The Fifth South-South Forum on Sustainability (SSFS5) was organized by Global University for Sustainability and the Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, together with 10 co-organizers, on 13–18 June 2018, in Lingnan University, Hong Kong, China.

SSFS5 focused on “Transformative Visions and Praxis”. On Day 3 (15 June 2018), in the session of “Community Governance and Participatory Democracy”, John RESTAKIS (Community Evolution Foundation, Canada) delivered a lecture on The Rojava Revolution: Co-operation, Environmentalism, and Feminism in the North Syria Democratic Federation. The video is produced by Global University for Sustainability, 2018.

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Introduction

“Many believe that modern technologies such as 3D printers, sensors, and networking capabilities provide an unprecedented opportunity to support a renewal of localized production – especially when combined with “Maker Movement” trends toward customization, user engagement, local and small-batch production, and reparability. Others are unconvinced, and instead forecast increased efficiency in high volume production and global supply chains. Let us state the core questions: will either the Maker Movement or these dramatic new technologies fundamentally influence the basic structures of market competition? Or, will this all be merely an interesting but marginal blip along the road as the technologies themselves are absorbed into automated high volume production? What are the clues? What do decision-makers across industry and policy need to know in order to properly evaluate this potential?

With this paper, we look beyond the revolutionary rhetoric of the Maker Movement in an attempt to consider its effects on a more practical level. We define the Maker Movement (also known as the Do-It-Yourself or Fab Movement) as a crusade for more accessible design and creation – incorporating a mix of new technologies, philosophies, and business models. This Movement is especially tied to the concepts of digital fabrication, public access to tools through community workshops (Fab Labs, hackerspaces, makerspaces, repair cafés, TechShops, etc.), the Internet of Everything/interconnected devices, and Jeremy Rifkin’s concept of the “zero marginal cost society.” We employ a vague definition here because the concept itself is nebulous and ill-defined; depending upon whom one asks, this Movement is a “bourgeois pass-time,” the “new industrial revolution, ”the future of interdisciplinary education, the impetus for a wealth of new hardware startups, and/or yet another overhyped and impossible vision of techno-utopia.

This essay will focus upon whether or not the Maker Movement might substantially disrupt traditional manufacturing, or alternatively at least create an enduring niche position in evolving manufacturing. Part I examines this from three perspectives: (1) Redistributed Production, (2) Personalized Fabrication, and (3) After-Market Repair and Customization.

The idealistic devotees of the Maker-Industrial Revolution argue that the particular confluence of Maker ideas and technology will lead to a hybrid form of production, combining the scale and efficiency of high-volume manufacture with the benefit to local economies provided by small, artisanal businesses. We divide these idealists into the Trekkies who imagine a thoroughly radical and (we will argue) science fictional manufacturing revolution, and the moderates who foresee significant changes but not a complete overhaul of the current manufacturing paradigm. We are focusing here on the “moderate Trekkies.”

By contrast, there are a group of skeptical realists who recognize possibilities, but consider that the impact of the tools and the Maker Movement will be more restrained. They tend to step past the Maker rhetoric around “democratization,” doubtful that this is an attainable or reasonable objective. Skeptical realists argue that, despite some impact on marketing strategies, products, and factory tools, the Maker Movement will not lead to radical changes in systems of production or current power structures; 3D printers, other digital fabrication tools, and open-source technologies have already been in use for decades without forcing any substantial shifts to production models. High-volume manufacturers already produce small batches of customized pens and T-shirts featuring company logos, so skeptics believe that the addition of more complex, customizable elements would likely follow the same traditional manufacturing model. Although many new micro-enterprises have arguably emerged as a direct result of the Maker Movement and related technologies, the skeptics don’t believe that the cumulative effect of these businesses will significantly affect the current high-volume manufacturing paradigm – which, by most calculations, is extraordinarily cost-effective for both consumers and corporations.

These skeptics may still be fervent believers in the overall potential of the Maker Movement – they simply don’t buy into the idea that this Movement and related technologies will itself drive substantial shifts in the current production landscape. Compelling evidence from the entrepreneurial community indicates that this Movement has had a significant impact upon both artisanal businesses and more ambitious hardware startups – and yet the skeptic would point out that, as Maker-entrepreneurs scale up their startups, they tend to follow traditional paths of either high-volume manufacturing or boutique artisanship. For example, the New York-based company MakerBot, once heralded as a pioneer in “democratizing manufacturing” through their affordable 3D printers, recently moved all their own production to China. (There are, however, regional desktop 3D printer competitors that kept their local production – such as Ultimaker in the Netherlands and Type A Machines in California.) Given the ease of high-volume manufacturing and economies of scale, the skeptic would argue that many Maker startups will either follow MakerBot’s less-than-revolutionary lead or else remain small and non-competitive.”

Read the full paper here.

Photo by wemake_cc

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We’re usually talking about communities creating commons, often in spite of government.  Thanks to the valuable writing of many contributors to this movement we are bolstered by community action.   The Occupy movement is a case in point. In Wellington, New Zealand, one continuation of the Occupy movement at 17 Tory Street is the result of pure citizen activism: partnerships between rugged individuals and a broad-minded property owner.

My local suburban community in Vogelmorn, Wellington has managed to take ownership of a bowling club with some administrative co-operation from local government, but certainly with no encouragement. Local politicians have lurked around the project watching it emerge, trying to decide if it’s a horse worth backing. They’ve been hedging their bets, but as we get a popular following they begin to make the right noises in public. Generally, our politicians are unreliable on this idea of communities being self-determining and responsible for their own destiny. No doubt it feels threatening to their ideas of representation.

Which is why I did a double take on hearing the Scottish government’s Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform, Roseanna Cunningham at the recent Community Land Scotland conference in Edinburgh. She presented the notion that government should be doing ‘what’s best for communities’, and talking in terms of ‘culture change’ required for Scottish people and the local authorities; sounding more like an activist than a senior minister.

Roseanna Cunningham from sophie jerram on Vimeo.

The Scottish Government’s aim is to have 1m acres of land in community hands by 2020. It has established a fund of £10m to assist communities to buy land whether for cities or rural sites. There’s a maximum of £1m per project so groups may have to find supplementary funds after feasibility is established. The Scottish National Party-led government has established community development agencies, enterprise advisory services, supports woodlands groups, crofting and forestry advisories. The Edinburgh conference was awash with groups and more standard legal, accounting and property professionals there to help the community buy-back which is believed to be the surest form of land access for long-term Scottish independence.  It seems that years of imbalance means that access to land alone is not an adequate goal. The benefits of ownership and details on the community right to buy scheme is found on the Government’s website.

One of the more interesting, quieter discussions I heard was around required cultural change. When asked about how Scottish communities were meant to build capacity to manage these large tracts of land, Cunningham described a shift that needs to occur between local government involving communities in planning. And that community capacity can’t be bought in.

“We need to learn by doing – and build up the priceless confidence of the Scottish people.”

After the conference I visited Wanlockhead in Dumfries and Galloway to meet a community who have come together to buy back land around a former mining town. The Wanlockhead Community Trust have an ambition to obtain 14,000 (5665ha) acres from the Duke of Buccleuch’s 900,000 acre Queensberry Estate.

Despite being an hour from Glasgow or 90 mins from Edinburgh, Wanlockhead feels remote. You travel through small winding roads with obscure signage; there is very little in the way of visitor services. But the 200 residents enjoy the peace and quiet. They form a strong, supportive community; “none of us is here for the night life,” quips Community Trust spokesperson Mac Blewer. The Trust is made up of a ‘self-selecting’ group: those working from home and some retirees. It includes recent newcomers to the village such as the Chair, Lincoln Richford, a retired English businessman. I asked him about capacity. How is the community finding its feet to attempt such a big buy back?

“It’s a happy accident that we have people to push the group along. And I don’t have issues about work. I’m freer. People who are working sometimes have to be careful what they say. We’ve got a range of skills – business, finance, communications, campaigns, business negotiation, and people in the village like (Innkeeper) James, who is the centrepoint of the village and connects with people who might not otherwise be engaged.

“But at the moment there are no full-time jobs in the village. There is one game keeper and one shepherdess. If our children are growing up here most will have to leave unless we can find something for them to do. Most of us didn’t know anything about buyouts. We’re in the south (successful buyouts have mostly been in the Northern Isles and Highlands) and we’re dealing with the largest landowner in Scotland. We’ve had to educate ourselves and then inform the village about what it’s about.”

Wanlockhead’s former lead mining tailings

The Wanlockhead Community Trust has run several public meetings and consultations with the village. Reforestation is a top priority. There are 8000 visitors to the museum and facilities are needed for them; toilets for example, and a bunkhouse, also ideal for walkers and mountain bikers. There are also campers in the Mennock pass and the community sees the potential to support this tourism. A ski club is open but lack of land security means development is stalled. “We could create a winter resort centre for the south of Scotland”, says Lincoln. “Skiing and curling used to be a big thing.”

Several members of the Trust recently visited the Isle of Harris to see how community ownership – including new affordable housing – has worked out. On Harris, a recycling centre and several carefully sited wind turbines have generated nine jobs and substantial income for that community. Lincoln is hugely positive “We’ve had guidance all the way. The potential of this is massive. This is a quiet revolution, bringing power to communities.”

Although meetings with the land owner are not frequent, the Duke’s Estate is engaged. “You have to applaud him for being one of the first owners to register his land holdings” (on the digital land registry) says Lincoln. “The question is what he’s prepared to sell. Because just the (former mining) village is not viable. We need to organise the projects and make it sustainable. We’re hoping to do this in an open and friendly way. We don’t want this to be a war”.

Lincoln Richford, Wanlock Community Trust Chair leads the buy-back

Can a revolution be led by government? It can, it seems if it’s resisting oppression from centuries of cultural habits of aristocratic and foreign land owners. Consciousness-raising around the movement has, however, dated back decades. The 1973 play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil by John McGrath is largely attributed with bringing about awareness of the systematic alienation of the Scottish people from their land. Based on solid historical research, it was performed in the style of a ceilidh – a festive evening of singing and dancing, and toured around small town halls, inciting a fervour of awareness about the tactics of the ruling class who enrolled support of the church, the law and the military to remove people from their land from mid-18th Century. Drawing a parallel between the Highland Clearances with the extraction of the wealth generated by oil discoveries in the North Sea, its Marxist undertones (and lack of awareness around fossil fuel climate impacts) now seem somewhat anachronistic – but the play is still hugely impactful.

The Cheviot, the Stag and Black Black Oil (2016) at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh. Photo credit: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.

With only 432 people still owning half of Scotland, there is still more work to be done on shifting the feudal culture of Cunningham’s imagined communities. The writing and research of Andy Wightman, a dedicated land reformer has kept the fires burning. Andy is now a Green Party MSP (Member of the Scottish Parliament), but is a humble politician. He spent the day at the Land Reform conference quietly taking notes and sending tweets then found time to show some of us the new Scottish Parliament.

By Saturday night, I’m listening to folk musicians who have assembled in the Wanlockhead Inn. The people playing are passionate, unassuming; warm but shy with strangers. A Glaswegian concurs about Scottish confidence. “You can’t have centuries of being told you’re worthless without it going in at some level. It’s like shit; if you throw a lot of it some will stick.”

Over warm beer and ballads, she talks about the consciousness raised since the 2014 independence referendum. “We call it the butterfly revolution”, she says. “Because there are always more of us. You can’t shoot us down. And, tonight, they’ve come from all over – to sing folk music, enjoy each other’s company, and to celebrate. They’re here to support the local community. So I say let’s keep it going, let’s get things moving, let’s take back our life, let’s take back our country – and let’s take back our land.”

I came to Scotland expecting to understand how land reform was being used to empower communities; and to understand the processes of commoning. What I had failed to understand was the scale of the inequality of the existing regime. The legislative process of government is absolutely crucial. Already 75% of people in the the Western Isles are now living on community-owned land. Highlands and Islands Enterprise’s site includes maps and interviews which give a great idea of progress. With another 500,000 acres of land still to go to reach the government’s target, there’s no better time to be a community in search of control of your own fell or dale.

Lead image: Wanlockhead, Dumries & Galloway; community buyback underway. All photos by the author, except as noted.

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Micah is also currently running for Mayor of Nehalem, Oregon. View his campaign here.

If you enjoyed this episode, check out Episode 01 where we talk to fellow Occupiers and Debt Resisters Astra Taylor and Thomas Gokey.

Cross-posted from TeamHuman.fm

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People gather during last year’s Occupy Hong Kong protests. Photo via Flickr user johnlsl

During the fall of 2011, when Occupy Wall Street inhabited a chunk of New York’s Financial District, many of us reporters found ourselves especially fascinated with the media center on the northeast end, a huddle of laptops and generators surrounded (at first) by a phalanx of bikes. I spent a lot of time there myself. After the christening of Tahrir Square as a “Facebook revolution” a few months earlier, this was the place where one would expect to find The Story, the place where the hashtags were being concocted and the viral videos uploaded. From #OccupyWallStreet to #BlackLivesMatter, it has become customary to name our movements after hashtags, and to thank our smartphones for bringing us together and into the streets.

As Occupy blew up around me, and as I tried to figure out what to write about it, I was lucky to have the guidance of Mary Elizabeth King, who worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights era and went on to become a scholar of movements around the world. I was editing a column of hers then, which gave us an excuse to check in regularly.

“Social media alone are not causative,” she wrote in one of her columns around that time. “Nonviolent movements have always appropriated the most advanced technologies available in order to spread their message.” This was something she told me again and again. Which is to say: Don’t be distracted by the technology—it’s not as big a deal as everyone thinks. She helped me listen better to the people themselves, to their ideas and their choices. Such meatspace-centrism also helped me understand why much of Occupy’s momentum was lost when police destroyed the physical protest camps.

We’re often told, especially by those who profit from them, that the latest gizmos change everything, that they spread democracy as a byproduct of their built-in disruptiveness. But whenever a Facebook-driven protest fills Union Square, I think of the May Day photographs from a century ago, when the same place was just as filled, or more so, by protesters in ties and matching hats—no Facebook required.

Socialists in Union Square, New York City, on May Day, 1912. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Power is still power, and a lot of the techniques for building it and challenging it from the past aren’t going away—unless we let ourselves forget them. And I worry that the gizmos many of us depend on are too good at helping us forget.

What online social media excel at is getting an idea out to a large number of people really quickly—but only for a brief period of time. They’re great at spurring bursts of adrenaline, not so much at sustaining long-term movements. This shouldn’t be so surprising, because the developers of social media networks optimize them for rapid-fire advertising. A labor organizer working with low-wage workers recently lamented to me that many of those she works with are using Instagram—which is even worse on this front than some other popular networks.

“There’s only so much you can do by sharing photos,” she said.

The problems that viral media present are not entirely new. They’re akin to what happened in 1968 in France, when students and artists filled Paris with their slogans and provoked an uprising that nearly brought down the government. And then the unions stepped in—at first, they supported the students, but then, by negotiating with the government and wielding their economic power, the unions took the gains for themselves. A similar story unfolded in the wake of Egypt’s “Facebook revolution”: The young, tech-savvy liberals may have instigated the uprising’s early days, but when the fairest election in the country’s history came around, they didn’t stand a chance against the Muslim Brotherhood, who had spent decades organizing through neighborhood mosques and social services. The Muslim Brotherhood later fell to the US-funded Egyptian military. The liberal Facebookers still have a long way to go.

If a viral, revolutionary rupture were to happen in the United States right now, who would be best poised to benefit? Walmart? The military? I doubt it would be the self-styled radicals loosely organized across the country. Whenever I’m in a meeting of anarchists talking about how they’d be stronger if they provided childcare, I think of the evangelical megachurches I’ve been to that are actually doing it, big time.

Protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011. Photo via Flickr user Ramy Raoof

Effective resistance movements depend on networks that are flexible, durable, and can adapt their strategies to changing conditions over time. They need to provide support to members and would-be members who want to ditch the institutions that prop up the current system. And they need to develop alternative institutions that build a new world in the shell of the old. None of these are things that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat do terribly well—though, in principle, they could.

DemocracyOS, built by Argentinian activists, and Loomio, built by Occupy veterans in New Zealand, are open-source tools that facilitate collective decision-making; both are already being put to use by a new generation of internet-based political parties. CoBudget, a new add-on for Loomio, helps groups allocate resources collaboratively. Another open-source project, Diaspora—a Facebook-like network that allows users to control their own data instead of entrusting it to a corporation—works well enough that the Islamic State has turned to it. CoWorker.org is a platform that helps workers connect with each other and mount campaigns to improve their conditions. Movement-friendly technologies like these, however, tend to be far less market-friendly than their competitors, and don’t attract the private investment that commercial platforms use to build a critical mass of users.

Smartphones, meanwhile, make it easier than ever before to document police abuse and blast the evidence out everywhere. Organizations like Witness are equipping activists to be even more sophisticated in putting mobile cameras to good use. But these phones also come at the cost of perpetual surveillance by increasingly sophisticated—and militarized—police forces; there are times when they are better left at home.

If you look beyond devices and apps, there are lots of reasons to be hopeful about the future of protest and activism. Never before has there been so much knowledge available about what makes protest effective, or so many opportunities for getting good training. Researchers like Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan have been sifting through data on past movements to determine what works and what doesn’t. Historians, meanwhile, are rediscovering forgotten stories of popular uprisings that shaped our world. The country’s first program in civil resistance, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, offers hope that someday schools teaching people power may be more plentiful than war colleges.

One thing that struck me over and over during my time among the Occupy encampments was the amnesia. The young activists’ familiarity with protest movements even a decade or two before theirs was scattered and piecemeal compared to their knowledge of celebrities, wars, and empires. Perhaps this is why so many participants succumbed to despair when the movement didn’t succeed quite as wildly as they’d hoped after just a few months. Perhaps, too, this is why so many people have given up on the Arab Spring after the horrors of Egyptian military rule and the Islamic State. We forget that the French Revolution underwent similar throes in its Reign of Terror and the rise of Napoleon; paradoxically, it was through Napoleon’s autocratic conquests that democratic ideas spread. In the United States, critics of Occupy fault it for not becoming more mixed up with electoral politics, like the Tea Party, but they rarely notice how it enabled the rise of progressive politicians like Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren.

That protest may be over, but the movement is not. I hope that those fighting the racist justice system today keep a longer view in mind than Occupiers generally did.

If there is one thing I have learned from covering protests, it is not to trust anyone’s predictions—including my own. Movements will always surprise us. But I think we know enough now to stop expecting some killer app to come along and change the world for us. That’s something we’ll have to do ourselves.

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In any case, this recent face-to-face interview, which pits Brand against Jeremy Paxman, a well-known British TV host of the very oldest of schools, has created quite the stir on the Net, and with good reason. Brand is seriously sharp in this video, spitting out pearls like, “(We…) have a disenfranchised, disillusioned, despondent underclass that are not being represented by that political system, so voting for it is tacit complicity with that system and that’s not something I’m offering up.”, and “The planet is being destroyed, we are creating an underclass, we’re exploiting poor people all over the world and the genuine, legitimate problems of the people are not being addressed by our political class.”, in the astonished face of Paxman, lounging in his armchair. What other “scandalous” celebrity has said anything like this?

I subtitled this into Spanish, and believe me, it was no mean feat. Brand churns it out like loaves and fishes, with hardly a pause between the interruptions and verb sparring with his interviewer (who, it must said, gives as good as he gets). We warned our Spanish audience: these subtitles are only for the fastest of readers. We tried to condense them as much as possible without losing Brand’s fire. The response has been overwhelming and gratifying.

(Hit the “close captions” button on the lower right if you want to see the Spanish Subtitles)

The critics wasted no time at all in coming down hard on this piece, on both the conservative and the progressive sides. Above all, what drew my attention was this, coming from Jerome Roos (editor of Reflections on a Revolution),  in my opinion one of the best online publications in existence. In his review of the interview, Roos points out:

“Ultimately, it’s not Russell Brand who gives me hope. Even though I greatly enjoyed his interview, I frankly don’t care very much what this celebrity tells the BBC or what he writes in the New Statesman. It’s the fact that his heartfelt revolutionary desire still resonates with millions that truly thrills me. I wouldn’t predict a revolution just yet. But that’s because I know it’s already begun.”

I also find Brand’s interventions a lot of fun, while at the same time I disagree with some of his commentary. For one thing, I really don’t think we need a “centralized administrative system” at this point. What I find most remarkable is simply the appearance of a “celebrity” of working-class origins reflecting the widespread anger felt the world over. At times, watching the emergence of the global movement (or resurgence, depending on your point of view, we don’t want to offend anyone…) in these last three years, I miss the connection between the revolution and the popular culture, a true hallmark of the sixties and the rise of punk. Where is the MC5 of today? The rise of Black Power, and its links to Free Jazz, to Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp…Frank Zappa, talking about the Watts riots… The Clash, Patti Smith… Where is the soundtrack to this revolution?

I don’t see anything that compares to the international reverberation felt in the musical, artistic and spiritual revolution of the sixties/seventies. We’re talking about a time when the politics and the popular culture of the day were inextricably woven together with a common desire: change. It could be argued that the nineties gave us a comparable musical revolution, but, what’s happening now? Why hasn’t there been a Rage Against the Machine union, to play at Occupy (granted, they played on Wall Street ten years earlier…)? Are we going to see a new musical movement that reflects, rather that “leads”, the gestalt of the Occupy, 15M, Turkish, Brazilian and Arab Spring movements? A new Punk Rock closer in spirit to a DIWO (DoItWIthOthers) ethic than the DIY of yore?

I’m not going to compare the artistic merits of Brand with those of the aforementioned artists (Inspector Callahan says it best: “Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one”). But it still seems important to take note of the repercussions their actions have on the popular consciousness. How many other celebrities are sticking themselves out like he is?

Brand seems like a good guy, charming and funny. He’s got soul, he’s sharp…and he says it well in the video, “There’s gonna be a revolution. It’s totally going to happen. I ain’t got a flicker of doubt, this is the end. This is time to wake up.”

This revolution needs more art, more accessibility, more Rock and Roll and a lot more jocularity. Let’s play with what they can’t possibly understand, as much as they may try to undermine it.

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