Michel spends half his time in Belgium and half in Thailand, and is the founder of the P2P Foundation, a global organisation of researchers working in collaboration to explore peer production, governance and property.  He is a writer, researcher and speaker on the subjects of technology, culture and business innovation.  “It’s about Open Source communities”, he told me. “A lot of it is like what you are doing with Transition, perhaps a bit of a difference would be that I try to look more at the trans-local, trans-national levels, and how we can build counter-power to trans-national capital”.  I started by asking him when he uses those terms, ‘trans-local’ and ‘trans-national’, what does he mean?

“You’re probably familiar with Ezio Manzini?  He talks about “small, local, open and connected”.  For example, permaculture, in one way it’s very local.  You’re thinking, “I’m doing something here, right now”.  At the same time, the learning of permaculture is really global.  People are connecting globally around permaculture.

One permaculture may not be significant, but 5,000 in the world, you’re actually doing something about the global structure.  But a difference I think is you can use the global to support the local and I see the global as its own arena.  We need something like the guilds in the Middle Ages.  We need leagues of cities.  We need leagues of co-ops.  In Fukushima you can’t just say, “I’m going to have a fishing co-op in my village”.  Sometimes you need scale to answer certain issues that can’t be solved at any local level.

In terms of the imagination, how do you see the work that you do impacting imagination and the invitation to imagination, and what’s your sense of the state of health of the imagination in the world that you’re trying to bring these ideas to?  What are the challenges that you see around that?

One of the things where we’re stuck in our imagination is that we see the private and public as a dichotomy, and we see civil society as some kind of left-over, you know, when you come home tired. Once you bring in the commons, you go already from two to three. Any problem becomes solvable with civil society, with autonomous creativity, with local imagination. Then you can still think about how market and state solutions and forms come into play, but you’ve already broadened it.

The second shift that is very important is where do we think value comes from? As long as you think value comes from the market, you’re very limited in what you can do. Because you can only imagine what’s existing and live on the crumbs. Once you start saying, “No, value is what we value”, you claim value sovereignty. Then you can say, “Well these people are creating value, and these people are creating value.” The realm of possibilities opens up.

That hopefully stimulates the imagination. The biggest challenge now is the reactivity that is induced by social media. I have it in my own life. I really have to be careful because you can spend so much time reacting to input. How do you make the space where you can just think? I see that as a big challenge for our society.

Huge.  And can you tell a little bit about the work you’re doing in Ghent?

I was asked by the city itself, by the Mayor and the Director of Strategy of the city, first of all to map urban commons.  These are commons-orientated civic initiatives.  In order to be in my map, if you like, you would have to have a commons, a shared resource, and we noticed that it went from 50 to 500 in ten years.

Then we worked on, “What do they want?” What do the commoners want so that the city can react and support these initiatives?  Then we looked at institutional design.  How can public commons co-operation occur?  We came up with a few things, like commons accords, which is inspired by the Italian experience where they have this regulation in Bologna.

It allows recognition of the commons, which is very important, because otherwise they can just send the police.  The second thing is the notion of contributory democracy, which requires some explanation.  It’s basically about you have a democratic mandate, as a city.  You’re elected and you say, “We want an ecological transition”.  Then you want to be participatory so you create full transition council.  But you have to invite in the big players, which actually maybe don’t want a transition.  So you get what is called ‘predatory delay’.

The third step is that there are actually citizens carrying out a mandate.  They are doing what we say we want.  Therefore they have legitimacy and have a voice because they’re showing us the way.  This is for me then a way to integrate the commoners and the pioneering initiatives.  The ones that are really bringing down thermodynamic costs: lowering the footprint; producing good food with a lot less waste and energy.  But also social outcomes.

The people actually doing it in the context of market and state failure get their place in the institution.  Then their example can become inspiration for a generalisation of these solutions.

And you’ve seen the process since you started it as something that unlocks imagination, or invites imagination? 

Most of these people think that they’re just doing marginal things against the stream.  That way it also limits their imagination.  They think, “Oh, we’re just doing it for ourselves”.  Once you see you’re part of a broader movement, and you’re recognised by society, it gives you a lot more moral strength to continue and to increase your level of ambition.  We’re doing this for the world.  We’re doing this to change our city.  It’s not just one little thing…

There’s a bigger narrative…

Yeah, yeah.

One of the questions I’ve asked everybody that I’ve interviewed for this book is that if you had been elected as the Prime Minister of Belgium, and you had ran on a platform of ‘Make Belgium Imaginative Again’, and you felt that actually you needed the imagination to be back…  Rather than having a National Innovation Strategy, we need a National Imagination Strategy in terms of education, and policy making, and so on and so on, what might you do in your first few weeks in office?

One of the things I really like, and something today, is the Maker movement, because one of the problems in the West has been this split between thinking and doing, Descartes and everything.  The fact that we now have people who are thinking about what they want to do, and how to do it, and are then doing it and reflecting on their action –it’s an anthropological revolution.  I would make this a new model.  Just open up universities to making maker spaces.

And I know this is not a direct answer but I want to make sure you have this.  It’s the notion of circular finance.  If you can prove to me that your activity lowers the human footprint, lowers thermodynamic and social costs, then I’m going to share the benefits with you and finance your transition.

So if you have a Community Land Trust like in France which demonstrably diminishes the pollution costs and health costs in the Department, then that money that is saved in negative externalities can be used to finance positive transition.  Just look at it systematically, for mobility, housing.

The next thing I would do is job creation.  We have the Brahminic left, educated people with cultural capital but not necessarily money, then we have the Merchant right, but there are people without both.  They are the ones suffering, and they are the ones voting for parties that are destroying our democracy.  I know people don’t like the word ‘jobs’.  I don’t want a job myself, personally, but I think a lot of people do.

It’s a good word, I think.

So create jobs to regenerate the planet…  If you want 100% organic food in a city like Ghent for 5 million meals a year, you can hire 15 farmers.  You can have a zero carbon transport system, and you can have cooks.  Just to have 100% organic food we need 12% of people in the countryside.  Six times more people.  This is the kind of thing we need to be doing, you know.

So given the world that we have in front of us at the moment, and what the world could be, there’s a lot of imagination –

Yes, I think I have too much imagination!  That’s what my wife says…

Where do you think that has come from?  Do you think you had an imaginative education?  How have you cultivated that?

I was a very lonely child.  I was an only child.  My biggest enemy was boredom.  If you’re bored, you have time to imagine.  That emptiness paradoxically became the richness.

I was going to say it was your greatest enemy, but it sounds like it was also your greatest friend in some ways as well?

Yeah.  It’s the oyster thing, right?  So you have the grain of sand in the oyster which creates the pearl.

Yeah, yeah.

It’s how you transform your suffering into some positive that makes your life successful I think.  So the other thing was I was very weak physically as a child.  So my intellectuality became the only thing I could do to actually have a sense of self-worth.  So that’s, I guess, the two together.

Originally published on RobHopkins.net

The post Michel Bauwens on P2P, the commons and the imagination appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Rob Hopkins: Something really amazing is happening in Liége in Belgium.  I was last there 4 years ago, where I gave talks and did meetings in support of Liege en Transition, and to attend a meeting to promote a project they had just launched called ‘Ceinture Aliment-Terre Liégeoise’ (‘The Liége Food Belt’).  When I was there, their event brought together academics, politicians, farmers, and many other people with an interest in food, to explore the practicalities of a co-ordinated relocalisation of the food system.  That was four years ago.  Now I’ve been back after four years and, as I said, something really amazing is happening in Liége…

I had been invited by Ceinture Aliment-Terre Liégeoise (CATL) to be the Patron of their ‘Nourrir Liége’ festival, a 10 day event designed to raise the profile of their work.  When I last visited, a cooperative vineyard, Vin de Liége (of which more later), had just raised €2 million in shares, much to everyone’s surprise and delight.  That was the first one, which gave CATL the confidence that this was possible.

Now, in 2018, 14 cooperatives exist under the CATL banner, 10 of which have been created after the official launch of the CATL in Nov. 2013. These include Les Petits Producteurs (two shops), Fungi up, a co-op growing mushrooms on coffee waste, Rayon 9, another using bicycles to distribute goods around the city, Cycle en Terre, a seed saving coop, Les Compagnons de la Terre, a farm growing a wide diversity of produce, La Brasserie Coopérative Liègeoise, a co-operative brewery, Vin du Pays de Herve, a second vineyard in the same model as Vin de Liège, ADM Bio, tranforming the vegetables of seven local farmer to reach collectivities kitchens, HesbiCooop, a food cooperative, Marguerite Happy Cow, a local fair trade milk transformation project, plus three distribution coops, Point Ferme, La Coopérative Ardente et Le Temps des Cerises, which are forming, together with Les Petits producteurs, a network of local food distribution. And running like a thread through all of these is Le Val’Heureux, the region’s local currency.

So what I want to explore in this post is what this ecosystem of co-operatives looks like, to introduce you to some of the key players, to how the imagination runs through this and to how this looks to be scaling up.

To kick us off, I sat down one evening with Christian Jonet, one of the people who has been constant in CATL since the beginning, and who now co-ordinates this network of coops, producers, researchers, institutions and associations (my full conversation with him is below).  He told me that when Liege en Transition started there were lots of working groups, but the ones that lasted were the money and the food groups.

With Christian Jonet of CATL (left) and Pascal Hennen, manager of Les Petits Producteurs, and the €5 Les Val’Hereux note which features CATL.

It became clear that they were not going to Transition the city just with volunteers, and that what they needed was to change the scale and, as he put it, “professionalise the movement”. Belgium has lost 100,000 agricultural jobs since 1990, and some new thinking was clearly needed.

They started with an event in November 2013 where they hired a big venue, invited everyone in the city with an interest in food, and asked them the question “what if within one generation the majority of food consumed in Liège was grown locally in the best ecological and social conditions?” Good question. One after another people took the mike and identified elements of what needed to happen access to land, finance, seeds, know-how, etc. The first co-op to get running was Compagnons de la Terre, and then the brewery and the others started to follow.

The event that launched CATL

“What was most important”, Christian told me, “was that we created a narrative”:

It was about mobilising citizens for the transition of the food system (fixing the environment with agroecology, empowering the community for the good of future generations, creating local jobs, etc), in three complementary ways. First evidently, it was about voting with your consumption, being a virtuous consumer. But it was also about saying if you can, invest in local economy. And if you invest, then also get involved in running things, volunteer, get your hands dirty. And it was a message that really resonated with people”.

And it worked. Together with Vin de Liège (which raised €3 million on its own), the 14 co-ops have nearly raised €5 million in investment from local people so far.

I was curious as to what, for Christian, were the elements behind the project moving from the ‘What If?’ stage into action. “Firstly, we had a good narrative. CATL is based on the narrative of projecting the future and how it could be, and also the fact that Vin de Liège had been a success gave the whole initiative a foundation of confidence. Each new project inspires more confidence in the next one“. Now, the good narrative was only just a start:

Many people had to step up to imagine, create and run collectively all of these cooperatives, and each time it meant had work. Some projects have been lots of fun, but some others have really been about blood, sweat and tears, and holding on strong until the boat was afloat”. The fact that a local endogenous dynamic can be created must also not be taken for granted. “People in other localities have tried to launch projects similar to Ceinture Aliment-Terre, mimicking the methodology used in Liège, gathering the local food chain actors in an open space to draw a collective strategy for local food system transition, but if in the immediate continuation you don’t create projects in which people can put their enthusiasm, energy and money; nothing just happens.”

Les Petits Producteurs

The first of the co-ops that we visited was Les Petits Producteurs, a shop in the centre of the city that has been open for just over a year.  I asked the shop’s manager, Pascal Hennen, to tell me what it is (you can hear our full conversation below).  He told me, “Les Petits Producteurs’ is a co-operative of 200 co-operators (members of the co-op), around 15 local farmers plus a few further afield (they source their oranges from a farm in Sicily for example), 2 shops, 7 workers and lots of energy”.

When they found the shop unit, they had just 5 weeks to transform it into a shop, something they achieved by mobilising their friends, wielding sledgehammers and paintbrushes. It’s a very simple concept. A big space, painted white, with pallets on the ceiling, pallets on the floor, food displayed on pallets, in boxes, with a note about the farmer and their story.

They did a financial forecast with a worse case, middle and best case scenario. The shop has been such a runaway success that they are exceeding the best case scenario, and it is already a challenge managing storing stock and the queues that form in the shop. “All positive problems to have…”, Pascal told me.

They raised €100,000 in shares from local people, although the shop took off so fast that they didn’t end up using much of it. So, I asked, what’s the money for? “For us, this is an agriculture project, not just a shop. The goal is to reinvest profits and exceeding capital for the farmers. Will we use it to buy land? To invest in helping new farmers? In buying buildings to help farmers?” It has been such a success that a second shop is already open elsewhere in the city, and Pascal dreams of opening “15 shops, perhaps 10? We never expected to be so successful, never”, he told me.

Les Petits Producteurs tell their story in their window

hey have a principle of not negotiating the farmer on price, and of keeping costs low. So they spent the minimum on fitting the shop out, and have a policy “one need,one product”. So they stock one kind of jam, one kind of beer and so on, the whole shop containing less than 200 products. Les Petits Producteurs is mostly organic, and their prices for organic produce are, on average, 15% lower than in Carrefour. Part of their staff’s job is to tell the stories of where the food comes from.

Being part of CATL really helps. It provides the links between the different co-ops, and they trade with each other, and share resources. Where might it all go, I wondered? “If we have 20 stores, we will reach the point where the supermarkets will start to say “oh shit”. We would love to fragilise (great word) them locally”.

I asked Christian about what a difference community investment makes for a business like Les Petits Producteurs. “As I said, in CATL we have created beautiful stories, we must now create beautiful stories of success, and Les Petits Producteurs is one of them. It is not easy to have a profitable business in food. This is about inventing new economic models and testing them until they work”.

The second CATL coop we visited, on an organic farm on the edge of Liège, was Brasserie Cooperative Liégeoise, a small brewery brewing 2 different types of organic beers using barley grown in the region, wheat grown on the organic farm where they’re based, and Belgian hops.  They are planning to grow all their hops on the farm and are expecting their first harvest this year.

Raphaël Lambois, the brewer at Brasserie Coopérative Liégeoise

They are currently brewing on a scale at which it is difficult to be profitable, so they are looking to double capacity soon, although within the same space.  Raphaël Lamblois, who showed us round, told me that it was very useful to be part of CATL, as the other members are some of their best customers, and it really helps the business to have good connections with the town.

We also paid a visit to Vin de Liege, in many ways the co-op which gave confidence to what followed that this kind of citizen investor-led approach is possible.  Vin de Liege is amazing.  We were taken on a tour around the production facilities and also the cellar.  It’s impressive to walk around and think that 3 years ago none of it existed.  Now it is a state-of-the-art facility, producing 12 wines, with about 30 acres of vines already planted, and plans to at least double that.  They are already winning awards.

Their cellar was fascinating, hearing how they commission each barrel so it is a particular mix of different woods, so that the woods are able to impart certain flavours and tannins to the wine. Creating a vineyard is a long term investment, they take many years to be profitable. As a testament to having a dream, telling a powerful story and creating something amazing, Vin de Liege is a remarkable thing.

Where it is all starting to get very interesting is in the impact that CATL is having on the city’s local government. While in Liege, I met with the city’s Mayor and councillor responsible for agriculture, and is it clear that something is really shifting. As Christian told me:

Now the local authorities are stepping up and saying wow, this is really interesting. They can see that what we are doing is good for society, that it can create jobs, build social links between people, that it is good for health and for the environment. I think that in the future, new projects will be a combination of the forces of the public and citizen-led initiatives. This week the City of Liège launched a new project called CreaFarm. We had many discussions with them about what was blocking agricultural Transition, and one of the key themes was the price of land.

They were convinced they could help because they own a lot of land in and around the city which is not really used properly. So they have identified all the sites, characterised the kinds of uses they’d be best for, and tested them for contamination (as a former industrial city, land contamination is not uncommon). They have then invited suggestions from people who would like to use the land, and created a panel to decide applications, which we are part of, and once they’ve decided, the land will be made available at low rents”.

Talking to the Mayor it is clear that for him, CATL is what the city sees as being its future story. Ten years ago, the city was set to move towards being a “smart city”. “Now we want to be a Transition City” he told me.

Members of Nourrir Liege, CATL and the Liege municipality sharing breakfast

I was fascinated to get a sense from Christian of how the projects underway and their success had impacted his, and others’, sense of the future, how imaginative and positive they felt about it.  “A lot of people were very pessimistic”, he told me:

Someone who’s been changed by this? Me! I had been very worried and concerned about the possibility of an imminent social collapse. It was very hard. My therapy has been doing these positive projects. I still believe the future might not be very bright. But being active means I feel much better. For me, it’s the connection with other people that changed everything for me, and for many others too!! The antidote was to do something. My sense is that when you read about collapse, you collapse yourself. Doing this work sets you into movement”.

Sitting in the back office at Les Petits Producteurs, Pascal is quietly excited about the increasing involvement of the municipality. “At the beginning, the municipality laughed, but now they think we are quite interesting. We are doing so well, that the municipality will have to follow – I don’t think they have a choice actually! I think it’s going to work. I’m positive because I am a pragmatic guy. I manage a shop. They can’t say no, because we exist and we are making things…”

Pascal Hennen

The following day, in Louvain-le-Neuve, Olivier de Schutter gave a presentation in which he used the term ‘Partner State’, his vision of the state getting alongside bottom-up community action, allowing the ideas and inspiration to rise up from below, and seeing their role as being to remove obstacles and to help things to flourish. My strong sense from everyone I spoke to in Liege was that that looks like the very model that is unfolding in Liege.

About the author: Rob Hopkins, co-founder of both Transition Town Totnes and Transition Network.  I am a serial blogger, author of The Power of Just Doing Stuff and 21 Stories of Transition, and I tweet as @robintransition.  I previously wrote The Transition Handbook and The Transition Companion, and was awarded a PhD by the University of Plymouth and more recently Honorary Doctorates by the University of the West of England and the University of Namur. In 2012 I was voted one of the Independent’s top 100 environmentalists and one of ‘Britain’s 50 New Radicals’.

I have appeared on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Four Thought’ and on ‘A Good Read’, appear in the French film phenomenon ‘Demain’ (‘Tomorrow’), have spoken at TED Global once, and at 3 TEDx events. I am an Ashoka Fellow, a keen gardener and one of the founders of New Lion Brewery in Totnes and a Director of Totnes Community Development Society, the group behind Atmos Totnes, a very ambitious community-led development project.  If you’re wondering why I’m writing a book about imagination, you can find out here.

Republished from the author’s blog, Rob Hopkins, Imagination Taking Power

The post A dazzlingly delicious taste of the future in Liége appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Could you say for somebody who hasn’t come cross the concept of a universal basic income, could you give them it in a nutshell?  What is UBI?

UBI is basically an idea that says everybody, simply by virtue of being alive, gets an income that gives them enough to survive, if not thrive, and that’s one of the debates.  There are lots of different people talking about it right now from across the political spectrum.  This is one of the things that makes it an interesting idea, or an idea that’s worth engaging with right now, because it’s an idea that’s emerging.  It’s formulating, so it’s not settled.

Martin Kirk. On a Skype with someone else…

There are lots of different ideas around lots of different conceptions.  There’s not a clear single narrative about it yet, although it’s rapidly forming.  It’s being talked about in terms of everything from reducing the size of government and the welfare state, in the way of just getting rid of all the social services and replacing them with a basic income, right through to people talking about it as a way to redesign the money system and effect fundamental transformational change to the root drivers of many of our problems, like infinite GDP growth.

So it can take you from that very simple ‘reduce government’ right through to ‘change the economic system’.  I think this is one of the reasons it’s getting a lot of people excited.  There are pilots going on all over the place. Just this last week or two the Scottish government announced its plans to run some pilots.  But they’ve been running global north, global south, for a while.  It’s actually an idea that’s got a very long history.

Thomas Paine talked about it as a negative income tax when he was writing in the 18^th century.  Hayek and the neoliberals were actually talking about it as an idea when they started formulating their ideas in the 1940s and 1950s.  So it’s got a long history.  But it’s in the last 3, 4 years it’s really started to break into the mainstream, have a bit of a resurgence, and one of the reasons that’s being driven is this conversation about automation.

This is what’s getting a lot of the Silicon valley types, the Mark Zuckerberg’s and Bill Gates’, that’s drawing them into it.  I don’t know if you saw just this last week, Hilary Clinton in ‘What Happened’, her just released book said that she was a hairs breadth away from running on a basic income platform in the 2016 election.

But in her words they just couldn’t make the numbers add up.  Jeremy Corbyn has said that the Labour party in the UK is studying it as a policy option.  Richard Branson has come out and said this is almost probably inevitable at some point.  So it’s being practiced, it’s being trialled, there are endless debates happening, it’s picking up political media, social support.

Interestingly, the one group that hasn’t latched on to this, as much as I think they should do, is environmentalists.  There is a lot that could be done with a UBI that could really address the key issues that we’re concerned about. From the way money draws its value from natural resources and the natural capital base of the planet, and that can be addressed.  You can also address the concept of growth, if you take interest bearing out of the money system.  So it opens up all these sorts of interesting ideas.

The problem right now, as I said earlier, is it’s stuck in the welfare frame.  It’s a reductive thing.  If you’re interested in transformative ideas, this is one that’s worth getting engaged with right now as the narrative is forming.

How would it be financed?

Again, this is one of the big debates that’s happening.  It’s one of the big questions that automatically comes up, “how is it paid for?”  There is a range of options.  Right through from the Conservatives who would just pay for it by scrapping so many other services.  Conservatives in the US are talking about a basic income of $10,000 a year, which is way below the poverty threshold, and below the minimum wage threshold, but could easily be paid for out of existing tax revenue if you chopped off a lot of the health services, welfare programmes that already exist.  So you’ve got that on one side.

Then, somewhere in the middle, you’ve got people talking about it from a sort of dividend.  A lot of people refer to the ‘Alaska model’ here.  Alaska’s had a basic dividend, they call it a permanent dividend fund, for quite a long time now.  That’s paid for by fossil fuel receipts from Canada South oil, or Alberta actually, then there are profits that are ploughed back into a dividend that goes to every citizen.  So people are talking about whether it could be funded from a carbon tax, or some other form of commons based revenue.  That’s another middle ground way of paying for it.

On the far end, and this is the one that we’re interested in, particularly at The Rules, go away from the current money system completely and we say there’s a really interesting conversation to be had here about a cryptocurrency based UBI.  The technology for that is not quite mature but it’s coming and it’s coming much faster than people expect.  We will very soon have the option of using a cryptocurrency either as an alternative or a complementary currency to the fiat currencies we all use.

But if you get into that space, then the question of where does the money come from doesn’t apply there, because the money is automatically generated by a system.  It’s just deposited into people’s accounts.  There’s no central authority who’s governing that.  It’s just an automated system.  So you don’t have to ask the question of where will the money come from.

You’ve got that spread, right through from the small government, Conservative and libertarians, all the way through to the more radical, I’ll say ‘Left’, just as shorthand but it’s a little bit disingenuous to use just the Left-Right spectrum here because it’s more complicated than that.  But just as a reference point, the radical left.

The battle is being had right now.  The battle for the narrative.  Right now it’s being won, or it’s being dominated by, the centre and the right.  One of the reasons for that is the language that’s used.

Just think of the term, ‘Universal Basic Income’, every single one of those words, militates against a more transformative conception.  People don’t respond well to the idea of universal things, on the whole.  They immediately start thinking about, “Well, why is my neighbour getting stuff?  Why am I having to work and they’re gutting stuff for free?”  It triggers a competitive mind set in people, and outgroup thinking. So people automatically start to think about who is the outgroup and will they get more than I?  The fairness logic kicks in very quickly.  That’s not particularly helpful.

The word ‘basic’ drags your brain down right down to the floor, and it leads you into questions like, “What’s the least possible we should be able to give people?  What’s the basic?  What’s the minimum?”  That’s a classic welfare type thinking, and it’s linked to all the concepts of the undeserving poor.  These people who don’t deserve what they get.  Their position is all of their own making.  So it opens up all those avenues of thought and logic.

‘Income’ is almost the worst, because income is widely understood to be something you receive in return for work.  That’s the definition of the word.  So actually we’re trying to talk about a system that separates work from income.  You’re using the word that means income for work.  So none of these on their own are prohibitive, but they are framing points.  They do lead you into a certain type of logic and they’ll push the conversation in a certain direction.  It’s a direction that is far more in line with the conservative thinking than the progressive thinking.  So we’re already hampered, we’re already ham-strung by the language.

So we have an uphill battle, but then when don’t we?!  Everything we do is an uphill battle against the system on some level or other…

So what would you rather call it?

We were going to test trial stuff.  We don’t have a specific name in mind but we know the conceptual domains that will be much more useful for us.  So community domains are much better than individual domains, and ‘universal’ gets you into more individualist thinking.

You could think about some sort of language around community.  Also people have a much stronger logic for the health of communities in some respects.  People understand that income coming into a community will strengthen it.  There’s a much more communitarian logic when you start talking in terms of communities.  It triggers that sort of logic much better.  So we should be looking at that sort of area.  We were going to do a process of trying to test a few different memes and framings and see which ones resonate.

The problem is, we spoke to a lot of the people who are big players in this field at the moment, and we made the judgement that the language is too embedded now.  We could be fighting that fight forever and make no progress.  If you’re looking for the efficient entry point into this narrative, trying to change that basic language probably isn’t going to serve you very well.  You’ve just got to suck it up and think about how else we can get in there.  Because it’s so widespread now, it’s used in so many different places, that horse has bolted already.  But if you wanted to take a clear eyed view of the challenge ahead of us, it’s worth thinking about these linguistic points.

So how could a UBI best be designed to most enable a renaissance of the imagination?  Why is it a useful tool for that?

Several reasons.  One, it’s a challenging idea, and you want challenging ideas.  You want ideas that take people one step beyond where they already are.  It’s very difficult to teach people an entirely new logic with one set of ideas, or one policy prescription.  But this one, just the very idea of everybody getting an income by virtue of being alive, is quite shocking.  Quite arresting for people.

On the face of it, it’s an engaging idea.  Even if the engagement is people going, “Well, how would you pay for it?”, it’s a negative response, but its still a response.  You’ve got an awful lot in your favour from a campaign perspective just there.  The struggle to get people’s eyeballs on your things is permanent with campaigners, so this one has got a built in advantage for that.  That’s the surface level.

Once you get into the deeper level with it, it gets even better though, because depending on how you frame it, and the framing is all important – as with everything, he who frames, wins. But if you can get the framing right, it invites people to rethink money.  It invites people to rethink power structures.  If I get a cryptocurrency that doesn’t come from a bank, that isn’t issued by my government or my local authority, suddenly I’m into questions of what are those authorities for?  I’m rethinking their role on quite a fundamental level.  So it gets you into questions of money.

It gets you into questions of power.  It gets you into questions of growth.  It gets you into all these rich fundamental areas of logic that capitalism relies on for its life force.  That’s one of the reasons that we really like it.  It’s got all the dimensions to it.

I think of it, you walk into a room and this room’s got 20 doors off it, and some of them are more fruitful than others to go down.  UBI offers you a lot of doors to go through in terms of where you can take people’s thinking and the narrative, or trigger people’s thinking and logics.  It’s not the only idea around of its kind around, but I don’t know many others that have this pure potential in them to get people thinking differently.

If it were introduced tomorrow, in what way might it catalyse a whole flourishing of imagination do you think?  There’s not many spaces left in modern life where imagination is really encouraged or really flourishes.  How would the introduction of a UBI address that?

There’s no such thing as a quick silver bullet solution that’s going to take people from bad logics to good logics, to ecological logics overnight.  One of those reasons is because our entire language locks us into a financial producer/consumer logic.  So accept the basis that our environment is anything but neutral right now.  It’s dis-incentivising our spending time on the imagination, on community, on following passions.  We all have to work for our income, so we have to do what’s required of us, not what is necessarily our passion.

Just think of the idea – what would you do with your life if you had the freedom to live, not a rich, but a materially safe and comfortable life, without working?  What would you do?  Without having to go to an office?  You might choose to, and that’s great, because some people love work of that sort.  But you wouldn’t necessarily need to.

So now you’re moving beyond a situation where our lives are focused around work and income and provision for ourselves, and focused much more on the idea of living.  A lot of people go straight to, “Well, people will just be lazy.”  But that’s not true.  All the evidence suggests, of course some people, a small number of people will choose not to work, not to do anything and sit around watching TV all day, but those people do a lot of that anyway.  They are not the majority of us in society.  The majority of us get a lot of value from our work, from being productive, from engaging with our communities, from engaging our minds and learning.

Those are the stuff of life for a lot of us.  So once you even take one step away from the absolute imperative into work, into wage work I should say rather, all manner of things can change.  But I don’t think we can predict exactly what will happen if that’s the case.  We’re going to become almost like a leisure society over the next 50-100 years, particularly as automation kicks in.

We’ve got plenty enough wealth, and even when automation kicks in, there will be plenty enough generating capacity for everybody without needing to grow the capital supply infinitely.  So the whole paradigm we’re going to be living in is going to change over the next decades.  The concept of work is going to change even if we don’t implement something like universal basic income.  But if we do, if we get ahead of the curve of automation, if we start to release people from the imperative of wage labour, I think we’ll find a number of magic things happen.

What happens if we move to automation without a UBI?  We end up with lots of people who have no work – the implications are really quite alarming, am I right?

They’re quite dystopian.  But I can’t imagine any government will allow that.  If you want to stoke social unrest, no better way to do it than have millions of people unemployed wandering around being desperate.  So as lay-offs happen from automation, governments are going to respond in one way or another.  They’re not going to want masses of unemployed people wandering around feeling disenfranchised.

I’m not sure we’re going to be facing that sort of future, because it does not serve the interests of the current power structures.  If you look at the way a lot of the Silicon valley people talk about UBI, what they’re actually talking about is a different business model for themselves.  They’re not thinking about it in terms of different economic systems.  They’re not thinking about it as a social justice move towards an environmentally sustainable future.  They’re thinking, “How can we make sure people still have money to buy our services when they don’t have jobs to go to because of the automation that we’ve triggered?  How can we keep our consumer base, a consumer base?”

This is the minefield of this conversation. And obviously, Mark Zuckerberg writes a manifesto and makes one speech at a Harvard commencement session and suddenly he’s the poster child for UBI.  That’s why this is such a fraught area right now, as these people weigh on into it and are dominating the environment, forming the narrative, setting the frame.  So the rest of us have to step up a bit, and make sure their conception doesn’t win.

You mentioned that UBI is potentially a very powerful tool environmentally.  Would it not, just giving people more money, would they not just be buying more iPads, going on more holidays?

Consume more?  Yeah, absolutely.  That is a risk, but it’s not a guaranteed outcome.  There are ways you can mitigate it.  If we go down the cryptocurrency route, you can easily, as easily as walking, build in certain rules into that system, that strongly incentivise local trading.  Dis-incentivise global supply chains, dis-incentivise buying from distant, therefore abstract, people in environments.  So that’s one thing you can do if you take a cryptocurrency route to not kick off lots of negative consumption.  There are a range of things you can do, but this is something to keep an eye on.

Cross-posted from Rob Hopkins’ blog. Click here for more stories  and perspectives on Universal Basic Income.

The post How a Universal Basic Income could Fire the imagination appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Rob Hopkins introduces the Transition Network‘s new book compilation. Click here to pre-order the book..

November 1st sees the publication of a landmark new publication from Transition Network.  ’21 Stories of Transition: how a movement of communities is coming together to reimagine and rebuild our world’ is published in advance of the COP21 climate negotiations in Paris in December, and is a joyous and inspiring celebration of what the Transition movement has become.

It tells 21 stories of 39 Transition projects in 15 countries, drawing out some staggering insights into their impacts (for example, between them, our 21 stories alone have saved car travel equivalent to driving to the Moon and back 3 times, installed renewable energy equivalent to that needed by 4,000 homes, put over £1 million of local currencies into circulation, and generated over 18,500 hours of volunteer input).  But those are just the measurable impacts.  So much of what these groups do is much harder to measure, but just as important.

Our stories are:

• The Million Miles Project, Black Isle, Scotland
• The Rise of Community Energy
• REconomy in Luxembourg
• EcoCrew Environmental Awareness Programme, Greyton, South Africa
• The rise of local currencies
• The Pasadena Repair Cafe, US
• Fishguard’s Surplus Food Cafe, Wales
• The Casau Community Garden, Salies, France
• Caring Town Totnes, UK
• Zarzalejo Futuro, Spain
• Lambeth Local Entrepreneur Forum, London, UK
• Transition Town Media’s Free Store, Pennsylvania, US
• Aardehuis Project Olst, Netherlands
• Greenslate Farm, Billinge & Orrell, UK
• Potager Alhambra, Brussels, Belgium
• Compagnons de la Terre, Liege, Belgium
• Harvesting Rainwater in São Paulo, Brazil
• Crystal Palace Food Market, London
• Transition Streets in Australia
• Scaling up Transition in Peterborough, Canada
• Ungersheim, Village in Transition, France

Told in the voices of the people making these projects happen, ’21 Stories for Transition’ also tells of the challenges groups face, and the strategies they develop to ensure the resilience not just of their projects, but also their groups.  It’s the most heartwarming, diverse and colourful Transition publication yet.  It will be published in both an English and a French edition.

The English edition will be published on November 1st, but you can pre-order now, and get your copy hot off the press.  The French edition will follow a couple of weeks later. Over the 21 days before COP21, we will be publishing one of these stories every day, as well as sharing more news on Transition-related events that will be taking place in Paris during the conference.

Pre-order your copy of ’21 Stories of Transition’.  

’21 Stories of Transition’ is gorgeously designed, 96 pages long, in full colour.  We think it is the most beautiful book on Transition yet published. It is NOT available via Amazon.  We will be sending books out on November 1st.  If you would like to order more than one, we are offering discounts for Transition groups:

• Order 30 copies and get a 30% discount
• Order 50 copies and get a 40% discount.

The post Introducing ’21 Stories of Transition’ appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The following podcast (and text) is reposted from the Transition Network website.

Isabelle Frémeaux (IF) and John Jordan (JJ) are the co-founders of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.  It’s a collective which , according to Isabelle, “aims at opening spaces, real or virtual, and bringing artists and activists together to work on and co-create more creative forms of resistance and civil disobedience”.  Both have a long history in campaigns and movements, as well as the arts.  I started by asking them to give us an overview of the kind of work they are involved in.

IF: The work we do has several dimensions. We do a lot of experiments. We like to call what we do experimental projects or pieces. We like the idea of experimenting collectively and accepting that sometimes things might fail, and that by embracing that capacity for failure we can be more creative. I’m by training an academic and a trainer, so I tend to be more into the training dimension of what we do.

We do quite a lot of workshops and trainings, from a day to 2 weeks with artists and activists to really see the synergies between arts and activism and often permaculture, and to see how when these three domains merge, we can create synergies for more creative, more efficient, more productive, more resilient projects that we aim to be projects that are geared towards forms of resistance and civil disobedience.

JJ: What we don’t do is ‘political art’. We’re quite critical of the notion of political art, which for us is art which is about political issues. Occasionally we make films and books but we call those “holidays in representation”. The majority of our work is not making films and books, it’s actually making these experiments which are really critiquing representation; the idea that most artists will make a performance about climate change or a sculptural installation about the loss of biodiversity or a film about climate justice.

What we are very clear about is that actually what we like to do, and what we think is vitally important, is to bring artists and activists together not to show the world but to transform it directly. Not to make images of politics, but to make politics artistic. The reason we work with these two worlds is we think that artists have a lot of creativity, a lot of capacity to think outside the box, a lot of capacity to transform things into poetics, yet often have big egos and not much social engagement.

We think activists – and of course these are generalisations – often have a lot of social critique, capacity to work collectively, but often a failure of imagination. Often the same rituals, the same kinds of demonstrations, the same kinds of tools for transforming society. By bringing these two worlds together, we think we can actually create something different.

We are always embedded in social movements. We spent 5 years as organisers within the Climate Camp and at the same time as organising the camp we were also organising workshops and actions that brought artists and activists together. For example one project was the creation of a thing called the Great Rebel Raft Regatta where we buried a whole load of boats in a forest a week before the Climate Camp happened in Kingsnorth.

The Great Rebel Raft Regatta.

The Climate Camp was a self-managed camp developed to create education and alternatives to the climate catastrophe, but it also always had an action at the end of it. This camp at Kingsnorth was actually to stop the building of a new coal fired power station that was taking place next to a power station that already existed. The project that we did, the Great Rebel Raft Regatta basically brought people together into affinity groups. We buried boats a week beforehand in the forest and with the boat was a bottle of rum. We also gave them a treasure map.

One of the Great Rebel Raft Regatta’s treasure maps.

We sent people off in their affinity groups to find the buried boat with the treasure map. They would dig up the boat, sleep in the forest overnight, then at 7 o’clock run out of the forest, take their boat onto the river and go and find and block the power station. We got about 150 people, and one boat managed to block a third of the power station and shut a third of it down. For us, it’s really using forms of action that are effective in terms of having an effect on the real world, but also are fun and adventurous. The whole aesthetic of the treasure map and the bottle of rum and the people dressed up as pirates brings a playful element to activism which we think is absolutely fundamental.

You use this term ‘insurrectionary imagination’. Could you just say a little bit more about what you mean by that?

IF: The imagination has the potential and is a fundamental ingredient for insurrection. We wanted to reclaim the offensive and the defiance that is often lacking in art. By calling it a ‘laboratory’ would call on the idea of imagination without having what we feel can be quite a bland understanding and bland connotation of the word ‘imagination’ which is very often seen as something lovely and creative and child-like by actually reclaiming the existence of the defiance of what we wanted to do. This is why we put the word ‘insurrectionary’ in the name of our collective.

JJ: Here’s how we describe it on our website:

The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Lab of ii) merges art and life, creativity and resistance, proposition and opposition. Infamous for touring the UK recruiting a rebel clown army, running courses in postcapitalist culture, throwing snowballs at bankers, turning hundreds of abandoned bikes into machines of disobedience and launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a coal fired power station; we treat insurrection as an art and art as a means of preparing for the coming insurrection. The Lab of ii is now in the process of setting up an international utopian art/life school on a Permaculture farm in Brittany.

We don’t actually believe in the separation between artists and activists, and we don’t actually believe in those two terms. We think the notion of art as a separate action in everyday life is a very recent phenomenon within the Western tradition. In most cultures there isn’t a separation of art and everyday life.

“Radical Origami Hats”.

We think that activism, this idea that activists have this monopoly on social change, is exactly the same as art having a monopoly on creativity. Actually everyone can and has the capacity and does change the world in some way, all the time. So in a way it’s a kind of dialectical relationship, because we wanted to get rid of both those notions.  For us, creating an insurrection or some kind of revolutionary change (which we think is absolutely necessary), we have to provide the alternatives to capitalism and the climate catastrophe and resist the problems that are happening that we can’t divide.

We see the DNA of social transformation as being two strands. Being the creation of alternatives such as Transition Towns etc, and a resistance, a resistance against the fossil fuel industries, the banks that fund them and so on. One without the other is absolutely pointless, because if we don’t resist then we forget who the enemy is and there’s a massive danger that our projects become simply experiments in laboratories for new forms of green capitalism. If we don’t create the alternatives, then of course we simply have a culture of resistance and a culture that’s simply saying ‘no’ all the time and that isn’t sustainable in terms of mental health and personal sustainability because people just burn out.

Historically we see the division of these two movements being absolutely a problem, and I think the 1970s is a classic example. For us in all our projects, we try to make models of alternative forms of living. So we haven’t flown on a plane for 10 years, despite the fact that we have this international art world career, where most of the people in that world spend their life on aeroplanes. We live ecologically, we live in a yurt in a community where we set up an organic farm, where we put the land into production. For us that’s not necessarily political but that’s what we do normally anyway, and resistance work is always done without hierarchy. We teach consensus at the beginning of all our projects and we try and use permaculture principles to make them happen.

As one example, and this is relevant because our latest project is geared towards the COP 21 in Paris, the UN Climate Summit which is aiming to find a universal agreement on CO2 emissions and adaptation and so on in December this year. In 2009, we were invited by 2 museums to do projects around COP15 in Denmark, in Copenhagen. We were invited by the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen.

We had already spent some time in Copenhagen. We published a book on alternatives called Paths Through Utopias, unfortunately only available in French, Korean and German. And we spent some time in Christiania in Copenhagen, a self-managed community in Copenhagen. We noticed then, during that time, that there were thousands of abandoned bikes all over Copenhagen. So we thought: there’s the material. There’s a permaculture principle, “create no waste”.  We thought let’s see what we can do with the waste of Copenhagen with these abandoned bikes. Let’s transform them into tools of civil disobedience.

Traditionally, civil disobedience in the Gandhian, Thoreau tradition is through the body and we thought what can we do with the body and a bicycle? We proposed this to the two museums, they both agreed. In the project we worked with the Climate Camp as the movement we were working with and the idea was that we would produce prototypes in the Arnolfini Gallery where we would put 50 people together in an open free workshop, we would teach them the basics of permaculture principles and so on, and we would then go – ok, what can we do with these bikes, and design a prototype that we’d then take to Copenhagen to then scale up.

Then we had an interesting moment when both museums said “you can’t do any welding in the museum”. So we thought ok, fine, we’ll get a container outside and we can put an image in it and it’ll be a more public space anyway, so the problem was the solution. Then they had a phone call from the Copenhagen curator and she said “we’ve got a container, but there’s just one little thing. We just talked to the Police in Denmark, and there are certain rules about what is a bicycle.

A bicycle can’t have more than three wheels, it can’t be more than 3 metres long etc etc. If your objects are outside of those rules then you have to write to the police, you have to show them the design and it will take 3 weeks before they come back to you and say you’ve got the right to go on the road. So we said “well that’s very interesting, but we’re doing civil disobedience. We don’t really care whether the bikes are legal or not”. At which point there was this pause, and she was like “so you’re really going to do it…”

We’ve had this experience in the art world a lot. Basically, a lot of the art world pretends to do politics. They have these very radical texts and radical propositions. Maybe she imagined we were going to build these objects and stay in the museum, but for us that’s not the point. The point is actually to take action. Unfortunately the museum then pulled out, but we did find an ex-squat in Copenhagen which is a sort of art and cultural centre called the Candy Factory and produced a project there. About 200 people ended up being involved and took part in the demonstration against the corporate domination of the UN climate talks.

In a way this is a good example of how we think a lot of so-called political art at the moment, which is very trendy. There are endless biennials, museum exhibitions, theatre festivals which use the word ‘political’, ‘radical’, ‘socially engaged’ and so on. Actually, as far as we’re concerned, a lot of it is what we’d call “pictures of politics”.

You recently wrote that “the Left is very scared of using desire and the body and capitalism and the Right are brilliant at it”.  Can you talk us through what the implications of that are, and for Transition as well?

IF: There is a tendency amongst the Left, and of course these are massive generalisations. A tendency to feel that the problem is what people don’t know and that therefore if we can produce more facts or figures or information or reports and that people know what’s going on; if we can show the maths, if we can have better pictures of the number of species that are going extinct or the number of people that are being affected, the figures of unemployment etc, then people will react. There’s this idea that there is a large number of people who do not act because they don’t know.

Whereas we believe that very often the problem is actually what people do know, that they cling on to things and values that have been the structure of their life for a long time, and that what generally makes people move is not rational thinking but much more often desires and fantasies of what could be.

There’s a beautiful quote by an American author called Stephen Duncan that puts it very beautifully, about “the dreams of what could be”. The dreams of what could be are much more located in the emotions, in the body, rather than in the left brain. It’s really important to combine them. It’s not a question of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and saying “stop all reports, stop all research, stop all science”. But to not overly rely on them.

The Clown Army at Gleneagles for the G8 Summit.

The numbers should be there as backup, to be used as crutches, but what is going to motivate most of us is to be able to experience emotionally and bodily a life that is more just, that is more healthy, that is more relaxed, that is more enjoyable. That’s not something that is purely rational. That is one of the knots that is very complicated to untie, the great lie of neo-liberalism and capitalism which is that more stuff necessarily means a better life. We know that it’s untrue, and yet this is something that is difficult to untie. We will manage to untie that by talking and calling upon people’s values.

At the same time, one of the notions that can be of new learning for projects like Transition Towns is that these emotions are the positive emotions of what could be, but also the negative emotions of what we know is wrong with what is going on. Actually, it is a matter of finding the balance and finding how one can feed the other and not overcome the other. Sometimes there can be a tendency to want to deny and obscure the anger and frustration at the injustice and the destruction.

Actually these emotions need to be acknowledged, and need to be used as fuel for resistance, while the emotions of what could be can be used as a tool to move forward to the alternative. It’s the combination of these two emotions that can make the social movements irresistible and indestructible, and very often the movements are indestructible when they’re only calling upon one of those. So it comes back to this DNA of the yes and the no, but I think it’s very true in the kind of emotions that we call upon in ourselves and in other people.

Permaculture is a big part of your work. Could you say a bit about that? Why is permaculture important to what you do?

IF: It offers a very inspiring and stable framework; a very stable value framework. To be able to work in the way we want, we thought that the three main pillars of permaculture are a very efficient way of making people understand that actually it’s not so complicated. Because the principles are a really good road map for working towards the system, and designs that are productive and resilient and respectful. Personally we feel very touched by the idea that you take nature as your teacher and the more you do that, the less you see nature as this external thing outside of you.

More and more you take it as a tool so that you can reintegrate yourself in nature which we’ve been taught to see as this thing…the fact that we very often talk about the environment is telling. It’s this thing that surrounds us, that obviously we’re not part of. Permaculture is an excellent tool to be able to reintegrate oneself into what is actually our only consistent. So we try to use the principles as frameworks for our experiments, and generally the spirit of permaculture is our inspiration.

JJ: And we have this 10 day training called ‘Think like a Forest’ which we have done 4 or 5 times over the past years. It’s actually very inspired – it’s a training in art, activism and permaculture and it really looks at what does art bring to activism, what does activism bring to art, what does art bring to permaculture, what does permaculture bring to art and activism and so forth, to look at it as a system of three worlds. That training was actually very inspired by a training by Starhawk, who’s an anarcho-feminist witch, very involved in the peace movement in the 80s and the alt to globalisation movement, who has a course called the Earth Activist Training Course which we both attended and was very much a big inspiration for us many, many years ago.

We modelled our course on that in a sense where there’s a permaculture element, but instead of having the witchcraft element, we replaced witchcraft with art. Her thing is earth-based spirituality, activism and permaculture, ours is art, activism and permaculture. And in a sense, art is magic. It’s a form of magic. We think that’s one of its powers, that actually things become true when enough people believe in them. Art is very good at weaving the magic that we need in these moments.

[This is an edited version of a longer conversation.  You can hear our discussion in full in the podcast below:]

The post Podcast of the Day: Isabelle Frémeaux, John Jordan and the rise of the insurrectionary imagination. appeared first on P2P Foundation.