AureaSocial’s entrance

SELF-MANAGEMENT SPACE OPEN TO THE WORLD FROM 2O11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today, after 7 years we are at a crossroads.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Union, Action and Self-Management!!!

Photo by Fotomovimiento

The post Solidarity with Aurea Social, the Catalan Integral Coop’s open, self-managed space appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Each week, we struggle with how our values fit in our workplaces and platforms.

We’re a group of tech workers who see how the tech industry shapes our lives and data, and how it is complicit in forms of oppression, including racism, classism, sexism, cisgenderism, homophobia, and xenophobia. We also believe there are alternatives, through equitable ownership and control. That’s why we’re organizing “User, Worker, Owner! Bringing Democracy to Work.”

Come be part of our gathering on May 2 in downtown Oakland.

Date/Time
Date(s) – May 2, 2018
5:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Location
VSCO

Join people from  and other groups committed to tech equity. Participants will define problems they face in workplaces and platforms, connect with like-minded peers, and explore strategies to shift ownership and control with an intersectional equity lens. We’ll have talks from digital labor researcher Niloufar Salehi and co-op scholar Nathan Schneider. Workshop topics we’re considering include:

– Collective governance – representation and consensus-based decision making
– Self-management – conflict resolution and growing pains in distributed team
– Shared finance and ownership – co-operative conversions and alternatives
– Community rules – product ethics, codes of conduct, and trust & safety
– Open space for more!

We’ll have light food and drinks. Nobody turned away for lack of funds. To request free tickets, or to help sponsor the event, email [email protected].

RSVP on Eventbrite here!

Tell us what you want to get out of this event by filling in this survey 

Photo by JD Hancock

The post User, Worker, Owner! May 2 in Oakland appeared first on P2P Foundation.

To refer to this topic, and to try recreate this subject with the greatest clarity possible, it seems important to us to establish what kind of of phenomenon and/or activity we’re referring to when we talk about self-management by workers. We also believe it is necessary and important to clarify that this concept, applied to processes that occur between workers, can be closely linked with the story of the autonomous organization of workers and with their diverse struggles, through which we must analyze and contextualize these experiments in self-management. That is to say, we do not believe it is possible to isolate this kind of productive and social experience from the long tradition of struggle and of conflicts with capital that workers have carried on throughout their history.

The use of the concept of self-management has connotations with great ideological weight, rather than concrete. The concept, seen from various viewpoints, is part of an idea or alternative with democracy and solidarity, linked to a given project, that tries to make explicit what the characteristics of economic, social, and political relationships should be in a society, and show that they can transcend the limits imposed by capitalist relations by laying out an alternative proposal for society.

In this way, when these experiences are analyzed, they are visualized as fundamentally positive and proactive phenomena; but, together with this vision, it is necessary to also have a critical view, so as to not hide or minimize a series of concrete problems or the fact that they are embedded almost structurally in this kind of experience. Therefore, it is important to avoid an idealized and uncritical vision of their functioning that ends up having few points of contact with the concrete reality in which they develop. In this regard, Peixoto de Albuquerque1 points out that the concept of self-management resurfaces associated with collectively-managed businesses that have inherited bankrupt companies in the process of neoliberal globalization and, at the same time, “again taking up the political and ideological struggles that gave rise to the concept, that is, associated with a utopian ideal of transformation and social change.” In spite of this, and as the author himself recognizes, it continues to be an ambiguous and polysemous concept that generally refers to a certain idea of “collectivism,” which encompasses social relationships, but more directly and specifically, economic relationships, though without getting too deep into their specific characteristics, which is why the concept ends up referring to multiple processes, without clarifying concretely what shape production spaces connected with self-management take, or should take.

With the objective of minimizing this conceptual ambiguity, we will establish that when we refer to productive self-management, we are talking about and referring to “worker management of a productive unit without capitalists or managers, developing their own organization of labor under non-hierarchical forms.”3 That is, we understand that self-management means that the workers collectively impose the rules that regulate production, the organization of the work process, the use of surpluses and the relationship with the rest of the economy and society. This last aspect is of vital importance, because the current attempts at self-management seek to transcend the limits of the productive space.

On the other hand, self-management is also susceptible to being understood as an appropriation by the workers of the productive process. This appropriation entails, in a nutshell, the possibility of the productive processes beginning to be taken over by the workers, who have the possibility of modifying the rules governing such processes in a capitalist venture, with the goal of being able to replace them with another kind of organization of labor.

It is important to clarify as we seek to deepen the debate on the concept of self-management that, for certain visions, it does not necessarily refer to an alternative form of economic organization of production. With this in mind, it is necessary to establish that it is a concept in dispute. With the habitual discursive capacity of the hegemonic system, it has reused the concept of self-management, introducing it into the very sphere of capitalist production.

In this regard, so-called “Toyotism” promoted a space for concrete “self-organization” in so-called “quality circles,” where “self-organized” workers are supposed to reach production quotas. This system means an overexploitation of the worker, since it not only exploits their physical capacity, but intellectual and dynamic as well. This new business model tends to replace the tight control of productive time exercised by the Taylorist-Fordist model of organizing work with another model in which the workers get involved in a space-time that goes beyond productive time.6 Self-organization led by capital turns workers into subjects who must “live” in service to the business, and their free time is reworked into productive time whenever they have to carry out functions of planning of production to guarantee a better development of the product.”

The new self-management practices:

“From a general point of view, it is no longer possible to understand the practices of self-management in a purely economistic and productivist way; it is necessary take into account the new sociocultural practices in them, because their differentiated value and their chances of success, as well as of continuation and expansion, will only be possible to the extent that a differential value resides in them that holds them up as a possible alternative to the hegemonic model of labor exploitation that capitalist society offers. This society’s current strength has to do with its ability to enforce not only a productive model, but also a value system, in the end, a culture in which the workers themselves are not absent, though they are the weak link in the set of social relationships.

In the current self-management proposals in Latin America, there is something distinctive, something with different characteristics, which can transform these experiences into models of production that contribute politically towards a change in social relationships in a revolutionary sense and not simply progressive.

In this regard, we believe that is important not only to reflect on productive practice, but also what value system these practices are going to be oriented to. We are reminded of the old anarchist political practices, where the social library meant a mechanism of action that tried not only to struggle in the production space, but also to do battle on the plane of ideas and symbolism, which is to say, in the space where a cultural model is built that, inevitably, is reflected in our practice as historical subjects.

This summation of social organizations that are different from each other has a long tradition in the history of capitalism. It can traced back to the middle of the nineteenth century as a response to the contradictions in industrial capitalism. These organizations tried develop a productive logic that was different from the capitalist logic that implied a steady concentration of wealth and profit. In contrast, community organizations that are managed with the logic of what is commonly known as the “social economy” or “solidarity economy” try to create an alternative founded on practices that are based on collaboration and solidarity among members that belong to an organization. This conception of the economy tries to displace capital as the guiding center of relations in the productive sector and places human beings at the center of the economic connections of society. “These experiences are fed by the principles of cooperativism created in Rochdale, England, in the middle of the nineteenth century, and were perfected and reworked in different socio-cultural contexts.”

This second dimension of the concept also rescues the potential of what some prefer to call the solidarity economy, which presents many of these economic or microeconomic experiences from the point of view of proposing an alternative to capitalism. According to this perspective, the solidarity economy is important above all as a chance for society to learn about economic forms based on solidarity, with the potential to become an alternative to the neoliberal political economy. Sustaining initiatives that border on subsistence gives, for this dimension, a dignifying meaning to human beings reduced to conditions of “exclusion” and generally provides the only way out of extreme social situations through relationships of economic solidarity and linked to movements and popular organizations that can gather the potential for transforming the struggle for survival into a new model of economy. Coraggio9 maintains, for example, that the social economy is “a transitional proposal of economic practices for transformative action, conscious of the society that they want to create from inside the currently existing mixed economy, in the direction of another economy, another economic system, organized by the principle of the expanded reproduction of the life of all citizen-workers, contrasted with the principle of the accumulation of capital.” From this programmatic conception, self-managed experiences like the businesses recovered by their workers that are most linked to the workers’ movement take on a different dimension, which holds up when put to the test of the greatest challenges of the rebuilding of another logic of work and production that revalidate the smaller but much more numerous experiences that swarm in the framework of the precariousness and informality of work, especially in Latin America.

In this sense, the most detailed analysis of the processes of self-management is possible, which sees them as an innovation in the use of technology and in possible changes, as well as in the limits that are discovered in the framework of these processes.

Taking into account the analysis of Ruggeri and Novaes,10 it is possible to see self-management processes and frame them in analysis of the relations of ownership, as well as the changes in the work process and changes that occur in the subjectivity of the workers. It is obvious that in all self-management processes currently underway, whether in experiences begun in businesses recovered by their workers,11 in other kinds of cooperatives, or different groups that are beginning to work on the production of a good or service in a self-managed way, the problem and the adaptation of “really existing technology” becomes a problem to solve, or rather, to adapt to. This problem begins to be substantial if the intent is to work in another way and not simply repeat the form of capitalist production. According to Novaes and Dagnino,12 the important thing is to analyze what technological development is in the processes of self-management.

The authors mentioned above point out that to think about the problem in a more theoretical framework, it is necessary to analyze the role of productive forces and to place that analysis in the framework of the dialectic of the capitalist mode of production and its possibilities of changing on the path towards another social system.

The question appears to be, then, how a technology can be verified as appropriate and how it can be visualized from the theoretical point of view. In that sense, Herrera proposes the concept of “technological space.” According to the author,[^13] the concept presents several advantages because: 1) it frames the technological problem in a global context; 2) it recognizes the historical-productive particularities of the societies involved; and 3) recreates basic concepts such as local participation and endogenous development.

Such characteristics mean understanding technological space as a dynamic space not susceptible to being fossilized, because no space with these characteristics remains unaltered over time. The problem, then, of what could be called Appropriate Technologies, must consider these points and analyze how the different self-managed spaces relate to the broader framework of capitalist relations that surround them and impose limits and restrictions on them.”

Source: Sociocultural and Historical Perspective on Worker Self-Management; from the Article: Worker self-management: A sociocultural and historical perspective. By Carlos Eduardo Martínez. Translated by Level Translation (Steve Herrick).

The post What We Can Learn from the New Self-Management Practices in the Recuperated Factories in Argentina appeared first on P2P Foundation.