “I don’t care about hierarchy, hierarchy is not the problem,” and immediately felt the temperature in the room drop by a few degrees.

I know I can be provocative with my overly-concise use of language, so I wanted to take some space here to explain more thoroughly. It will take me a few minutes to describe my understanding of hierarchy and power, making the argument that this focus on “hierarchy” is a dangerous misdirection. Then in part 2, I share 11 practical steps that you can take to improve the power dynamics at your workplace, whether you’re in a horizontal collective, decentralised company, hierarchical organisation, or a post-consensus social foam.

Hierarchy Is Just a Shape

For this argument, we need to set aside our emotional and political reactions to the word “hierarchy”. Let’s pretend for a few minutes that we’ve never seen the horrible coercive inefficient hierarchies of human organisations, and just treat the word as a neutral scientific term. I’m thinking of hierarchy purely as a taxonomy, a way to map a system into nested relationships.

Take language for instance. If you tell me you hate fruit, I know not to offer you an apple. It would be impossible to make sense of the world without these hierarchical relationships.

Many natural systems can be understood through a hierarchical metaphor: a tree has a trunk and branches and twigs and leaves. I have no issue with that hierarchy. I don’t think we need a revolution for leaves to overthrow their branches.

In this taxonomical view, hierarchy is an amoral metaphor, a map, a shape which allows me to efficiently explain that this is contained by that.

I don’t think it is inherently unjust to have an organisation with some hierarchical forms. You might have a communications department, alongside an engineering department, and they may both be contained by some coordinating function.

In the kind of “self-managing” “flat” “non-hierarchical” or “less-hierarchical” organisations we work with at The Hum, org charts are usually drawn with friendly circles instead of evil triangles.

Take Enspiral, for instance. We frequently use a circular metaphor to draw a map of our the different roles in the network. I know the circle has symbolic importance for us, but… isn’t it just a pyramid viewed from a different angle?

So What?

More than just an abstract semantic debate for word nerds, I believe that this fascination with “hierarchy” and “non-hierarchy” is a major problem. Focussing on “hierarchy” doesn’t just miss the point, it creates cover for extremely toxic behaviour.

I have encountered so many organisations who describe themselves as “non-hierarchical”, and wear that label as a badge of pride.

I’m guilty of this myself: having declared ourselves to be a “non-hierarchical” organisation, I’m unable to clearly see the un-just, un-accountable, un-inclusive, un-transparent, un-healthy dynamics that inevitably emerge in any human group. Calling ourselves “non-hierarchical” is like a free pass that gets in the way of our self-awareness.

Jo Freeman named this beautifully in The Tyranny of Structurelessness, where she argues that the informal hierarchies of a “structureless” group will always be less accountable and fair than a more formal organisation. It’s worth reading the essay in full, but I’ll pull out a couple paragraphs here to give you the flavour:

“Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities, or intentions of the people involved. (…)

“This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an “objective” news story, “value-free” social science, or a “free” economy. A “laissez faire” group is about as realistic as a “laissez faire” society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of “structurelessness” does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones. Similarly “laissez faire” philosophy did not prevent the economically powerful from establishing control over wages, prices, and distribution of goods; it only prevented the government from doing so. Thus structurelessness becomes a way of masking power, (…) usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). As long as the structure of the group is informal, the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is limited to those who know the rules. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware.

Freeman uses the word “structureless”, which is specific to the context of her 1960’s feminism. Today, you could swap “structureless” for “non-hierarchical” and get a very accurate diagnosis of a sickness that afflicts nearly every group that rejects hierarchical structures.

We’re coming up to the 50th anniversary of this essay, and still it seems the majority of radical organisations have missed the point.

So I repeat: I don’t care about hierarchy. It’s just a shape. I care about power dynamics.

Yes, when a hierarchical shape is applied to a human group, it tends to encourage coercive power dynamics. Usually the people at the top are given more importance than the rest. But the problem is the power, not the shape. So let’s focus on the problem.

More Feminists Talking About “Power”

“Power” is a complex, loaded word, so let’s slow down again and unpack it.

My understanding borrows a lot from Miki Kashtan and Starhawk, who in turn borrow from Mary Parker Follett. (To follow this train of thought, read Kashtan’s Myths of Power-With series and Starhawk’s excellent short book The Empowerment Manual.)

Follett coined the terms “power-over” and “power-with” in 1924. Starhawk adds a third category “power-from-within”. These labels provide three useful lenses for analysing the power dynamics of an organisation. With apologies to the original authors, here’s my definitions:

• power-from-within or empowerment — the creative force you feel when you’re making art, or speaking up for something you believe in
• power-with or social power — influence, status, rank, or reputation that determines how much you are listened to in a group
• power-over or coercion — power used by one person to control another

I think words like “non-hierarchical”, “self-managing” and “horizontal” are kind of vague codes, pointing to our intention to create healthy power relations. In the past, when I said “Enspiral is a non-hierarchical organisation”, what I really meant was “Enspiral is a non-coercive organisation”. That’s the important piece, we’re trying to work without coercion.

These days I have mostly removed “non-hierarchical” from my vocabulary. I still haven’t found a great replacement, but for now I say “decentralised”. But again, it’s not the shape that’s interesting, it’s the power dynamics.

Here are the power dynamics I’m striving for in a “decentralised organisation”:

1. Maximise power-from-within: everyone feels empowered; they are confident to speak up, knowing their voice matters; good ideas can come from anywhere; people play to their strengths; creativity is celebrated; growth is encouraged; anyone can lead some of the time.
2. Make power-with transparent: we’re honest about who has influence; pathways to social power are clearly signposted; influential roles are distributed and rotated; the formal org chart maps closely to the informal influence network.
3. Minimise power-over: one person cannot force another to do something; we are sensitive to coercion; any restrictions on behaviour are developed with a collective mandate.

This sounds nice in theory, but how does it work in practice? I’ve been experimenting with these questions for years as a cofounder and a coach, so I have some practical suggestions for shifting power in each of the three dimensions.

You can read all about it in the second part of this essay: 11 Practical Steps Towards Healthy Power Dynamics at Work.

p.s. Published by Richard D. Bartlett, with no rights reserved. You have my consent to reproduce without permission: different file formats are on my website. If you’re feeling grateful you can support me on Patreon.No rights reserved by the author.

Drawing of 3 org charts: hierarchy, consensus, blah blah… they’re just shapes!

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System Reset is a feature-length documentary which explores this story of change in our economy. Shot in London, Amsterdam and Barcelona, this film is a DIF 2018 exclusive. It features some of the leading thinkers in materials, economics, the commons movement, FabLabs, digital citizenship, urban planning and architecture. Don’t miss your opportunity to see them collectively weave a picture of how our economy could operate.

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These are the questions from Laura Flanders’ opening statements at the Transnational Institute’s convening on Transformative Cities in Amsterdam during July 2018.

The post Transformative Cities: Crisis and Opportunity in Amsterdam appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Matt Stoller of the Open Market Institute talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the growing influence of Google, Facebook, and Amazon on commercial and political life. Stoller argues that these large firms have too much power over our options as consumers and creators as well as having a large impact on our access to information.

About Matt Stoller

Matt Stoller is a Fellow at the Open Markets Institute. He is writing a book on monopoly power in the 20th century for Simon and Schuster. Previously, he was a Senior Policy Advisor and Budget Analyst to the Senate Budget Committee. He also worked in the U.S. House of Representatives on financial services policy, including Dodd-Frank, the Federal Reserve, and the foreclosure crisis. He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Republic, Vice, and Salon. He was a producer for MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show, and served as a writer and actor on the short-lived FX television series Brand X with Russell Brand. You can follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller.

Header photo by GrungeTextures

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Elena Martínez Vicente is a product designer, specialized in designing better processes and more understandable products for humans. She was a designer with the P2PValue project and has extensive experience collaborating with commons, communities and P2P projects, including an ongoing collaboration with the P2P Foundation on our publications and the Commons Transition Primer.

Silvia and Elena are team members in  P2P Models, a research project examining the infrastructure, governance and economy of decentralized, democratic organizations, with a particular focus on value allocation and distribution.

We asked them to tell us about their experiences working in the commons, in academia,  and in the broader world.

Elena, Silvia, tell us a bit about your backgrounds, interests and how you came to be involved in the P2P Models project.

Elena: Since 2006, I have worked as an Interaction Designer in the private sector, also working for NGOs and cooperation projects in general, whenever I had a chance. From my days as a student, and intermittently, I have been in and out of activist groups, feminist and commons communities. It is not until 2016 that I could finally dedicate my entire time at work to “designing for the good ones”. Since then, I have been trying to translate difficult concepts for the common(s) people through infographics, post, illustrations and simple designs. I also try to bring some sanity to free software, since often in large projects, very good intentions are left on the wayside because it is “a pain in the ass” to use them as these projects do not give the right importance to design and user experience.

Silvia: Really, I was never in touch with these themes before, in fact, I think I always avoided using technology in general (I’m now more concerned about how important and powerful this kind of knowledge is). I was always very confused about what to study. I have a lot of diverse interests: dancing, carpentry, philosophy…and although now I find it positive, at that time I felt pressure to “find my speciality”. What I knew, was I liked to write and I was interested in social issues and this led me to Anthropology. Partly because of diverse life experiences, years later I started a master’s degree in Gender Studies and Development Cooperation in Madrid, which offered an internship in Colombia. This experience reinforced my liking for research. When I was back in Madrid, a friend told me about this job opportunity and I did not hesitate to try it.

Can you describe what P2P Models is about? Who else is on the team, and what stage is the project in right now?

Silvia: I am still understanding what this project is about…hahaha. I’m lucky enough to have some master classes with Samer, our principal investigator, to know more about the tech part. I have a much clearer image about the social side of the project. We want to better understand how the governance and the distribution of value work happens in the CBPP (Commons Based Peer Production Communities), in order to know how blockchain could be useful for them. Fortunately, we have a sociologist-computer scientist in our team, David Rozas, who can be the link between the social and the tech part. We are 7 people in total, with different backgrounds and education but with activism in common. Also, we have a lot of collaborators and advisors who help us. We are at the beginning of the project, still taking off, maybe in the most challenging stage or where we should take more important decisions.

Elena: P2PModels is a research project full of difficult tech concepts so it is a beautiful challenge for me. Basically, we can summarize it in a question: Could we advance to a Commons Transition with blockchain?

The project has three main branches to build decentralized, democratic and distributed organizations. We intend to collaborate with international communities to learn from them and to think about technologies that could help to improve the lives of the people who work in these communities.

The people involved are Samer Hassan, principal investigator, David Rozas and Silvia in the sociological part right now, Sem and Antonio as tech advisors and Geno, our word-translator for humans. And, we are hiring tech unicorns and project managers too.

What are some of the projects being studied?

Elena: Right now, we are centered in designing better processes within the team, building the basis as a group and rethinking our team culture. A very important (and invisible) task. In terms of productive work, we almost have the pilot communities, for the ethnographic research. Secondly we are working on the brand, the new website and the communication strategy. We are just a few people doing a lot of stuff!

Silvia: That is one of the important decisions we should take and we are still thinking about it. We have drawn up the criteria to choose which projects could be interesting to study, and it seems like in the next months we can start some provisional social research but as I said, this is also under construction! We are full of verve, and we want to take on a lot of case studies but we have to be aware of our capabilities, in terms of time etcetera.

Blockchain-enabled projects are meant to be about decentralizing power, but treat this in a technical way. How do you see this project addressing other issues about decentralizing power, taking into account gender, race, class…?

Silvia: Thank you for asking this question. We strongly believe that the decentralization of power is possible beyond the technical part. Because of that we are giving the same value to both the tech and social sides of the project. Personally­, I’m really focussed on bringing a gender perspective to the project, of course an intersectional one. We are going to put all our efforts into this in order to carry out gender-mainstreaming in the project, starting first within our team and our own culture. We believe strongly that “the personal technical is political”.

Elena: Decentralizing power is the foundation, in your own dynamics and in your relationships as a working group. And it is true, I can see a lot of white men people talking and talking about decentralizing power in both blockchain and the commons. What they do not ask about is their own race, class or gender privileges of being there, maybe they have some women people behind doing the invisible work? Are their personal relationships unequal? Great speeches, theories and papers are useless without considering this.

Communities involved in contributory accounting have different concepts of value and value tracking. Can we avoid the mindset that says that the only value worth tracking is exchange value?

Elena: We have to try it!! It is a partial way, inherited from capitalism and therefore a patriarchal way to see value. People contribute in different ways to the group. What about emotional value? I always work better with people who take care of me and who I love. I do not know if this type of value can be tracked, but we all know that it is there, we cannot ignore it and try to measure and track all the facts.

Silvia: Yes, I think we can. Feminist economy has been doing this, challenging the heterodox economy, for many years. It is a matter of having the will and developing a broader outlook. It is not easy, I have never worked before in tech and I am still struggling with how to apply my knowledge in this field. I assume it is going to be a very creative process.

What about invisible or affective work? Can these be tracked and measured?

Elena: Affective and invisible work is the base of all groups and society. I am not interested in measuring them, but maybe we could try to train in empathy, listening and learning a little more. In Spain, for example, assemblies, work meetings… are often held at 8 p.m. This is absolutely incompatible with the caring done outside of work, and nobody seems to mind. This makes people that have to care disappear from decision making and groups. In my opinion, it is a capitalist heritage that we need to rethink.

Silvia: I don’t know if it is a matter of measuring. The feminists working in development cooperation, for example, have done a really good job with time, using surveys or calculating the contributions of domestic and affective work to the GDP. On the other hand, I think a very important first step is to consolidate the idea of invisible and affective work as the base of life, and understanding how without it, there is nothing else. This kind of work must not be in the periphery, waiting to be measured or recognized; we have to put it in the center, as Amaia Pérez Orozco explains so well.

Although commons based peer production is an emancipating way of pooling our productive capacities, these communities are often dominated by male, white, economically privileged individuals. What is the role of “peer to peer” in confronting these disparities?  

Silvia: We cannot be so innocent in thinking that in “peer to peer” production there are no power relationships. These commons based initiatives have a lot of potential, challenging capitalism and exploring new ways to build economy, but of course they have to implement a lot of mechanisms to avoid reproducing patriarchy, racism, and other structures of domination. It is still necessary to make the struggle against knowledge- or power-inequality a priority in these communities.

Elena: P2P communities have made important advances in decentralizing power but, like Silvia said, we cannot think that everything is already done, because in most cases, we’re all white, first world people. We have to make an effort to introduce measures that help us to re-think and re-design real peer to peer values. I am not an expert, but I can still see, typically, a white, upper-class man doing free software or exchanging p2p value.

Silvia, how does your background in feminism and anthropology fit into the project? How do these affect Commons and P2P practices, in academia and “in the real world”?

Silvia: Well, the entire group has expressed from the beginning how important the social branch of the project was for them. They have helped me to overcome this “imposter syndrome” I had (I know the theory, however, I am still in the empowerment process…). Well, I think a new person on a team always enriches it. Because of my background, maybe I can give some different perspectives to achieve this non-techno-determinism view that the project wants to maintain. This maybe goes more for the academic part. On the other hand, I think my inexperience in tech makes me a good translator and mediator with the “real world”.

Elena, you have done design work on a number of P2P-related projects. Are there specific challenges you try to address in communicating this field? How can ideas like P2P and the Commons be represented visually, and especially to non-academics?

Elena: I am always thinking that we should be capable of talking about commons with the mainstream, and one way to make this possible is with design and communication.

Academic people have the ability to make a simple concept complicated. In this way, we need journalists and designers who translate these complicated minds, papers and concepts to the people. People can easily understand the value of urban gardens in their neighborhood, or the way energy cooperatives are an advantage for the environment and your pocket, but books or essays about p2p communities are very complicated and full of difficult concepts. In that sense, the Commons Transition Primer we did last year is an excellent advance. In the last few years, feminism has done this with excellent results, so, we should try, shouldn’t we?

We talk about a Commons Transition. Do the two of you see this taking place? If so, how?

Silvia: Well, to be fair, I would not say that this would be a transition, but a return to the past. Women have being doing Commons and alternative initiatives for centuries, the novelty now is the inclusion of some technologies like blockchain. I do not dare to make predictions… Deep down, what I would like is that this happens in a coherent way with the bases of the Commons, that is with equity, solidarity and an awareness of interdependence.

Elena: Step by step, I can see little advances in people’s mentalities, or in local politics. For example, recently the Madrid council has received a UN Public Service prize for a collaborative free software platform called Decide Madrid. It is an excellent sign and means that our work and efforts working in the commons are important and can provoke social change.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Silvia: I would like to give special thanks to my colleague Elena. From the beginning I’ve felt her sorority, and it is really a pleasure to share my workspace with such an experienced person and woman. It is great to have her support and knowledge in this uncertain and masculinized sector.

Elena:

 Elena Martínez Vicente studied Fine Arts in the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, where she spent her final two years enjoying a grant in Venice, Italy.

Silvia Díaz Molina studied Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. After two years living in Vienna (Austria), participating in different volunteer work and activism, she joined the Gender Studies and Development Cooperation Master’s Degree at the Instituto Complutense de Estudios Internacionales, because of which she had the opportunity to do an internship in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), where she wrote her thesis about “Afro-descendant women from the Colombian Caribbean, sexual violence and the construction of memories about the armed conflict”. In April 2018, she became part of the P2PModels project as a researcher, developing the social side of the project.

Lead image by Gaelx, Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0; text image by Janita Top, Unsplash

The post Elena Martinez and Silvia Díaz of P2P Models on Blockchain, Feminism and Affective P2P appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

The post Book of the day: Total Urban Mobilisation and the Post-Capitalist City appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Part I: Data Collection

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

Republished from New Economics Foundation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the report

Photo by moleitau

The post Essay of the day: The rise of the data oligarchs appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By creating opportunities for exchange, mutual action and sharing, A4C not only operates as a platform but attempts to create a new commons, a synthesis between arts and political engagement.

A4C intends to explore the  interstitial spaces between power and communities, traditional arts system and society, states and territories. We pursue documentation as artistic practice.

In an historical phase of what Antonio Gramsci named “interregnum” whereas we know what we leave but do not know what we will find, A4C is a space for collective search, experimentation, creation of what post-colonial philosopher Homi Babha named ” a third space”, that transcends traditional definitions of arts and politics. Particular attention will be devoted to building bridges and opportunities for collective work, exchange and dialogue between European and Latin American artists and activists.

Our first steps have moved along the issue of migrations and war, starting with the participation at the Nationless Pavillion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, to the pop-up exhibition “From the shores of Tripoli to the hills of Moctezuma” in Rome-based gallery Ex-Elettrofonica,  to continue with “Dispacci-Dispatches” an exploration in the history of Italian colonial wars in Libya by means of displacements and re-enactment of historical chronicles and documents read in various locations of the Quartiere Africano (African quarter) in Rome, built to celebrate fascist colonies in Africa.

SHOWREEL A4C #ArtsForTheCommons from Rosa Jijon on Vimeo.

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