Early last week, when Republican Lt. Gov. of Texas, Dan Patrick, suggested that the elderly should be willing to die from COVID-19 to get the economy back in action, something major shifted. If just briefly, the mask came off. Here was an elected official explicitly offering human sacrifices to appease the market. 

Texas Lt Gov Dan Patrick went on national tv & argued elderly people should die for the health of the market. Capitalism is a system that priorities profits over people. This fight is literally a matter of life or death. Battle lines are being drawn. Which side are you on?

“Capitalism has always been willing to sacrifice life,” author and activist Naomi Klein told an audience of 14,000 people last week on an online teach-in hosted by Haymarket Books. “[It’s an] economic model soaked in blood. This is not a more radical version of capitalism; what is more radical is the scale.”

It’s unfortunate that it’s taking a global pandemic to reveal it, but the unprecedented crisis catalyzed by the coronavirus has exposed our capitalist economic system for what it has always been. From the early history of colonialism, slavery, the enclosure of the commons to the ravages of industrial capitalism, and into modern austerity regimes, capitalism has always put profit over people.

This is exactly why any calls for “returning to normal” are so misguided. “Normal is deadly, normal was a massive crisis,” Klein emphasized last week. “We don’t need to stimulate the death economy, we need to catalyze a massive transformation into an economy that is based on protecting life.”

In 2007, Klein presented her thesis of disaster capitalism to the world in her groundbreaking book, “The Shock Doctrine.” Her ideas seemed to perfectly explain much of what was — and still is — taking place globally. The thesis is fairly simple: When a crisis unfolds, disaster capitalists will try to create an opportunity to advance their nefarious agendas. One obvious example of this is the stimulus bill signed into law late last week which showers trillions of dollars onto Wall Street and giant corporations with minimal oversight or regulation. Nothing suggests a “return to normal” more than another corporate bailout that will never “trickle-down” to the rest of us. 

Instead, what Klein and others demand is a bottom-up bailout that goes well beyond simply surviving this acute crisis. Throughout the teach-in, Klein and her co-panelists Astra Taylor and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, offered a variety of solutions that could be applied to both the short- and long-term crises of the coronavirus and capitalism — both relief and recovery. An example of immediate relief would be a moratorium on rent until the crisis is over, while an example of recovery would be passing policies that would guarantee affordable housing to everybody living in the United States. The former is a stopgap measure to mitigate immediate harm; the latter is systemic transformation.

Part of the economic recovery package which just passed congress includes a one-time payment of $1,200 to individuals making less than $75,000 annually. There has been quite a bit of criticism coming from many different communities suggesting the figure of $1,200 is too low. The number was likely derived from the federal minimum wage wherein a full-time worker making $7.25/hr grosses $1,160 per month. Rounded up, this explains the $1,200 figure that the Republicans and Democrats agreed upon. 

If we utilize the framing encouraged by Klein and others we can begin to see how the coronavirus pandemic simply reveals the more chronic disaster that is the Federal minimum wage. If $1,200 is not enough in an acute crisis, then it’s certainly not enough during “normal” times. 

Of course, affordable housing and an increase in the minimum wage are not new ideas. In fact, many of the structural policy proposals put forth by Klein and her co-panelists are ideas that have been on the agenda of the left for quite some time. “We need to reimagine in this moment,” Klein argued. “And the good news is that we aren’t starting from scratch.”

Policy proposals like the Green New Deal, universal health care, universal basic income, and labor protections such as raising the minimum wage to $15/hr and democratizing the economy, for example, have all — as Klein puts it — been “lying around” for quite some time. She borrows this phrase from the economist Milton Friedman, who argued that radical transformation can only take place during periods of acute crisis. It’s during these periods that the ideas “already lying around” will step in to fill the gaps. 

Friedman was an American right-wing economist whose ideas are largely responsible for the rise of neoliberalism and austerity politics that have shaped the last 40 years. He utilized a crisis in capitalism during the late 1970s to help usher in a sweeping transformation that ended the Keynesian, New Deal-era in the United States. 

“The scale of the coronavirus crisis is so profound that there is now an opportunity to remake our society for the greater good, while rejecting the pernicious individualism that has left us utterly ill-equipped for the moment,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explained during the teach-in. “The class-driven hierarchy of our society will encourage the spread of this vicious virus, unless dramatic and previously unthinkable solutions are immediately put on the table.”

The coronavirus is an unprecedented event, but it’s the sharpening of class divides, the gutting of our social safety net and the mentality of selfish individualism encouraged by capitalism which have turned this pandemic into an unimaginable crisis. 

Things like eviction moratoriums, stimulus checks, or extended unemployment benefits will not fundamentally address the conditions which allowed the coronavirus to unfold so disastrously. They also won’t address the many chronic disasters that plague capitalist society on a daily basis. As Klein and others argue, these things can only be addressed through radical, systemic transformation. 

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This article is part of our reporting on the community response to the coronavirus crisis:

• The People’s COVID-19 Response needs you
• The coronavirus pandemic calls us to share more than ever
• 10 ways to share during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Coronavirus catalyzes growing wave of grassroots action despite social distancing
• 14 community-minded books to read during the 2020 quarantine
• Things got a whole lot more local than I expected due to coronavirus
• My new pandemic routine
• How these US immigrants are giving back to their new community during the COVID-19 crisis
• Open-source medical supplies battle COVID-19

Lead image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The post Coronavirus demands radical transformation, not a ‘return to normal’ appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Before the Corona outbreak, and with the help of Jose Ramos, the lead editor of an upcoming book about cosmo-local production, I had been reviewing the literature on historical rhythms and cycles to set the stage for the current ‘chaotic transition’ and ‘what comes next’. 

In short, I have come to two important conclusions: 

1. society moves from relative stable stages, through chaotic transitions, which are real mutations both in human consciousness and in socio-economic structures 
2. this change is non-linear and moves through internal or external shocks. 

Clearly, Corona is such a shock, partly exo-genous, i.e. a unpredictable outside factor, but also partly endo-genous (internal factor), since our devastating ecological practices are an important part of pandemic generation. It’s a double whammy which both endangers human life and creates a double shock to the economic system (both demand and supply driven, this is quite unprecedented, as economic crisis usually alternate between one and the other). Corona is not going to be sufficient for a full transition, but it will be a Great Accelerator, which has already changed so much in such a short time. I am not predicting that the results will be uniformly positive (accelerating the green/p2p/commons transition), or negative (Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine). Think about what happened after the fall of Rome to see a mixture of radical changes.

Nevertheless, here are some preliminary conclusions: 

1) The market plays almost no role in finding solutions in such crisis moments, and 90% of big and small companies would go bankrupt without state support (right now, big banks are pressing big pharma to price-gouge even more the vital medicines in the US!). Of course, this is not to belittle the many SME’s which are rooted in their communities and doing their best to somehow contribute to them, but the proper ‘capitalist’ multinational and financial entities would have created a situation in which the poor would have been condemned to die for lack of affordable testing and medicines, thereby endangering the population as a whole.

2) The nation-states are weak and the leaders have made mistakes, but they have turned out to be to be an absolutely indispensable institution to avoid chaotic reactions from a fragmented social field, and to discipline the market so that everyone is not put in even graver danger.

3) The current multilateral regime has been useful, (WHO), but also rather weak and ineffectual, at least insufficient to the task. Many people have died because of the weakness of factors 2 and 3, but paradoxically, an enormously larger amount would have died without them; all in all, they are playing a vital role and after initial delays and mistakes, most of them adapted to relatively sensible policies. We should not entertain any illusions that the abolishing of state forms would be anything else than a grave disaster in this context.

4) We have seen an extraordinary civic spirit and collaborative mobilisation of civil society which has been vital in the adaptation to the crisis, and to mitigate market and state failures; countless local and trans-local groups have been set in motion to create technical and scientific commons capable to rapidly produce medical devices that the market had not in stock and the state failed to order in time. Without valves and ventilators, the sick die; without masks, medical personnel gets infected and citizens continue to infect each other at too rapid rates; without mass testing we cannot move from mitigation to suppression; in all these efforts, civil society groups have taken the lead.

5) What has been emerging through p2p/commons/open source efforts are the seeds of new institutions for trans-local, trans-national responses, which can at this stage, not replace, but greatly strengthen the nation-state/multilateral regime, insufficient to the task as they may be (we will need a much stronger trans-national, not inter-national, multilateral institutions in the future, which can guarantee that the human economy works within planetary boundaries and acceptable social equity parameters, as ecological and social justice are strongly dependent on each other).

This regime, which is now still dominant and necessary, can order around market players, as they are now doing through new legislation that both saves and coerces/mobilizes market players. But most of all, it needs to work with, and help mobilize, the collective intelligence of trans-local and trans-national expertise, the latter of which strongly needs to become effective. This process towards ‘partner state’ practices and public-commons protocols will not be automatic, and will be an alternative to a coercive and authoritarian state-centric model, which could be one of the negative outcomes of this crisis.

So what is the role of the commons movement ?

1) One is to show and demonstrate what we can do, as we have already done through the multitude of open source efforts to market and state failures as well as mutual aid self-organizing.

2) Use the opportunity of this pedagogical catastrophe to strive for structural adaptations and reforms. In other words, we can’t just be local and tribal, we must be trans-local, and work at every level of institutional life, in order to transform institutions and proposes commons-centric reforms and transformative policies.

Corona is a serious crisis, but the climate is a much more serious one. In a paradoxical way, the global mobilization against Corona, despite the weakness and mistakes, has shown what can be done, and how fast institutions can adapt and change their choices once our life, and thus their legitimacy, is at stake. This bodes well for climate change adaption and ecological transformation. But make no mistake, this is just one of the crises we will need. The deep transformation that we need for this bifurcation, requires a ‘mutation of consciousness’ on a par with the ones we had in the 11th and 16th century in Europe. Though this time it will need to be global and fairly ‘simultaneous’. We are not there yet, but we’re definitely seeing strong premises for it, and for which this crisis acted as a revealer. This is just the first of the pedagogical catastrophes that will force the necessary transformations to a new stable system that lives within the confines of nature and realizes its interdependence with all other life forms. It will need to escape the historical cycle of pulsation between extractive regimes leading to ecological crisis, and the regenerative responses that human societies have always brought. Instead, we will need to move to a steady-state economic and social regime that can last many centuries and millennia.

More Information

If you like our analysis, please read our draft:

• The temporal context for the cosmo-local transition can be found here

If you want to learn more about the role of the commons in transitions, and our commons-centric approach, see:

• What You Should Read To Understand the Commons

Originally published in Liminal News

Origami image by Dany_Sternfeld 

The post Corona and the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

After Hurricane Irma devastated 90% of the island’s buildings last year, it forced virtually all 1,800 residents to relocate to nearby Antigua or cities like New York and Toronto.  International investors, working with Prime Minister Gastone Brown, a former banker, decided it was a ripe time to invoke the Shock Doctrine. This is the idea popularized by journalist Naomi Klein to describe how the market/state collusion to exploit national crises to ram through predatory neoliberal policies, which would otherwise be fiercely resisted by the citizenry.

In a great piece of reportage in The Intercept (January 23, 2018), Naomi Klein and Alleen Brown describe how the island government is taking advantage of the diaspora of Bardua residents. With no one around, it is an opportune moment to try to privatize the land and eliminate the communal ownership that has existed in Barbuda for nearly 200 years. A senator on the island described the communal ownership as something that was “born in the bowels of slavery and continued to grow in the post-emancipation world.”

The ostensible goal of the privatization policy is to provide a humanitarian response to the hurricane by facilitating outside investment and development. But the real goal is to open the door to investors and developers, who have long resented the democratic limits on development on Barbuda. They are eager to buy up pristine Caribbean land at bargain-basement prices and spur standard-issue Caribbean luxury resorts and ancillary businesses. The most notable such investor is actor Robert De Niro, who plans to build a luxury complex called Paradise Found Nobu.

According to Klein and Brown, “a sweeping 13-page ‘amendment‘ to the hard-won Barbuda Land Act was officially introduced in Antigua and Barbuda’s House of Representatives” on December 12, 2017.  “It includes changes that entirely reverse the meaning of the law. In the amendment, a clause declaring Barbuda ‘owned in common by the people of Barbuda’ was deleted and replaced. ‘The fundamental purpose of the Act is to grant to Barbudans the right to purchase the [land],’ the amended act reads.”

An outrageous act of enclosure, cast in the name of humanitarianism. Not surprisingly, international media coverage of these developments has been virtually absent. One exception:  a twelve-minute video documentary by The New York Times.

The transition to a scheme of private ownership of land – and the rampant “development” that would ensue – would radically change the culture of the island and strip Barbudans of their control over their land and rights of self-determination. It would also force many residents to leave the island permanently because they could no longer afford to live there, except as employees at the new luxury hotels and resorts.

In light of the diaspora of residents, it is hard for the to fight back. If anyone knows of people or groups actively involved in efforts to save the communal ownership of Barbudan land, please let me know and I’ll share the information here.

Update: There is a Facebook group dedicated to the Barbuda land grab and recovery delays at www.facebook.com/barbudasilentnomore.

To my readers:  My apologies for the absence of blog posts in recent weeks.  I am in the middle of writing a book that I hope to complete soon. Thanks for your patience!

Photo by andryn2006

The post Now Underway, a Neocolonial Land Grab on Barbuda appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Part One: Crisis as Opportunity

“Crises offer the opportunity to implement policies that lead to profound political and economic changes on the fast track as societies are in turmoil and unable to organise themselves against these implementations. Naomi Klein (2007) explains in her book, “The Shock Doctrine”, how proponents of neoliberalism unable to convince people by means of argument, use situations of shock such as coups d’état, dictatorships or natural disasters to proliferate neoliberal policies. These entail a stripping of the welfare state and general public services as well as the privatisation of public assets. Rather than “free economies” going hand in hand with democratic societies, as it often tends to be represented, the “liberalisation” of economies historically depended on the shocking of populations through extreme state violence and terror or the seizing of opportunities that had an equally traumatising and paralysing effect on civil society. Naomi Klein shows through a rich array of case studies of the last 50 years how neoliberal policies are incompatible with constitutional democracy if no repressive measures are taken against the own population. Neoliberalism was tested first as an experiment in Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile where the population was held in check through widespread torture and disappearances. After the experiment was repeated in other military dictatorships like the Argentinean junta, Margaret Thatcher’s Great Britain became the first Western democracy that adopted neoliberal policies. After initially dismissing neoliberalism as “incompatible with constitutional democracy”, she created domestic conditions that enabled her to push forward with the neoliberal agenda at home. These conditions were created through the Falkland War abroad and a violent suppression of unions at home. In Thatcher’s Great Britain, downsizing of the welfare state and far-reaching privatisation programs came along with the curtailment of labour and demonstration rights and an increase in repressive measures. Such developments can also be observed in Spain and Greece today.

In direct resemblance to Thatcher’s TINA (“There is no alternative”) narrative, the media and politicians of both Spain and Greece adopt a discourse of “we have lived beyond our means and now we have to cut back, there is nothing we can do about it, we have to cut social services and privatise in the name of fiscal balancing” (Reich, 2013). One of the main objectives of the Shock Doctrine, as explained by Klein (2007), is to sweep away autonomous narratives and inoculate people with fear to diverge from the prescribed plan of action; in other words, to create an experiential understanding that there really is no alternative to what the central powers say and do. Similarly, David Graeber interprets neoliberalism less as an economic program than a political program “designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives” (Graeber & Solnit, 2012). It is thus telling that the Greek mass media create horror scenarios of what happens if the congress does not pass Troika’s austerity memoranda. “Economic experts” literally tell the Greek people on national TV that “there will be chaos. Greece will become a Third World Country. The supermarket shelves will soon be empty. There will be ration coupons” (Chatzistefanou & Kitidi, 2012). Similarly, a special “Citizen Security Law” is crafted in Spain to quell the new forms of citizen protests and politics that defy the austerity programs, create autonomous narratives and form the Spanish indignado movement (Fernandez-Savater & Martin, 2014). These anti-protest laws take such repressive measures as criminalizing passive resistance, uploading police violence on Youtube or Tweeting about a protest which can be punishable by fines as high as 600,000€ (The Guardian, 2013). Members of the indignado movement identified the objective of these laws as an attempt “to proscribe politics by criminalizing it, and withdrawing anything other than politics by politicians from circulation” (Fernandez-Savater & Martin, 2014). It is thus directly aimed at the citizenry’s capability to create their own narratives and to make sense of the events around them without having to rely on the information propagated by the political elite and the mass media.

While civil society is educated towards learned helplessness, a psychological state in which there is no more perceived capability to effect changes on the personal environment and complete submission to any external changes that are inflicted on the person, comprehensive privatisation programs transform public goods into private wealth (Soy Publica, 2014). Before the privatisation program in Greece could begin, however, the necessary governmental positions needed to be staffed by the appropriate personnel favourable to the plans. When former Prime Minister George Papandreou stepped down from his post in 2011 due to vehement popular opposition to the conditions of the Troika’s bailout plan, he made way for the former Vice President of the European Central Bank, Lucas Papademos, to lead the new interim-government until elections in 2012 (The Guardian, 2011). Papademos then staffed governmental positions with people from the private Greek Bank Eurobank which made negotiations with the Troika essentially into an interbank deal (Chatzistefanou & Kitidi, 2012). It is important to note that this interim government had no democratic legitimacy while passing comprehensive austerity and privatisation bills that would shape the country’s future for years to come. In the light of the massive vocal opposition to the neoliberal policies passed, this interim government can be viewed as a direct cancellation of democracy where sovereignty is given to experts from the banking sector. One Greek citizen summarizes the feeling of the time in the Greek documentary Catastroika: “The political system we have now in Greece resembles that of a junta. It is a banker’s junta with no more popular legitimation than the 1967 junta” (ibid.).

In order to facilitate a speedy privatisation process, the Greek privatisation fund “Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund” (commonly known under the Greek acronym TAIPED) has been founded to undertake the most extensive privatisation program ever implemented in an EU country (Mavroudi, 2013). The stated mission of the private fund is “to restrict governmental intervention in the privatisation process” (TAIPED, 2014). Public assets ranging from islands to public utility companies and motorways are handed over in escrow to the fund for it to be sold off to private bidders. A special law prohibits assets once handed over to be given back to the state, and the Greek public sector has legally withdrawn from any financial claim over revenues which are committed to go towards debt-service (Mavroudi, 2013). Only two out of the six board members are approved by a parliamentary committee and there are a range of international experts and observers from the Troika advising the fund. Critical observers argue that the Greek privatisation process resembles that of occupied countries where external agents come to the country, run the sell-off of the country’s assets, while the costs of the whole operation are carried by the local population whereas the profits which are expected to amount to 50 billion Euros go to the creditors (Chatzistefanou & Kitidi, 2012).

It is a large scale transfer of public wealth into private property outside of any democratic control.

As in other privatisation cases, the value of the public assets are vastly underestimated and therefore sold far below actual value (Klein, 2007). To take an example, the old Hellenikon airport has been estimated by independent pre-crisis valuations to be worth $6.8 billion (Baboulias, 2014). Recently, however, it has been sold to the private entity of Lamda Development for $1.2 billion who as the sole bidder for the site has been exempted “from any tax, duty or fee, including income tax in respect of any form of income derived from its business, of transfer tax for any reason, [or] capital accumulation tax” (The Press Project, 2014). To make matters worse, the Greek newspaper To Vima calculated that the Greek state will have to make at least another $3.4 billion in administrative and infrastructural expenses before it can deliver the property to its new owner (Roos, 2014). The Greek state thus accumulates further public debt by subsidizing the multi-billionnaire Latsis family through this purchase while poverty-inducing fees and taxes are imposed on ordinary citizens who survive on less than 500 Euros per month. This is but one example to show how the privatisation process is first of all a transfer of public wealth to the capital class and not necessarily helping in fiscal balancing.”

Part Two: The Crisis as Community Builder

Crises do not only cause material hardship and an opportunity for the powerful to privatise public wealth, but they can also spur the fast building of communities and a sense of solidarity between those who are affected by it. Rebecca Solnit (2009) provides in her book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster a rich array of case studies where people came together as a response to natural disasters in order to help each other through the difficult times. From earthquakes in San Francisco and Mexico City to floods in New Orleans and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, what Solnit found time and again was that in these times of external disruptions to social life, people who usually lived individuated lives suddenly came together for cooperative disaster relief. On the ground, people were there for each other, helping their neighbours and fellow citizens who they mostly did not know, and people reported a great sense of belonging and solidarity. At the same time, individuals respond emotionally in surprising ways: rather than being overwhelmed by fear and confusion, they report an intense joy of working together for a greater cause, and of getting intimate with people instantly who lived in their vicinity for years without ever having personally interacted with them. Furthermore, as external structures and institutions break down and individuals respond to them in cooperation with others, they start to feel in control of their own lives again; they feel to have more power and agency than in their uninterrupted everyday lives. Solnit describes this spirit of mutual aid always in great contrast to the response of the central powers – governments – who often militarise disaster zones expecting people to behave in savage Hobbesian ways as “the social order” is expected to break down through the external havoc. The only way the prevailing social order breaks down however, is in the sense that people stop relying on external institutions and start taking responsibility for their own lives by interacting in spontaneously emerging decentralised networks for dispersed decision making. Solnit recognises how threatening disasters are for political elites as power is being devolved to people on the ground as they are the first responders who assemble impromptu kitchens and networks to rebuild their neighbourhoods. She argues that centralised powers are structurally incapable of dealing with such situations and that “only the dispersed force of countless people making countless decision is adequate to a major crisis” (Solnit, 2009, p. 305).

My hypothesis is that economic crises like the one we are currently living through have a similar effect on people as the account Rebecca Solnit (2009) provides of natural disasters. As great parts of the population lose their employment and some even their home, and they feel they cannot turn to the state for help, they start to rely on each other again. In such times of widespread shared economic distress, people begin to build networks of solidarity and mutual aid. As hierarchical institutions fail and cannot further be relied on, people build their own decentralised networks of provision and decision-making on the ground. This can take the form of widespread social movements or collaborative economic projects. As the formal economy breaks down, people start building their own parallel economy on the ground based on values they view should be embodied in economic interactions. The question is though whether these alternative economic networks persist longer than the spontaneous reactions of disaster relief which vanish again as their environment is rebuilt and many think only warmly back to it as an episode they once lived through. If these new economic networks are built for the purpose of social transformation rather than surviving through the times of a dysfunctional formal economy, then they can lead through a genuinely different economic culture that continues to flourish even outside the times of crisis. Either way, through the convergence of various ecological crises that can be expected to seriously disrupt the economic system in a not too distant future, the experience of having built a grassroots economy increases the resilience of these local communities who are better prepared for the crises still to come. The more these alternative structures are developed, the less hard will be the transition to a new economy when we are forced to. For this, it is important to strengthen a new economic culture now that relies on cooperation, mutual aid and solidarity within ecological limits.”

Part Three: Beyond the Crisis: The Emergence of Alternative Economic Practices

“Economies are inherently cultural. The way things are produced, distributed and consumed is strongly shaped through cultural norms and practices (Zelizer, 2011). When there is a systemic crisis, this indicates also a cultural crisis: the existence of certain values as the guiding principles of human behaviour that are non-sustainable (Aitken, 2007; Akerloff & Shiller, 2010). Thus, the transition towards a new sustainable economy based on social and environmental values is strongly dependent on a fundamental cultural change if we are not to wait on external resource pressures that force us in that direction (Nolan, 2009). It may very well be that we are currently in such a period of cultural transition. Since culture is a material practice, it should be possible to observe signs of new protocultural forms in the spontaneous adaptation of peoples’ lives to the constraints and opportunities arising from the crisis. This dissertation investigates new economic practices as an indication of such a cultural transition.

The financial crisis has been brought about through a combination of deregulation and individualism as a way of life which manifested in corporate managers focused on their own shortterm profits as the guiding principle of their increasingly risky decisions (Tett, 2009; Zaloom, 2006). The “me first” culture is a key-ingredient of business management, manifested in the self-interested, rational, utility-maximising “homo economicus” (Sennett, 2006; Moran, 2009). This culture can be designated as “networked self-interest” (Cardoso & Jacobetty, 2012). On the other hand, across the world, there are movements of protesters that condemn this “me-first” culture in economic and political networks of power and the results it has brought about. Gustavo Cardoso and Pedro Jacobetty (2012) research the culture of these oppositional movements and argue that although we live in a network society under network individualism, an underlying cultural shift is taking place towards the adoption of a paradigm less centred on self-interest and more on the ability to adopt common interests and belong to a group that shares objectives within a given network. Such a cultural transition is fuelled by a change in values and belief in cooperation, free sharing, transparency, and open source production. Cardoso and Jacobetty identify these traits in the political and economic movements for social change and term them “cultures of networked belonging”. A description that I find very appropriate as a sense of belonging is one of the most valuable features that these networks offer to their participants. The sense of belonging to a wider movement, contributing to a bigger cause, to be looked after and to be able to care for other people are some of the most valuable psychological support mechanisms that save its participants through the time of crisis. This has always been the case with catastrophes as Rebecca Solnit (2009) makes abundantly clear in her book A Paradise Made in Hell, but the difference with the support systems that flourish in this particular crisis is that they are created to stay on afterwards and continue to provide these benefits as they embody exactly the social change that people are aiming for. As one writing on a wall in Madrid puts it: “Nothing would be worse than getting back to ‘normal’” (Biliris, 2012).

The crisis creates a profound cultural challenge for many as it throws them into an identity crisis as consumers (Chatzidakis, 2014). Since the crisis leads to a severe drop in income for many people who are also not able anymore to consume on the basis of credit as they used to for the last decade, large parts of the Southern European population find themselves in a position where they cannot consume as much as they used to and would like to. Some try desperately to revive consumer fantasies by visiting gifting bazaars or paying small deposits in stores to reserve items, pretending not to know that it is no longer possible for them to return and buy them (ibid.). Others try to find fulfilment in something else than consumption and in order to do so need to change their values and generate from within a new culture in order to overcome consumerism (Castells, Caraca & Cardoso, 2012). Since new values do not generate in a vacuum, this non-consumerist culture may only grow on the basis of actual social practices that exist in societies around the world, often first enacted by drop-outs of the current economy because of their rejection of what they consider to be a destructive way of life (ibid.). The rise of a new economic culture may thus result from the historical convergence between a cultural vanguard searching for a different way of life, and the disoriented masses of ex-consumers who no longer have the opportunity to consume anything but themselves – “people who have nothing to lose but their cancelled credit cards” (ibid., p. 12). In this light, they need to make the shift Erich Fromm (1976) advocated almost 40 years ago “from having to being”. In the context of the crisis, the identity of an affected person framed through “having” is likely to be that of a “defective and disqualified consumer” for whom “non-shopping is the jarring and festering stigma of a life un-fulfilled” (Bauman, 2011). To create a dignified identity in this new context, it thus remains the frame of “being” which places greater emphasis on a person’s relationships, belonging and processes someone is involved in (Fromm, 1976). The alternative economic practices that currently proliferate in Southern Europe’s crisis-ridden societies offer exactly this kind of identity-creation through practical affiliation.

A Catalan research group, including the eminent sociologist Manuel Castells, conducted an empirical research project to study the universe of conscious alternative economic practices in Catalonia (Conill et al., 2012). On basis of seventy filmed interviews of individuals involved in such networks and organisations, the research group created the documentary film “Homage to Catalonia II” which subsequently was used to stimulate debate in eight focus groups. From this qualitative research, a questionnaire was created which was used to conduct 800 interviews with a statistically representative sample of the population of Barcelona. The survey tried to measure the extent of diffusion of each one of the identified alternative economic practices in society at large, and determine the factors inducing or restraining the diffusion of these practices during the economic crisis. To be sure, economic activities that do not fit within the pattern structured by the rules of the capitalist market permeate throughout the entire society, and society only functions because everybody performs every day countless acts of generosity that defy market logic (Graeber, 2011). In some cases, however, there is a deliberate attempt to connect these practices to an alternative vision of how social interaction and especially economic activities should be organised (Conill et al., 2012). The research team attempts to map the diffusion of these conscious non-capitalist practices in Catalonia and has categorised the diverse activities in a typology that is displayed in Figure 1.

The researchers have found that alternative economic practices have grown considerably since the onset of the crisis, but are due to their methodological setup – a one-time survey and not a longitudinal study – not able to quantify this growth (Conill et al., 2012). Nonetheless, one remarkable quantitative finding is that 97% of the surveyed people have engaged in some kind of non-capitalist economic practice since the start of the crisis 2008. The fact that virtually every participant of the representative sample of Barcelona’s population is engaged to some degree with these practices shows that there is a strong resonance between a conscious alternative economic culture and the culture of a mainstream society shaken by the economic crisis. While everybody, regardless in how intensely they are involved in alternative economic practices, is fully aware of the severity of the economic crisis, people differ widely in their perception and evaluation of the crisis. The first group, which the research team terms “culturally transformative” feels reaffirmed in their analysis and rejection of a consumerist lifestyle and feels vindicated to have set up an alternative way of life before the crisis hit. They position themselves ideologically and aim for social change that treats the root causes of the crisis rather than adapting to its effects. For the second group, who the researchers term “alternative practitioners”, the crisis has shaken their beliefs and their understanding of life. It affects everything they used to do or think, so that adapting to the new environment is difficult and confusing. In order to get by in these hard times, they change their practices: they consume less, they share and barter, they participate in solidarity networks and a number of other practices that help them to deal with the economic unpredictability in which they currently find themselves, but often without knowing exactly why, how and for what kind of future. While the practice of the first group is mostly value-driven, the motivation of the second group to engage with such alternative economic practices tends to be to meet their needs in a new way as old patterns do not suffice anymore. While the culturally transformatives had anticipated the crisis, the alternative practitioners are reacting only now and are learning by doing, slowly discovering a new world of alternative economic practices through gradual involvement. In contrast, the third group that the researchers term “culturally adapted” are unable or unwilling to accept the new circumstances, are waiting, enduring the hard times, and hoping for the best, which is often vocalised as a return to the ‘normal’ pre-crisis conditions. The research team speculates that as the crisis deepens, the shift from being culturally adapted to becoming alternative practitioners may be one of the most decisive trends in ongoing social change (Conill et al., 2012).

The research team has identified 26 practices which they grouped in three categories: self-sufficiency, altruistic and exchange and cooperation (Conill et al., 2012). Table 1 depicts the percentage of the total population that has engaged in each of these practices since the beginning of the crisis in 2008 until the research was conducted in 2011.”

Lead image by Dr Case

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