North America Regional Municipalist Summit

New York City July 27-29, 2018

A growing movement across the globe is seeking to democratize and feminize political institutions at the level closest to our day-to-day lives: the municipal level. Weaving together social movements, participatory tools, solidarity economy, concrete wins, and the confluence of diverse political forces into a more direct form of democracy.

Join us in New York City from July 27-29 for the Fearless Cities North America Regional Summit, the first ever municipalist summit in North America. This regional Fearless Cities will include comprehensive participation from Canada, the United States, Mexico, and the Greater Caribbean and will be rooted in the international network coalesced by last year’s Fearless Cities international summit.

Register Here

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A technology is considered ‘open’ when it gives users the freedom (a) to study it, (b) to use it any way they wish, (c) to reproduce it and (d) modify it according to their own needs. By contrast, closed technologies are those that restrict these freedoms, limiting users’ ability to study them, reproduce them and modify them so as to adapt them to their needs. That is precisely the advantage of open technologies from the perspective of end users: whereas closed technologies limit the spectrum of possibilities of what end users can do, open technologies ‘liberate’ them, giving them the possibility to tinker with them and evolve them. Paradoxically, despite the fact that open technologies are greatly appreciated by the global technological community because of the freedoms they offer, the technology products manufactured and marketed by the vast majority of technology firms around the world are ‘closed’. This, of course, does not happen because of technological reasons: most of these companies supply their clients with closed machines and tools simply because in that way they can easily ‘lock’ them into a relationship of dependence.

It is not hard to see why this type of client-supplier relationship is particularly harmful for SSE organizations, as it implies their dependence on economic agents with diametrically opposed values and interests. To put it simply, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for SSE organizations to evolve into a vehicle for the transition to a truly social economy when they are dependent on the above economic agents for the tools they need on a daily basis. By contrast, open technologies may well be strategic resources for their autonomy and technological sovereignty. As brazilian activist-philosopher Euclides Mance remarks, SSE organizations should turn to open design and free software tools (like the Linux operating system for computers) in order to extricate themselves from the relationship of dependence they have unwillingly developed with closed technology companies.

A documentary about Sarantaporo.gr

To find the tools which fit their needs and goals, SSE agents should turn to the ‘community’ itself: in most cases, the development and the transfer of open technology to the field of its application and end-use is carried out by collaborative technology projects with the primary aim of covering needs, rather than making a profit. A great example is that of Sarantaporo.gr in Greece, which operates a modern telecom infrastructure of wireless networking in the area of Sarantaporo since 2013, through which more than twenty villages have acquired access to the Internet. The contribution of those collaborative projects – and that is crucial – is not limited to high-technology products, but extends to all kinds of tools and machines. A characteristic example is the Catalan Integral Cooperative in Catalonia and L’Atelier Paysan in France, which develop agricultural (open design) tools geared to the particular needs of small producers of their region.

The above examples show clearly the great potential of the SSE for positive change. However, for that to happen, it should have sufficient support structures for reinforcing its entrepreneurial action. That is where it is lagging behind. The SSE does not have structures analogous to the incubators for start-ups, the ‘accelerators’ and the liaison offices operating at most universities for the transfer of know-how to capitalist firms. Addressing this need is an area in which government policy could play a strategic role: in that regard, it is extremely positive that the recent action plan of the Greek Government tries to combat this problem through the development of more than a hundred cooperatively-organized support centres for the SSE across the entire country by 2023. That is precisely the kind of impetus that the SSE needs in order to grow. Of course, the capacity of these centres to support the SSE technologically will be of decisive importance: those are the structures that can and must make open technology accessible and user-friendly at local level, supplying the SSE organizations of their region with technology tools that promote the principles of the SSE and ensure its autonomy.

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The following excerpt is from a post originally published on thenextsystem.org. To read the complete paper, download the PDF here.

This paper by Michael T. Lewis, published alongside three others, is one of many proposals for a systemic alternative we have published or will be publishing here at the Next System Project. We have commissioned these papers in order to facilitate an informed and comprehensive discussion of “new systems,” and as part of this effort, we have also created a comparative framework which provides a basis for evaluating system proposals according to a common set of criteria.

The post Navigating System Transition in a Volatile Century appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Michel Bauwens is a theorist in the emerging field of P2P theory and director and founder of the P2P Foundation, a global organisation of researchers collaborating in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He has authored a number of essays, including his seminal thesis, The Political Economy of Peer Production.

In the run up to the Open 2017 – Platform Co-ops conference in London, Oliver Sylvester-Bradley, from The Open Co-op explores some of Michel’s ideas.

Avoiding the exploitation of the commons and open source peer production

OSB: At The Open Co-op we believe that open source software is an essential component of the Platform co-op / solidarity economy. However, some of the developers I speak to are now less inclined to publish their code openly, since they have seen large corporations incorporate their code and go on to build multi million pound businesses… This makes me wonder if there is a need to move on from simply “open source” by creating a new licensing system, similar to the Creative Commons for artistic works, in order to ensure that developers can stipulate the ways in which their code may be used, and by whom, in order to ensure the commercial world does not exploit open source.

MB: This is of course a very valid concern. But we have to ask a few questions. First, we have to recognise that people have to make a living and free software developers, like others, can be paid for their work as employees or freelancers, independent of the ‘open’ nature of the code. 75% of Linux Core developers are paid for example, and the Fair Use Economy report calculated that one sixth of GDP and 17 million workers are making a living around shared knowledge economies. That’s not trivial.

My point is that work is a rival good, and has a price, but that knowledge is naturally abundant and thus privatising it is inherently problematic.

Which is why we propose a novel solution, one which combines both a full commitment to share knowledge, and a demand for reciprocity towards the commons in the case of commercialisation. This is what we call the ‘copyfair’ principle, and it avoids the reality of free software, which is that, ‘the more free the license, the more private the economy around it’.

To my mind, we thus continue to write shared code, but we create ethical business coalitions around it, and we re-introduce reciprocity into the private market mechanisms.  Examples of this are the practice of the FairShares Association, which has one CC non-commercial license for everyone, and a commercial license for those who pay a membership fee (this is their ‘reciprocity’ requirement).

The Peer Production License used by some publishers is another. I take this as an ethical requirement: while we all have to make a living, and I respect the freedom of everyone to use moderate IP protection as a free choice, I believe that withholding vital productive knowledge for humanity is not the right thing to do.

OSB: OK, some people get paid to write open code – others do not, but I believe for open code to flourish we need to actively encourage developers to publish openly and that is not going to continue to happen if their work gets blatantly exploited for financial gain by others.

Having read more about the PPL now I understand its structure and objectives and admire the way it aims to encourage reciprocation if a conventional capitalist business reaps financial dividends from the open source work. I also understand the valid objections to limiting the flow of ‘free knowledge’ and information.

However, I personally feel we are in a kind of battle here, to either fix, out-evolve or supersede the ‘extractive’ economy asap, if we do not want humanity to become extinct. And I do not see the elites that wield power today giving up on their vested interests any time soon so, to me it seems, we would be wise to place limits on how, and where, and in exchange for what, our work can be used.

As Nathan Schneider put it to me in a recent email:
“as long as there have been commoners, they have had to protect their commons from the greedy hands of the lords.”

We need to organise ourselves so that the ‘value’ of our work can be re-invested in our livelihoods, communities and resources. 

MB: We have to be defensive, but I think more importantly we need to organise ourselves so that the ‘value’ of our work can be re-invested in our livelihoods, communities and resources. This is why it can never be a purely defensive game, or even trying to get more of the piece of the pie, but it requires a reorganisation of our modes of production and exchange.

Our proposal at the P2P Foundation is threefold at the micro-economic stage: first, we need to build productive communities around our commons, and declare our value sovereignty; this means deciding to distribute value differently, ‘generatively’; this requires a second step, creating generative entrepreneurial coalitions, so that we are commoners adding to the commons, but also cooperators making a living. And this requires also of course building meta-networks, between them.

Obviously, this takes time, and it took capital 400 years to consolidate itself with all the institutions it needed. The problem of course, is: we don’t have that time, but perhaps, because of the acceleration of learning through mutual networks, we can achieve it in 40.

It’s clear from this, given the urgencies of climate change and ecological destruction, that we can never wait for these prefigurative processes to go on on their own. This is why we also need to ally the prefigurative forces with social movements and emancipatory political forces, and we need to infuse them with the models of the commons, and ‘liberate’ them from their exclusive reliance on private vs state.

By building such an alliance we can then also politically transform social and economic institutions and have them evolve in the direction of the prefigurative society that we are building. Free knowledge is hugely important in this context, because under capitalism, we treat rare resources as if they were infinite, and we treat abundant resources, as if they were scarce. So we destroy the planet, but withhold the knowledge necessary to solve the problems thus created.

Think of how patenting of solar and electric cars led to a 30 year stagnation of their necessary development. This is why we have to square the circle, continue to share code, but create vehicles for livelihood creation around it. We must also transform the institutions so that we can have a ‘partner state’ which can ’empower and enable personal and social autonomy’, just as the FLOSS Foundations are doing that at the micro-level. We need commons-based, commonified public institutions. Nobody said it would be easy.

Under capitalism, we treat rare resources as if they were infinite, and we treat abundant resources, as if they were scarce. So we destroy the planet, but withhold the knowledge necessary to solve the problems thus created. 

Can Co-ops create increased value?

OSB: I was inspired to hear you talk about the increased value that can be generated by co-ops and platform co-ops when members are all owners and value is not syphoned off, and away from the organisation, by third parties such as external investors. To me this is one of the main benefits of platform co-ops which I feel has not been adequately explained. Do you know of any real-world examples that prove this to be the case?

MB: Yes, I fully agree with that basic premise that we need platform cooperatives that are generative towards their community and commons and the resources they draw from. Cooperatives of course have a long history of proving they work and employ more people worldwide than the multinational enterprises, and we also know from studies that cooperative startups do a lot better than venture-based startups (who, for each unicorn they produce, destroy 99 other companies). This being said, platform cooperatives are very new and so it is still difficult to say with confidence how they will work. But Nathan Schneider’s Internet of Ownership site identifies more than 250 of them, and, to take just one of them,  Stocksy, a platform co-owned by professional photographers, seems to do quite well.

So, it needs to happen, and the established cooperatives and ethical and solidarity finance absolutely needs to wake up to the necessity of playing a vital supportive role. I stress another condition though, which is the concept of ‘open cooperatives’. My critique is that traditional coops end up working for their members in the competitive capitalist economy, and tend to slowly take over the practices of corporations, up to the point of being demutualised sometimes.

An open cooperative in contrast, would be multi-stakeholder, which means that a ride-hailing coop might be co-owned and governed not just by the drivers, but also by the users and other stakeholders; that it actively (through its own statutes and rules) is engaged in producing common goods (not just the platform itself, but say a commitment to open source code for example); and that it has an outlook and structure committed to achieving some social or environmental purpose.

Marjorie Kelly, in her book on the ‘Emerging Ownership Revolution’ has outlined five major characteristics of ‘generative enterprise’ that I think we should be heeding.

She writes that:

“In ownership design, there are five essential patterns that work together to create either extractive or generative design: purpose, membership, governance, capital, and networks.

• Extractive ownership has a Financial Purpose: maximizing profits. Generative ownership has a Living Purpose: creating the conditions for life.
• While corporations today have Absentee Membership, with owners disconnected from the life of enterprise, generative ownership has Rooted Membership, with ownership held in human hands.
• While extractive ownership involves Governance by Markets, with control by capital markets on autopilot, generative designs have Mission-Controlled Governance, with control by those focused on social mission.
• While extractive investments involve Casino Finance, alternative approaches involve Stakeholder Finance, where capital becomes a friend rather than a master.
• Instead of Commodity Networks, where goods are traded based solely on price, generative economic relations are supported by Ethical Networks, which offer collective support for social and ecological norms.”

I think that is an excellent summary of where we need to be heading.

Inter Co-op cooperation and decentralised, distributed currencies

OSB: Principle 6, co-operation between co-ops, seems to provide huge scope for recycling the value that is generated within the co-op community, but doesn’t seem to have been particularly effective to date. Do you have any thoughts on why that might be and how co-ops could improve inter-co-op cooperation?

Relatedly, in a recent article for oD I suggested that “Decentralised distributed currencies will change the way our economy works by re-routing flows of capital. For example, if I could earn “co-op coins” in one co-op and spend them in the next, as a co-op member I would be incentivised to do so, since I also receive a share of the profits.”

How practical do you think that idea is? And what role do you see for decentralised distributed currencies in a new, generative economy?

MB: Cooperatives that compete, with each other and other private companies, and for the benefit of their own members, have historically adapted to capitalist practices, and they had to, given that capitalist competition drives down the cost and prices of the products they need; this has made inter-cooperative cooperation difficult to achieve, with some exceptions. I don’t think it can improve in the same context. But making cooperation ‘commons-centric’ changes the logic, since such commons increase the productive capacity of participating cooperatives. This is why capital has moved massively to the platform models and why it has been such a historical mistake of the cooperative movement to have missed the boat in this shift.

I also believe distributed currencies may play a role in this shift. The way I see it is the following: cooperative commons coalitions need to declare their ‘value sovereignty’; this means that, even as they may be dependent on external capital logics, internally, they can change the mode of distribution of value according to their own value logics, using contributory accounting mechanisms. And within this context, they can express their own new value logics, using new types of currencies, like for example backfeed.cc aims to do. I recommend your readers to check out our latest report on ‘Value in the Commons’ which analyses developments in open and contributory value accounting, based on 3 in-depth case studies.

OSB: The terminology you use here is a little new to me. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that, even though a co-op may generate income in GBP, for example, they can derive their own methods of distributing value (above and beyond just the GBP) to their members and other stakeholders, using their own distributed currencies. Is that what you are saying?

MB: I am saying two things. First, coops indeed need sovereign currencies as income, which they can distribute not just as wages, but also as contributive income, according to their own rules. Second, and complementarily, they can also recognise other value than what is recognised as ‘commodity’ or market value by the external market, and create other tokens for that, which can be used in inter-cooperative networks. These tokens are similar to complementary currencies that are used locally, but in this case, we are speaking of ‘territories of value circulation’, that are not geographically determined, but exist through the network of value exchanges over the network.

OSB: I read with interest how Open value Networks present a viable model for profit sharing in which a ‘value accounting system’ computes equity in proportion to contributions automatically, removing the pain from the profit sharing process. Could that be another example of “declaring value sovereignty” you describe above?

MB: Sensorica is indeed an example of value sovereignty, and there can be other forms, and of course, that is the point of value sovereignty, that it can be diverse. Sensoria’s aim is to create a much more direct linkage between commons contribution and market income. My own preference though is to create cooperatives around the commons, as an intermediary institution.

Is the blockchain really the holy grail for distributed organisations and currencies?

OSB: backfeed.cc seems interesting, and especially powerful if it can be understood and deployed as intended, but I am not convinced that the blockchain is either required, or the best underlying infrastructure, for new forms of distributed currency. For example, the block chain goes to great lengths to anonymise transactions, so that trade made may be conducted anonymously but, as we have seen so clearly in our modern economy (and as the Prisoners’ Dilemma illustrates so well), people do not behave so well in one-time, anonymous transactions.

On the contrary, when transactions are with real people, that we grow to know, people tend to behave more co-operatively and even develop deeper, more valuable ties based on mutual aid and solidarity. Reputation seems like the key ingredient here, as opposed to anonymity. What do you think about the current obsession with basing all these types of new, distributed, organisations and systems on the blockchain? And what do you think about the idea of an alternative system, based on open identity and reputation being more suited (and potentially more valuable to) the p2p / collaborative economy?

MB: I agree with your critique. The blockchain, let’s not forget, comes from the design of the Bitcoin currency, which is an anarcho-capitalist, “austrian economics” inspired design. It represents ‘ultracapitalism’ if you will, the urge to commodify everything. It presumes atomised and isolated individuals that contract out with each other, and dislikes any collective governance. So, while I think the blockchain can be inserted in other designs that do not make these limiting assumptions about human nature and motivations, it is not absolutely necessary.

My own beef with backfeed is that it assumes human work needs incentives, but the key assumption I make is the opposite, i.e. that commons work is driven ‘intrinsically’, and so there is a danger, that incentivising may actually ‘crowd out’ commoning behaviour to replace it with competition for scarce tokens. But of course we need to experiment, and backfeed is versatile enough to allow for very different designs adapted to various communities.

Ownership is directly related to the real value of an organisation

OSB: I developed the diagram (below) during discussions with Douglas Rushkoff, which attempts to illustrate the direct relationship between ownership and “real” value of an organisation to society. How true do you think this illustration is?

MB: The graphic is fine for me, in my own language, which comes from Marjorie Kelly’s ‘Emerging Ownership Revolution’, which we discussed above, I distinguish ‘extractive’ from ‘generative’ approaches; this could be added to the graphic. For example, the VC model extracts value from human communities and natural resources, for the benefit of a minority of shareholders (example, Uber destroys the potential of ride-sharing to diminish the numbers of cars, by making drivers compete for customers); while cooperative models attempt to add value to the communities and resources they work with.

What is democracy and how can we make improve on the present, undemocratic system

OSB: You seem to be a fan of democracy, as am I, however, I’m not sure I have ever experienced it. What do you think real democracy is?

MB: I think there are two competing visions of democracy, one which is rule by the people directly, as in the Athenian model (though it was restricted to male citizens), the other is through a set of institutions which have the contrary aim of actually restraining such direct power, as documented in the book by Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, “Athens on Trial: the Anti-Democratic tradition in Western thought “.

My focus is on the first model. The problem is that after 200 years of the second model, the primary areas of our life, like school and work, are not democratic, and so the basic problem is that we expect democratic behaviour from people (citizens / residents) who have basically never exercised it. This is one reason I favour the commons model, because it is based on self-governing communities, so it is a training school for democracy like no other.

OSB: When you say ‘the commons model’ what exactly do you mean? Where can we see a commons model acting as “a training ground for democracy like no other”?

MB: I follow the traditional definition of the commons, i.e. a shared resource, managed by a community according to its own norms. There are plenty of physical commons in the Global South, i.e. 85% of Africans still depend on them, less so in the West, but there are in fact more than we think. In Galicia, Spain, one third of the land is still commons and run by commons associations. But today, we see the explosion of digital commons (shared knowledge resources are the basis of one sixth of GDP in the US economy), and urban commons. There has been a tenfold increase of citizen initiatives in Flanders in the last ten years, and a similar exponential explosion in the Netherlands, and many of these initiatives involve creating commons as part of their practice. Guy Standing’s book on the precariat, has documented the deep linkage of precarious workers with networks characterised by commons.

I do not believe a complex society can solely run on direct democracy, and it is not realistic to demand of people to be involved with everything.

The innovation of peer production moreover, which is now actively pursued in the Italian model promoted by LabGovand LabSus, is the realisation that not everybody has to decide on everything, we simply have no time to be involved in everything at the personal level, but to give privileged space to the already engaged citizens, with the appropriate control mechanisms by other stakeholders, including ‘society’ as a whole.

OSB: So do you favour liquid democracy, or any kind of delegative democracy?

MB: I favour a mixture, which needs to be experimented with. I do not believe a complex society can solely run on direct democracy, and it is not realistic to demand of people to be involved with everything. Thus we need to build new layers of deliberative democracy and participation, on top of improved representative democracies, which can also include new lottery systems for such presentation, as for example presented in Melenchon’s proposal for a newConstituent Assembly and 6th Republic in France.

Right now, we (the human race) are at the cusp of combining the old representative model, which is no longer functioning for different reasons, and an added layer of experimental more direct democratic models. See also what is happening in Voralberg, the Austrian region, with civic councils for examples; or the Bologna Regulation in Italian cities, which gives citizens direct policy power to instantiate commons governance projects.

I think the essence is now experimentation, and different regions/countries/cities might opt for different contextual mixes of collective decision-making. Of course, I am also very aware of potential counter-tendencies with an authoritarian capitalism under the leadership of right-wing radicals such as the Trump-ian forces. It’s going to be a context between the two models, while we know the status-quo is no longer functioning.

OSB: Since members of co-ops and platform co-ops get to vote on everything and anything by which they are affected, a society populated by a multitude of co-ops might provide an alternative system of governance.

A co-op of co-ops could perform organisational duties at any scale whilst ensuring democratic governance by pushing decisions down to the lowest possible levels. What do you think about the possibility of a completely new system of democracy, like the above, superseding the existing system?

MB: I think we should be wary of uniform systems, since, if anything goes wrong with it, there is no backup. This was the argument of Rosa Luxemburg against the abolition in Russia of the parliament (during the Russian Revolution), she realised that if anything went wrong with the worker councils, there would be no other power able to create a balance, and she was proven right. The model you describe is being experimented in Rojava I believe.

But the cooperative model has its limits in my view, in that it easily functions as private property or ‘worker capitalism’, in relation to the rest of society. This is why I stress the model of open cooperatives, in which coops are also directly aligned with the production of common good, in the form of ‘commons’, through their own statutory obligations. In general, I favour a pluri-form model of democracy, in which cooperative democracy has its place, along with others, to make sure there is institutional diversity.

OSB: So, would I be right in saying you think that the most practical way to expand democracy is for citizens to propose solutions and organise around areas of shared interest (or physical or digital commons), to make their voices known and to influence our existing ‘representative democracies’ in the hopes that our representatives make better decisions?

Democracy has to be first of all a practice that is integrated in our lives, not something just like an election, which is like electing which elite is going to govern us.

MB: No that is not entirely correct. On the one hand, democracy has to be first of all a practice that is integrated in our lives, not something just like an election, which is like electing which elite is going to govern us (election = elite, both words have the same roots, and the greeks saw elections as the aristocratic principle and the lottery as the democratic principle); the commons, defined as shared resources that are governed by communities according to their own rules and norms, are a good way to achieve this, i.e. as we learn and work, we practice democracy.

Representative democracy needs to exist to cover wider territorial and functional units, but we are at the threshold where mere representation is no longer enough, and so this is the time to augment it with new techniques, to be experimented with, and this may involve participatory, deliberative, liquid feedback type, lotteries etc.

 John Heron explains well what chance of change I believe we can achieve, he once wrote:

“There seem to be at least four degrees of cultural development, rooted in degrees of moral insight:

1. autocratic cultures which define rights in a limited and oppressive way and there are no rights of political participation;
2. narrow democratic cultures which practice political participation through representation, but have no or very limited participation of people in decision-making in all other realms, such as research, religion, education, industry etc.;
3. wider democratic cultures which practice both political participation and varying degrees of wider kinds of participation;
4. commons p2p cultures in a libertarian and abundance-oriented global network with equipotential rights of participation of everyone in every field of human endeavour.”

Heron adds that “These four degrees could be stated in terms of the relations between hierarchy, co-operation and autonomy.

1. Hierarchy defines, controls and constrains co-operation and autonomy;
2. Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere only;
3. Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere and in varying degrees in other spheres;
4. The sole role of hierarchy is in its spontaneous emergence in the initiation and continuous flowering of autonomy-in-co-operation in all spheres of human endeavour”

Visions of the future

OSB: Finally, I’d like to ask about your vision. We are often exposed to the vision of a world full of hate and extremism and scarcity but rarely hear about a positive alternative. If you were in charge, what changes would you make to help speed up the transition to a collaborative, generative, sustainable, economy?

MB: I have a rather tragic vision for change, i.e. change happens when we must. At this stage where we have a world civilisation which is based on extraction, where social inequalities lead to authoritarian right wing populism and the planet is endangered in all kinds of ways, humanity will do what it has always done, i.e. create popular and spiritual movements that aim to limit extraction and discipline the extractors.  Mark Whitaker, who has done a 3,000 year comparative review of how civilisations react to meltdowns shows a pattern. This means going to a system that stabilises social unrest. This is where peer to peer dynamics come in today, and that needs massive mutualisation ( = pooling, = commons) of physical and knowledge resources.

Thus any successor system will need to comprise revived commons as a way to drastically reduce the material footprint.

If the medieval monks mutualised knowledge and infrastructure through monasteries and feudalism re-localised production, so today we have free software / open design, the sharing / access based economy to mutualise idle resources and recycle / upcycle and distribute local manufacturing based on demand, to relocalise.

You know the analogy of imaginal cells in the caterpillar; the cells who identify with the caterpillar are in panic, because the system is dying, but the cells who identify with the butterfly and carry its DNA know that it is a transition. Similarly today, we see seed forms emerging to solve the systemic crises, and the P2P Foundation is dedicated to observing them, analysing them and to think through where this can lead us, and be a catalyst for that change.

OSB: That’s a great analogy. The Open Co-op has similar objectives and we will be discussing all of the above themes at Open 2017 in London In February. Thank you for your time and all your thoughts Michel, you are an inspiration and the P2P Foundation is an amazing resource for the anyone interested in the transition to a more equitable, sustainable society.

This post was originally published on OpenDemocracy.net. 

The post Representation is no longer enough – A Q&A with Michel Bauwens appeared first on P2P Foundation.

But what does citizenship mean in the context of untrustworthy political institutions and isolation from quality education and basic public services? While some scholars have referred to the condition of people living in peripheral urban areas of 21st-century cities as “subcitizenship,” Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues that citizenship cannot be obtained via the concession of rights for people living in such conditions, but instead obtaining citizenship demands the transformation of global processes of socialization and models of development. In effect, rights may not be sitting there waiting to be accessed. Even with ascension in socio-economic status, for instance, they may instead require collective action.

Anthropologist James Holston writes of what he sees as a uniquely Brazilian “inclusively inegalitarian citizenship.” This combines two conflicting components: formal membership and principles of incorporation into nation-state (largely established in the 1988 Constitution as the country transitioned to democracy), together with “substantive distribution of rights, meanings, institutions, practices that membership entails to those deemed citizens.” Given that these two factors are so often at odds, Holston investigates what he calls ” insurgent citizenship,” a form of confronting this gap in formal and substantive rights in an insurgent way in the peripheries, through the auto-construction of the periphery, through protest and petition, and through identities that challenge exclusionary norms of society and citizenship.

It could be argued that solidarity economy initiatives are an example of “insurgent citizenship,” and of transformative models of socialization and development. Sociologist Pedro Demo summarizes the capacity to access citizenship rights as a type of agency, describing citizenship as the “human capacity to become a subject, to make your own collectively organized history.” He argues the bases of this kind of critical capacity are constructed via education, political organization, cultural identity, information, and communication.

So, which rights are actors in the solidarity economy organizing to access, or to establish in a meaningful way for themselves and their communities? Sociologist Paulo Henrique Martins divides citizenship rights into three categories: civil rights (individual liberties of freedom, equality, property, security), social rights to access well-being and social good (the right to work, to health, to education, to retirement), and political rights (electoral participation and freedom of association, meeting and political and union organization).

Social rights and the solidarity economy

In terms of social rights, solidarity economic enterprises, or empreendimentos econômicos solidários (EESs), offer member-workers means to build access to dignified working conditions, both in the physical workplace and in term of informal benefits as far as schedule flexibility and the absence of the threat of unexpected termination.

EESs also provide workers a channel for access to continued education through support organizations, such as university-based solidarity economy enterprise incubators or, in Rio’s case, the Municipal Secretariat of Solidarity Economy. Relatedly, another social right that EES participation can lead to is exposure to new physical spaces through commercialization opportunities such as Circuito Rio EcoSol, with the potential to alter a member-worker’s relationship to their city, and to themselves as a protagonist.

Working conditions go beyond dignified (non-abusive) to being generative of positive gains in well-being, such as therapeutic benefits of socializing, with reference to trauma, depression, and drug addiction.” Fuxico saindo da boca, criando fuxico com as mãos.” I first heard this in a Porto Alegre tailoring collective. One woman grazed her throat and another touched her tongue, as they explained what this meant to me: “Fuxico — gossip — coming out of our mouths, making fuxico — small fabric flowers for adornment — with our hands.”

I heard this again as Clarice from Devas, the sustainable clothing association based in the Complexo da Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone, told me that the origin of Devas was a “fuxico group.” She explained that a project at Maré’s health clinic in the early 1990s taught women how to sew, including fuxico flowers, and they together engaged in the other meaning of fuxico, discussing “personal dramas, children who had died, children who had become involved in crime, discussing the impact of trafficking on the community.”

A social worker who works with the Univens seamstresses in Porto Alegre relayed that the first thing she noticed about the group was that it “goes beyond production.” This “beyond” includes, as she put it, “the exchange of information and the strengthening of these women as people.” The conversation in the group is not just gossip, but is an airing of personal challenges, a space to give and receive advice, and a space to talk about community issues.

While the value of women getting together to gossip and vent about their lives could be downplayed, taking into consideration the context of some of these women, it becomes clear why this space is so critical. As the social worker put it, “This is the space.” She explained that many of the women have become socially isolated, due to safety issues in their neighborhoods and overburdened schedules between work and caregiving, especially for female heads of household.

Though this isolation is not a universal reality in favelas or other low-income neighborhoods, which can be highly social spaces, many of the women I spoke to in my research referenced it, and have perhaps sought out collective work for this reason. Even in communities with high degrees of social interaction, there may be a difference between solidarity economy workspaces and strictly social spaces in terms of the the themes being substantively discussed.

One of the member-workers at the Porto Alegre seamstress collective echoed these themes: “Because I take care of my disabled son, I don’t have other spaces in which I see friends.” Another member of the same group teared up explaining how the group is a family to her.

Clarice of Devas explained that she believes that “belonging to a group” outside the family is critical for anyone. She identified part of the importance of group belonging as dealing with violence-related trauma: “If there was a shootout today, violence makes you sick, but the group makes you strong, you have people to talk to, people to go out with.”

Indeed, depression and the therapeutic nature of the group came up in interviews with Clarice from Mulheres Guerreiras de Babilônia (Warrior Women of Babilônia), and with both the seamstress and food production collectives in Rio Grande do Sul. In Devas, one woman who suffered from debilitating depression and panic attacks has assumed a leadership role within the association. Clarice said of her story: “Society tells us as women that we are not capable of anything, and here we work against this.” The Babilônia seamstresses said of their work, simply: “It is therapy.”

In the food production cooperative in Rio Grande do Sul, member-workers said of their work: “It is a pure time” and “it is a paradise, you forget everything, and do what you like. Before, I felt alone; here, I speak what I feel.” One member-worker who has suffered particularly from debilitating depression said: “This work represents not staying focused only on the things that bother me. Getting out and being active, so things that bothered me internally go away. It is hope.” Indeed the leadership of this cooperative had this dynamic in mind from the outset: “The cooperative is a dream, it is companionship, it saves things that can only be spoken in the group. With whom else would you say these things?”

EESs also support continued education, through intentional skills-building. Often member-workers teach each other new skills. And through training processes with civil society or public sector actors, member-workers learn new technical skills, business management, and how to navigate other services.

Mara Adell, a leader of Mara Adell Sustentável in Complexo do Alemão, told me that the training course she did through the SEDES was “everything.” She explained: “Before, I wasn’t separating home income from business income, I didn’t have a sense of how much profit my products were making.” In the case of the Rio Grande do Sul EESs, they were more engaged with university-based solidarity economy enterprise incubators than government agencies. While at times that technical assistance felt exhausting, in other cases, it was welcomed both for the skills learned and for workshops on broader topics, such as the functioning of local government agencies.

Finally, health is another social right to which EES participation can expand access. Flexibility means not only that caregivers are able to better attend to family members, but also, in some cases, to their own health. For example, two of the member-workers in the food services cooperative in Rio Grande do Sul were able to continue working despite severe musculo-skeletal injuries that prohibited their employment at previous jobs.

Civil rights and the solidarity economy

In terms of civil rights, the basic right to freedom and security is implicated in the role EESs play as a space of support for women in situations of domestic violence. This dynamic was present for at least two of the member-workers in the Rio Grande do Sul food services cooperative. One of these women said that part of the importance of the cooperative for her was that “here, they take you seriously,” whereas she reported that she was often not believed when sharing about domestic violence incidents with people outside the cooperative. Clarice from Devas paraphrased one member-worker who stepped out of an abusive relationship with the support of the cooperative: “Before, if he mistreated me, I wouldn’t have anywhere to go. Now, I know I could come here to sleep.”

Political rights and the solidarity economy

In terms of political rights, the solidarity ties between members that emerge from participation in EESs can be a platform for collective action. The extent to which EES member-workers access this potential is mediated by several factors in personal and group background, including experience with activism, existing barriers to collective action, internal leadership, and types of external assistance present.

Additionally, the type of collective action varies, in some cases specific to solidarity economy movement spaces (forums, counsels, etc.) and in other cases applying to broader community action. Practicing democracy within collective management in EESs can act as a space for leadership development that translates to engagement with collective action, though this is limited in the context of EESs where collective management is informal and unstructured.

The fact that EESs are rooted in member-workers’ communities and offer a regular space to come together to talk about community dynamics can lead to increased community participation. In the Rio Grande do Sul tailoring collective, the group constantly discusses neighborhood issues, and one member was able to speak at a university and civil society meeting on community dynamics. This took place through the technical assistance of a university-based incubator, and demonstrates a political function of connections to such civil society actors. The food services cooperative in Rio Grande do Sul also engages in constant discussion about the neighborhood and its challenges. In Rio, Clarice says that member-workers have become more active in Maré’s Neighborhood Associations, while Mara Adell says that members have begun to use more neighborhood services in Alemão now that they are based in the community for work and can exchange information.

EESs often seek to give back to their communities directly, as well. The food services cooperative previously operated a community space with popular education opportunities, though this ended along with the administration of a more progressive municipal government that had subsidized the activity. Mara Adell Sustentável is subsidized by building materials company, LafargeHolcim, and in exchange for the free space, Mara Adell Sustentável gives workshops on tailoring and repurposing of materials in Complexo do Alemão. The group also shares its space for cultural events with local entrepreneurs who only have to pay for maintenance of equipment proportional to their use.

Outside of their communities, increased interaction with different kinds of actors also represents an increased freedom of mobility and even perhaps an insurgent claim to these women’s “right to the city.” The 1988 Brazilian Constitution established “the right to come and go” and Rio de Janeiro’s 1992 City Master Plan explicitly states the goal of “integrating the favelas into the formal city” and “preserving their local character.” Pursuit of real access to the right to come and go has been central to many recent favela struggles for rights, especially given the fact that favela residents continue to be unfairly profiled in the asfalto, or formal city.

The Solidarity Economy Circuit’s fairs take place throughout both the periphery and the asfalto in some of the city’s most prominent public spaces. Given this, and the dominance of favela residents in the Circuit, the fairs can be seen as a space of interaction between the favela and the formal city, a form of the “hill descending” as these women assert their right to the city. As Ana Asti asserts, “The extent to which producers and consumers interact directly in Rio’s fairs is a defining feature.” Insurgent citizenship, and its performance, does not only take place through marches, protests, and demonstrations, but also through more everyday practices to claim public space.

Conclusion

Participation in the solidarity economy through collective work done in EESs can be an opportunity for all sorts of people, but particularly those who have been systematically shut out from economic opportunity and from many of their rights as citizens. For residents of favelas and other economically disadvantaged communities, for example, educational levels and discrimination may act as barriers to “good jobs.” EESs can be “good jobs,” not only in terms of income-generation and skill-building, but also in terms of being a non-exploitative and flexible workplace; in terms of creating new spaces of social interaction (inside and outside the EES) that can increase security, combat isolation, and foster joy; and in terms of building increased community awareness, engagement, and leadership.

EESs should be evaluated against their internal logic, which differs from enterprise to enterprise. Though the EESs interviewed in the Rio circuit of fairs were managing to provide living wages to member-workers, this was not true in the case of many of the Rio Grande do Sul EESs interviewed. While EESs are not always financially sustainable, members may stick around both because of a lack of better options and/or for the compensating social benefits. The internal logic of some of these EESs may include that they offer women an opportunity to merge family and work life more than in traditional workspaces. This has the potential to be a radical reimagining of how different kinds of labor are valued more than a regression in the struggle for women’s rights.

In terms of public policy, the economic and political crisis affecting Brazil is leading to cuts in all sorts of social programs and solidarity economy institutions are falling prey to that process. However, movement actors point out that, given the relatively autonomous, protagonista, post-development nature of solidarity economy initiatives, the need for government support, while critical, is minimal. EESs as a development strategy are not designed to make individuals completely self-sufficient, but rather to help them take more active roles in their lives, including fighting to access rights owed to them as citizens.

In Rio de Janeiro right now, where the Solidarity Economy Circuit is at risk, entrepreneurs point out that their main costs are those of the critical public spaces the City grants to the fairs, as well as subsidized facilities maintenance. These fractional costs are helping to keep afloat not only another kind of economy, but all sorts of ripple effects in these entrepreneurs’ lives, families, and communities of origin. Their rallying cry is: “The solidarity economy is ours!”

This is the third of a three-part series on solidarity economy in Brazil.

Author Anna Cash conducted research on the solidarity economy as a platform for increasing social inclusion in 2015 in the greater Porto Alegre area, as part of a Fulbright Fellowship in partnership with the EcoSol Research Group at Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), and with the guidance of Professor Luiz Inácio Gaiger. She is currently a student in the Masters in City Planning program at University of California, Berkeley.

Article and images re-posted from RioOnWatch. 

The post 3 Key Rights Underlying the Solidarity Economy in Brazil appeared first on P2P Foundation.

There are upwards of 300 solidarity economic enterprises, or empreendimentos econômicos solidários (EESs), participating in the 14 fairs that make up Circuito Rio EcoSol, Rio’s solidarity economy circuit. Many of the participants are from favelas, and many EESs have joined together in networks.

The Mulheres Guerreiras da Babilônia (Warrior Women of Babilônia), for example, form an association of 10 women who make bags and accessories with imagery from their community, including imagery representing strong Afro-Brazilian women. They have joined together with other EESs to form a network of solidarity economy entrepreneurs from Pavão-Pavãozinho, Mangueira, Babilônia, and Santa Teresa.

Mara Adell Sustentável, an association in Complexo do Alemão, is also in the business of bags and accessories, but with a sustainable focus. Their eight-person association reuses PVC banners, water bottles, and “anything they can get their hands on” to repurpose as creative accessories. Mara Adell, an important leader for the association, formed a network of solidarity economy enterprises in Complexo do Alemão, with 13 EESs, including Mara Adell Sustentável, participating at present.

Devas has been operational in Complexo da Maré for 18 years making sustainable clothing. Today, there are 12 women participating, though there were 26 at the association’s peak. Devas founder and facilitator, Clarice Cavalcanti, has played an important leadership role in the push for Rio de Janeiro to have more supportive solidarity economy public policy, winning some important victories. Today, she coordinates four of the 14 fairs that make up the Circuit.

Why solidarity economy?

So, why do these people, in this case largely women from Rio’s favelas, make their living in the solidarity economy?

Survival and ideology are the two primary important and interlinked components. In some cases the same person is motivated by both of these components: those who know from the deepest firsthand experience that “capitalism is not for everyone and it never was,” in Clarice’s words, sometimes end up being the most deeply convinced that another world — and another work — are not only possible, but necessary.

On the other hand, Mara Adell from Complexo do Alemão distinguishes between “vendors” and “militants,” and there certainly does exist a divide in the solidarity economy between those who merely see the commercial opportunities as a survival strategy and those who have a more ideological commitment to the cause. Mara explains that the Complexo do Alemão solidarity economy network she established is down to the 13 most committed EESs because many of those who initially sought to participate were only interested in selling goods. Mara explains that “those goods often came from China; we know they are made with slave labor, and that is not what the solidarity economy is about.”

Solidarity economy and quality of life

Clarice sees the most important victory of the solidarity economy in Brazil as the “social organization of work.” Essentially, solidarity economy efforts aim to address both labor market gaps and broader societal deficiencies. This happens through two main mechanisms:

1. EESs can meet a need for income generation where labor market exclusion — via both educational disparities and spatial discrimination — is strong.
2. EESs can provide supportive workspaces that meet a need for social interaction that addresses trauma related to poverty and violence.

Addressing market exclusion

As of the first trimester of 2016, Brazilian unemployment jumped to 10.2 percent. There aren’t enough good jobs in the country, and furthermore, with only 40 percent of favela residents obtaining a high school education or higher, many do not have the schooling necessary to get the quality jobs that do exist.

Beyond skills and opportunity mismatches, many favela residents face employment discrimination because of their address. This is sometimes called “spatial discrimination.” Clarice from Devas points out that many applications are thrown out when an applicant lists a Complexo da Maré address, to the point that Maré residents often list nearby neighborhood Bonsuccesso on applications instead.

Researcher Janice Perlman comprehensively summarized favela employment dynamics in a 2005 study that revisited initial survey data from 1969. Favela residents surveyed viewed a “good job with a good salary” (or “decent work with decent pay” in the informal sector) as the “single most important factor for a successful life” — over good health, education, housing, land tenure, governance, and personal security.

Perlman then highlights the primary barriers to sought-after livelihoods. These barriers include:

• Higher educational standards for job entry because of structural advances in education;
• Loss of manufacturing industry in Rio de Janeiro’s metropolitan area;
• Reduction in construction jobs after the 1960s/1970s boom;
• Reduction in domestic service jobs, which were the single biggest source of female livelihood in 1968, due to tighter middle class budgets, automation, and availability of quick-fix food;
• Pervasive stigma against favela residents.

Perlman’s study shows that favela residents are well aware of spatial discrimination: on perceptions of barriers to livelihood, 84 percent of respondents listed favela residency as a biggest barrier, compared to 80 percent skin color, 74 percent appearance, 60 percent origin, and 54 percent gender. Perlman goes on to illustrate that when comparing incomes between favela residents and other Rio residents, there are drastically lower rates of return to educational investment for those living in favelas (controlling for other demographic traits).

What is clear is that favela residents are often shut out from livelihood opportunities. This is an important discussion, especially given the fact that residents view a good job as a key to mobility.

Where jobs are accessible, however, there can still be a difference between earnings in the traditional economy and the solidarity economy. For example, Clarice points out that each Devas product budget accounts for labor costs at R$23 per hour, whereas she cites typical labor costs in a seamstress workshop at R$2.50 to R$3 per hour.

Creating supportive spaces

Salary, benefits, and workplace conditions often differ between solidarity economy work and the traditional economy jobs that are most accessible to favela residents.

When EESs are informal, there are challenges to their ability to provide benefits to member-workers. This underscores the importance of creating accessible legal forms for EESs. In the cases of Devas, Mulheres Guerreiras da Babilônia, and Mara Adell Sustentável, all are registered as associations and thus have the ability to pay benefits. Clarice underscores that Devas member-workers receive social security benefits and that a recent member-worker who had become pregnant was able to take maternity leave that she wouldn’t have been able to negotiate in other forms of employment previously available to her.

There are also informal benefits to working in an EES, particularly for female heads of household and mothers in general. Rio de Janeiro is a city that has relegated many service workers to the hills and the suburban periphery, making childcare a challenge for mothers who work far from home due to long commutes. EES member-workers often come from the communities where their workplace is located, or in some cases produce from home, coming together just for meetings, organization, and commercialization, all of which allow increased flexibility for caregiving.

At a food services solidarity economy cooperative in Rio Grande do Sul, during fieldwork conducted with my colleague, psychologist Marilene Liége Daros, and the cooperative members, female member-workers spoke extensively about these dynamics:

“Here, you can leave running if your sick daughter has a problem in the house, for example. Because it’s all by foot, you know? That was the objective.”

“If you’re five minutes late in regular work, you’re on the street the next day.”

“Yesterday, we all couldn’t come due to (scheduling) conflicts, so we decided to come Friday instead.”

We conducted an exercise asking these member-workers to compare traditional work and solidarity economy work through free association:

Reimagining the relationship between private and work life

Employment that blurs the line between domestic caregiving and workforce labor may seem like a step backwards for women’s rights, relegating women to the private sphere without offering opportunities for professional advancement. Furthermore, the EESs in this article are all in industries that might be considered typically feminine: crafts, food, tailoring.

However, as Brazilian sociologist Helena Bonumá argues, solidarity economy arrangements can bring “the private to the productive sphere,” reimagining both of these spheres and “highlighting the reproductive sphere as fundamental for the production of life.” In the example of the food services cooperative, member-workers’ freedom to respond to family needs has a bearing on work arrangements, and their constant conversational reflection on family life is indicative of this.

Indeed, many feminist scholars point to the rigidity of the division between public “work” spheres and private spheres of unpaid care work as a key part of the maintenance of structures that are oppressive to women. Prominent feminist political scientist Nancy Fraser has said, “There can be no ’emancipation of women’ so long as this structure… [of] gendered, hierarchical division between ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’… remains intact.”

Many women in Brazil’s low-income communities are either engaged in both production and reproduction as female heads of household, or are engaged in care work in two contexts — for their own family, as well as under the employ of a wealthier family. In that second circumstance, Fraser notes that it is important to be cognizant of the ways in which “lean in” feminism means “lean on” feminism: In the current structure, women in the professional-managerial class can only benefit from more time spent on their careers if they rely on others for care work and housework. This might be a supportive partner, but is often a low-wage, precarious, female worker.

A story of community and political organizing

One success story that is well known in Brazilian solidarity economy circles and which highlights how EESs can offer an alternative to “lean in” feminism is that of Univens, a tailoring cooperative in Porto Alegre. When Univens member-workers struggled without anyone to take care of their children, they started a community daycare center. The cooperative offers courses, which members feel are especially important as crack takes a stronger hold in the neighborhood. They are interested in expanding these classes from tailoring to theater, painting, and other cultural programs. The courses started with 18 people but now have a large waiting list. Univens also has a solidarity fund in order to help out with crises in the community and is thinking of starting a community bank.

Leader Nelsa Nespolo attributes the cooperative’s success to three important factors: first, relationships — everyone in the cooperative lives in the neighborhood and will continue to see each other in the community no matter what happens in the cooperative; second, experience with organizing — Nelsa had previously been involved in youth and factory workers’ organizing, which leads to an understanding of democratic practices; and finally, transparency — there is good financial control in the cooperative and due to transparency there has never been an issue with the application of internal resources. Possibly as a cross-cutting factor, Nelsa points out that Univens does not want to grow beyond 30 people, because their internal democracy works well at this scale.

The story of Univens is one of community and political organizing. Twenty years ago in this neighborhood, the residents did not have any infrastructure in terms of paved streets or garbage collection. At that time, the city of Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting policy had a huge impact — the neighborhood came together to ask for needs to be met one street at a time. In the face of high unemployment in the 1990s, women from the neighborhood began to come together to make money through seamstress work. Initially working in their homes, they eventually started the cooperative. There were no supports for cooperatives at that time, so they went article by article creating their own statute, modeled after a housing cooperative. Today, they have social security, vacation leave (10 days in July and 20 days in February), sick leave, and surplus at the end of the year.

Given the realities of double shifts and of unpaid labor in the home, EESs like Univens, which reimagine the relationship between home and work, may be liberating even if they do not mesh with certain Western notions of what women’s advancement looks like. Indeed, EESs can be a means for solidarity economy entrepreneurs to construct a more participatory citizenship, which will be the topic of the final article in the series.

This is the second of a three-part series on solidarity economy in Brazil. Read part one here.

Author Anna Cash conducted research on the solidarity economy as a platform for increasing social inclusion in 2015 in the greater Porto Alegre area, as part of a Fulbright Fellowship in partnership with the EcoSol Research Group at Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), and with the guidance of Professor Luiz Inácio Gaiger. She is currently a student in the Masters in City Planning program at University of California Berkeley.

Article and images re-posted from RioOnWatch.

The post Why Women in Brazil Are Turning to the Solidarity Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In the North East of England, the College team visited Shared Interest, a social enterprise based in Newcastle that uses the investments of individuals to make loans to Fairtrade producers around the world. These investors are members who have a say in the way Shared Interest is run and what businesses it funds. Their involvement empowers the investors, who feel that they are more than just donors, because they know what their money is used for and can stand for a position on Shared Interest’s board and committees. The film shows how and why Shared Interest works in this way, the way in which Shared Interest’s support differs from conventional kinds of loans, the impact of these loans on the producers, and what motivates investors to get involved in this way.

About Solidarity Economy Showcase

All over the world – and in towns and communities close to you – people are providing services and products in ways that put people, not profit, first. These include not just well-known initiatives such as Fairtrade, but small-scale and local projects which encourage people to pool their resources and skills to work co-operatively and collaboratively. There is a name for this alternative way of doing business: the Social and Solidarity Economy. Three short films made by the Co-operative College get behind the scenes to explore what motivates the people involved in the solidarity economy, and how it benefits both the people employed in this way and those using their services and products.

The films are one of the first outcomes from the international, three-year ‘SUSY’ project, which has brought together 26 partners from European 23 territories. The College and London-based global education charity Think Global are the UK partners, and are focusing on the solidarity economy in the North West of England, the North East of England, Greater London and the South East of England, in addition to the Indian territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

After an initial stage which involved mapping and speaking to solidarity initiatives in these areas, best practice case studies were identified, and interviews were conducted with members, employees and users. These interviews formed the basis for the short films.

The videos produced by SUSY partners across Europe can be watched on the ‘SUSY’ YouTube channel. They show the scope and diversity of the solidarity economy, spotlighting initiatives ranging from a co-operative café in Prague, and enterprises promoting environmentally friendly living, responsible tourism and renewable energy, to initiatives supporting social enterprises. Prepare to be surprised and inspired by the films, which also visit a Slovenian enterprise promoting world cuisine, a food co-operative in Finland, a recycling initiative in Brazil, Iban weavers in Borneo, and a project in France using recycled coffee grounds to grow mushrooms.

Future outcomes of the SUSY project will include training, as well as film festivals, speaker tours and other public events. More information will be available on the SUSY website at http://uk.solidarityeconomy.eu.

The post Solidarity Economy Showcase: Shared Interest appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Care and Share Associates (CASA), a care provider owned by its employees, was chosen as the focus for the film highlighting the solidarity economy in the North West of England. The film-makers from the College met employees and users of the Manchester branch of CASA, who describe how it was set up in response to the needs of its members, and explain the ways in which employee ownership influences the way the business is run. The film demonstrates that employees feel they have a say and that their job is valued, leading to a noticeable improvement in the quality of the care provided.

About Solidarity Economy Showcase:

All over the world – and in towns and communities close to you – people are providing services and products in ways that put people, not profit, first. These include not just well-known initiatives such as Fairtrade, but small-scale and local projects which encourage people to pool their resources and skills to work co-operatively and collaboratively. There is a name for this alternative way of doing business: the Social and Solidarity Economy. Three short films made by the Co-operative College get behind the scenes to explore what motivates the people involved in the solidarity economy, and how it benefits both the people employed in this way and those using their services and products.

The films are one of the first outcomes from the international, three-year ‘SUSY’ project, which has brought together 26 partners from European 23 territories. The College and London-based global education charity Think Global are the UK partners, and are focusing on the solidarity economy in the North West of England, the North East of England, Greater London and the South East of England, in addition to the Indian territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

After an initial stage which involved mapping and speaking to solidarity initiatives in these areas, best practice case studies were identified, and interviews were conducted with members, employees and users. These interviews formed the basis for the short films.

The videos produced by SUSY partners across Europe can be watched on the ‘SUSY’ YouTube channel. They show the scope and diversity of the solidarity economy, spotlighting initiatives ranging from a co-operative café in Prague, and enterprises promoting environmentally friendly living, responsible tourism and renewable energy, to initiatives supporting social enterprises. Prepare to be surprised and inspired by the films, which also visit a Slovenian enterprise promoting world cuisine, a food co-operative in Finland, a recycling initiative in Brazil, Iban weavers in Borneo, and a project in France using recycled coffee grounds to grow mushrooms.

Future outcomes of the SUSY project will include training, as well as film festivals, speaker tours and other public events. More information will be available on the SUSY website at http://uk.solidarityeconomy.eu.

The post Solidarity Economy Showcase: CASA Manchester appeared first on P2P Foundation.

There are many examples of this in both consumption and labor: favelas have been practicing collective consumerism since their inception (and well before the “sharing economy” was trendy); favelas come together in mutirão collective work sessions for infrastructure upgrades, such as building sewerage systems or cleaning up abandoned lots; and favelados (favela residents) have come together in work collectives, such as the baking and skills sharing collective Mangarfo featured in the short documentary, “Here Is My Place.”

These grassroots collective economic practices are all examples of the “solidarity economy” that exists in favelas and in other communities all over Brazil and the world. Solidarity economy has many definitions but, most broadly, is both an umbrella term and a movement that seeks to promote alternative economic structures based on collective ownership and horizontal management instead of private ownership and hierarchical management. Such structures include community banks, credit unions, family agriculture, cooperative housing, barter clubs, consumer cooperatives, and worker cooperatives or collectives, most well-known in Brazil in the industries of recycling and crafts. The goal is to decentralize wealth, root wealth in communities, and financially and politically empower stakeholders participating in these structures toward another, more just, economy.

Much of solidarity economy ascribes to the seven principles of cooperativism:

1. Voluntary and free participation
2. Democratic management
3. Economic participation of members
4. Autonomy and independence
5. Education, training, and information
6. Cooperation among cooperatives
7. Interest in the community

Solidarity Economy Enterprises and Protagonists

Solidarity economic enterprises, or empreendimentos econômicos solidários (EESs), are at the heart of this movement. Such initiatives typically combine individuals excluded from the labor market, or moved by the initiatives’ ideology, in the search for collective alternative means of survival.

As Brazil’s former National Secretary of Solidarity Economy, Paul Singer (widely considered the father of the Brazilian solidarity economy movement), said in a public assembly in Porto Alegre last year: Solidarity economy is predominantly “spread by women, young people, the unemployed — by all of the victims of capitalism.”

The solidarity economy, blending the public sector, private sector, and third (civil society and philanthropic) sector, is one manifestation of a Brazilian development model where development beneficiaries take a more active role. A 2015 UNESCO Report describes how in Rio’s favelas there is a strong presence of social organizations that are “bottom-up, without outside intervention, motivated by people who were born, grew up, and continue living in favelas.”

Indeed, a common word used to described actors in the Brazilian solidarity economy is protagonistas, or protagonists, taking leading roles in their own lives. Notably, this language is not the “self-help” language that is common amongst many “community economic development” initiatives in the U.S. and in places like India, where initiatives that in some ways resemble solidarity economy can be observed with slightly different framing language.

Asset-based development experts Alison Mathie and Gord Cunningham ­frame producer cooperatives as an example of “group capacity-building,” which contrasts with “individual capacity-building.” Development projects that focus on individual capacity-building aim to improve the economic success of individuals (for example, microfinance clients), taking for granted that this will thereby lead to community economic development. However, the group capacity-building perspective sees collective action as an end in itself and development, thus, as an endogenous process. Notably, in such a framework, Mathie and Gord delineate the role of external agencies as a “facilitator of a process, and as a node in a widening network of connections the community may have with other actors.”

Solidarity Economy as Public Policy

The solidarity economy movement has had a high degree of ostensible political success in Brazil, in part because of the wave of unemployment in the 1990s, but also because of an existing strong labor movement. Brazil created not only a national Solidarity Economy Secretariat (SENAES), but also forums and councils at the metropolitan, municipal, state, and national levels. The Brazilian Forum of Solidarity Economy (FBES), brings together state and civil society actors nationally to discuss public policy for supporting solidarity economy.

However, despite apparent policy victories, the solidarity economy political infrastructure faces many challenges nationally. First, it is still logistically difficult for EESs to formalize in Brazil. Currently, the most common forms are informal groups, associations, and cooperatives. The Brazilian cooperative law was not created with solidarity economy cooperatives in mind. The cooperative form is subject to high rates of taxation, while the association legal form is broad, serving for non-revenue generating social projects along with work collectives. There is a national campaign for a solidarity economy legal form that is based on the internal logic of cooperatives and collectives that ascribe to the solidarity economy.

While informal economy and solidarity economy are not interchangeable terms, the current state of the Brazilian solidarity economy is very informal. Of all EESs in Brazil mapped through the SIES National Mapping project finalized in 2013, 31 percent of EESs are informal groups, 60 percent are associations, and 9 percent cooperatives. In Rio de Janeiro state, likely due to the relatively younger solidarity economy landscape, it is even more informal, as 68 percent of EESs are informal groups, 25 percent associations, and 6 percent cooperatives.

However, it is important to distinguish the solidarity economy from the informal economy for a couple of key reasons. First, to be a part of the informal economy does not mean that one is practicing solidarity economics based on principles of collective benefit. Secondly, the solidarity economy movement strives for formal recognition in order to be able to take advantages of the benefits traditional businesses receive. Formal recognition does not mean fitting EESs into existing purely profit-maximizing legal forms, but creating new ones that better fit with the logic of EESs, which seek to make returns to pay workers a fair wage and reinvest in the EES and, when possible, the community.

Rio’s Solidarity Economy

Since January 2009, Rio’s Special Secretariat of Solidarity Economic Development (SEDES) has been the first municipal secretariat dedicated to solidarity economy in Brazil. (In other Brazilian cities solidarity economy initiatives sit under departments of work and employment.) The secretariat’s objective, according to its official page is to “formulate and execute public policy designed to widen the market and democratize access to the economy of the city. Projects of local and solidarity economy development, based in associativism and collectivism, in self-management and productive networks, are the focus of SEDES.” The SEDES website goes on to explain that “networks of small businesses, cooperatives, productive arrangements, and poles of EESs” are “vectors of an intelligent and efficient strategy of confronting and overcoming social exclusion, unemployment, and precarious work in the world’s big cities.”

A large part of SEDES’ work has been to work towards certifying Rio as the first Latin American capital to be a Fair Trade Town. Mayor Eduardo Paes committed to five related goals: Create a coordinating committee of the campaign; declare support for and utilize products of fair trade in the public sector, for example by purchasing school lunches from local producers; support the placement of solidarity economy products in local markets; incentivize businesses in supporting and consuming these products, for example by utilizing uniforms made by solidarity economy entrepreneurs; and publicize the campaign in the media.

SEDES has also established goals to create two circuits of fairs in the city: Circuito Rio EcoSol, or Rio Solidarity Economy Circuit, which is a network of artisan fairs, and Circuito Carioca de Feiras Orgânicas, or Carioca Circuit of Organic Produce Fairs.

According to Ana Larronda Asti, Director of Solidarity Economy and Fair Trade at SEDES, the solidarity economy artisan fair circuit has an intentional focus on women who are residents of favelas and low-income communities. It is made up of 14 fairs around the city’s major poles, such that solidarity economy entrepreneurs have commercialization opportunities throughout each month.

Circuito Rio EcoSol locations include Complexo da Maré, Méier, and Manguinhos in the North Zone; Campo Grande, Paciência, and Santa Cruz in the West Zone; Freguesia in Jacarepaguá and Praça Saens Pena in Tijuca; Cinelândia, Praça Mauá, and São Cristóvão downtown; and Largo do Machado, Ipanema, and Leme in the South Zone.

As of June 2016, there were over 300 EESs participating. In order to participate, a group must have the legal form of association or popular cooperative, be in the business of production or commercialization, and have three or more people working for it. In addition, the group must be registered to CADSOL, the national registry for solidarity economy enterprises, and must confirm that its members have attended at least four municipal forum meetings, as well as undergone solidarity economy training from SEDES. Many of the EESs are organized into networks, facilitating collective commercialization.

Current Political Threats and Uncertainty

Unfortunately, given the political crisis at the federal level, SEDES is in a very vulnerable position. In late May, two-thirds of the 40-person staff were let go and the R$37 million budget was cut. The Special Secretariat at the time was without a boss and “without direction, in matters both strategic and practical.”

SEDES now has a new Secretary — Franklin Dias Coelho — but the agency’s status as a Special Secretariat means it was created by an action of Mayor Eduardo Paes and not by the City Council. Its special status therefore means that it can also be disbanded by the mayor as quickly as it was established. At the national level, the Solidarity Economy Secretariat is also undergoing changes that will dramatically alter its character, including the replacement in June of Secretary Paul Singer, who was a key figure in establishing the secretariat.

Solidarity economy entrepreneurs are now organizing politically to make SEDES into an institution that is permanently part of the municipal government. This year’s turmoil leaves them vulnerable given that the majority of the solidarity economy entrepreneurs’ income is dependent on the fairs and SEDES is responsible for helping to secure the public spaces where they are held. Some of the entrepreneurs at the fairs have been fighting for two decades for supportive public policy, such as the 2012 Solidarity Economy Law which defined terms for solidarity economy and established a Municipal Council in addition to SEDES, for civil society and public sector actors to dialogue. Many of the actors in this movement fear for their livelihoods, worried that their hard-earned victories could unravel in the current political context.

This is the first of a three-part series on solidarity economy in Brazil. With solidarity economy political infrastructure at risk, so too are the opportunities that EESs offer workers for increased quality of life and supportive spaces for women, as well as new forms of accessing rights, which will be the topics of the next two articles in the series.

Author Anna Cash conducted research on the solidarity economy as a platform for increasing social inclusion in 2015 in the greater Porto Alegre area, as part of a Fulbright Fellowship in partnership with the EcoSol Research Group at Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos (Unisinos), and with the guidance of Professor Luiz Inácio Gaiger. She is currently a student in the Masters in City Planning program at University of California, Berkeley.

Article and images re-posted from RioOnWatch. Clique aqui para Português. 

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He recently authored a chapter of the new book on Platform Co-ops Ours to Hack and Own, in which he states:

“Platform cooperatives – as a direct affront to the platform monopolies characterizing digital industrialism – offer a means of both reclaiming the value we create and forging the solidarity we need to work toward our collective good. Instead of extracting value and delivering it up to distant shareholders, we harvest, circulate, and recycle the value again and again. And those are precisely the habits we must retrieve as we move ahead from an extractive and growth-based economy to one as regenerative and sustainable as we’re going to need to survive the great challenges of our time.”

In the run up to the Open 2017 – Platform Co-ops conference in London, Oliver Sylvester-Bradley explores some of Douglas’ ideas:

OSB: You’ve mentioned that “the model of the ever expanding economy is bankrupt” and highlighted the “corporate charters” and “central currency” as the core components of the present “bankrupt” system. How can we hope to challenge the corporate charters?

DR: Well, you sound like you believe the way to change corporate structure is for citizens to take action against the corporations. That’s certainly one possible approach, and useful in a situation where there are no human beings within the corporation who are willing or able to change the corporations from the inside. What might be surprising to you is that most of the people in corporations actually do not want to kill people, do not want to be enslaving children in resource-rich nations, and do not want to make the planet uninhabitable. They are the ones in the best position to change corporate actions, since they are inside the companies themselves.

They simply need to be educated about what is possible. I tried to do some of that in my book. CEOs and Boards of Directors need to understand that they do have legal authority to act in the best long term interests of the company. So-called “activist” shareholders really cannot sue Boards for hurting the short-term value of shares – especially when the Boards are acting in the long-term interests of the shareholders. Not destroying the planet is in the best long-term interests of shareholders. Likewise, companies can restructure and reorient from within to favor dividends and public reinvestment over capital gains and extraction.

So, as I argue in my book, the key is to convince CEOs and others who are running corporations that they can exercise human agency in their decisions. They do not have to behave automatically. They can use their decision-making authority. They need to communicate with shareholders, and explain the advantages of getting lots of dividends instead of a one-time “pop” of share price, followed by an inevitable decline. Companies can actually make more money with ongoing revenues than blindly pursuing growth.

They can stop selling off their most productive assets, and instead remain powerfully competent companies. Steady state economics is about maximizing circulation rather than extraction. To anyone who understands how business works, they should see how this is a healthier choice for those within the business, as well as the distant shareholders who only want money at any cost.

OSB: You have described how “digital giants are running charter monopoly software…” and that their “technology enforces the monopoly”. At Open we are keen to see NGOs, co-ops, non-profits and even Local Authorities start to utilise open source software and, in return, to fund the development of a suite of open source apps which facilitate collective ownership and collaboration. What steps do you think are required to disrupt the digital giants’ monopolies?

DR: Of course, I was using the word “software” a bit metaphorically. The corporate charter is itself a program that can be changed. Instead, it is being further amplified by technology. What I mean by that is that the corporation works in a particular way, as dictated by the charters and contracts making up their business plan. So a company’s core code – long forgotten – may assume that the way to make money is to prevent people in the regions where the company operates from making any money. And while that may have been a good strategy for maintaining a slave state in the 1400’s, it doesn’t work so well in places where people are supposed to be free or employed.

But the company’s directors may have forgotten all of this by the 21st century, and simply implemented new plans based on the same strategy of exploitation and extraction. So now they are writing software and building platforms that embed these same assumptions about their users. And they end up extracting value and time from people without helping them create or retain any for themselves.

Or a business plan might be to make money by extracting metal ore from the ground. Then, the company builds technology to do that, which makes the extraction happen a lot faster. They don’t realize that extracting so quickly and totally may deplete things in new ways. And because they don’t realize that the core “code” of the company is actually changeable, they don’t see any way out of the problem.

Now, you’re talking about software solutions themselves, and how people from the outside can give up entirely on the corporate solutions, and build alternative software that works in greater consonance with the needs of real people and places. That’s pretty easy to do. We can write an alternative Uber that lets the drivers participate in the profits. Or an alternative Facebook that doesn’t manipulate people’s news feeds to try to program people’s future choices. The trick is getting people to use the alternatives when they’re not so pretty or universally accepted.

OSB: It has been suggested that the open-source / platform co-op alternatives to corporate software solutions will need to do two things at least:

1. Be easier to use / provide a better experience
2. Cost the user the same or less (i.e. provide better value for (conventional) money.

What do you think about the possibility of an “open app ecosystem” (a library of interoperable apps, covering all aspects of communication, organisation and even trading needs) sweeping into dominance over the corporate alternatives once it provides the same level of utility, at the same price, as the present corporate systems?

DR: The easiest tactic is to help people experience the impact of various pieces of software on their own existence. Does Facebook make them happier? How is it helping them take command of their lives? People sometimes have to become more aware of the surveillance state, the extractive quality of these tools, and the nauseous, empty, angry feeling they have after using this stuff in order to feel motivated to make a change.

OSB: Your chapter in Ours to Hack and Own entitled ‘Renaissance now’ explains how we are on the verge of a modern-day renaissance. There is no doubt that revitalising and retrieving lessons, techniques and habits from the past could help bring about change but the last renaissance was also driven by a shift in intellectual thinking. Do you have any thoughts on how, and where, an intellectual shift might come from?

DR: I think changes in experience can change people’s world view. If they have terrific experiences working in co-ops or using local currency or simply sharing stuff, then their world view will change.

OSB: You explained how “banks were invented to extract value from our transactions not to authenticate transactions”. Do you have any thought on why LETS and time banks haven’t made a more effective transition to the web?

DR: I think part of the reason LETS and alternative, trust-enabling systems have not developed is that most people are not actually proud of the value they create. Too many people feel that they don’t have enough to offer, and need to hide behind anonymous cryptocurrencies and traditional anonymizing monetary systems in order to mask things. Meanwhile, if a person is sitting in a cubicle working for a mortgage broker or collecting debt from student loans, how are they supposed to participate in a local LETS system? What real value are they creating for others? Such people find it easier to take some of the cash they’ve made and “invest” it in Ethereum than… become part of some local favour bank. To create and exchange value, you have to be able to create some value for other humans – not just help some corporation extract value from people.

OSB: I am excited about the idea that platform co-ops and the collective ownership of our local facilities and businesses could potentially completely disrupt capitalist democracy as we know it. Where do you stand on ‘working with and within the present system’ vs ‘building a new system which makes the present system obsolete’?

DR: Well, I don’t think it’s one or the other. People can vote on public and municipal activities through traditional democratic participation, and people can vote on private and business activities through their participation in cooperatives. I do believe that the more influence real people have on the private sector, the more freedom our public activities will be from corporate control. A platform cooperative is not going to lobby the government for destruction of the environment where its workers are living. So government ends up able to deal with reconciling the different views of its people, rather than that of its people with that of its non-human corporate actors.

Conversation with Rushkoff revealed there is a direct and inverse relationship between external investment from VCs and the real value a business has to society. The more external investment; the more the business is forced to follow money making objectives regardless of the impacts on the customers or users; the more value is extracted to pay back shareholders who may have no interest in the success of the idea or project, other than their personal ROI. By comparison, if an organisation or business is owned by its members its entire purpose can be very different. The objective of a member-owned co-op, or a platform co-op, is normally to benefit and support its members, meaning it’s focus shifts from irrelevant profit seeking to good wages for workers, equality and the long term sustainability of the organisation.

OSB: Do you think there is a direct correlation between the amount of external investment an organisation accepts (and hence ownership / governing authority it relinquishes) and the real value an organisation has for society?

DR: Well, it has more to do with how much a business actually needs to operate and satisfy its market. If a business is really inexpensive to operate, then it doesn’t make sense for that business to take billions of dollars in investment. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true. If you take billions of dollars of investment, then the people who gave you that money expect to get that money back. This means you need to make billions of dollars in revenue. That’s really hard – especially if you’re a small business that can actually function with just a few thousand dollars. If you take less money, then you are not obligated to grow the business so fast. You are still *allowed* to grow your business fast, but you don’t have to become a multi-billion-dollar business right away.

The more money you take, and the less proportioned to the real size of your business, the more power you have to surrender to the people giving you the money.

OSB: We are often exposed to the vision of a world full of hate and extremism and scarcity but rarely hear about a positive alternative. If platform co-ops, the solidarity / generative economy take hold it strikes me we could be living in a very different world in the future. Can you describe what you think this world might look like?

DR: I’m not a utopian, so I don’t envision a world or economy entirely transformed into a new state where all the value people create is properly registered, the commons is reinstated and appropriately governed, and selfishness is exchanged for true compassion.

“The generative, solidarity-inspired economy I envision is one where humanity stands a good chance of making through the next century without going extinct.”

The generative, solidarity-inspired economy I envision is one where humanity stands a good chance of making through the next century without going extinct. I am trying to envision a world where global warfare won’t be the only way to prevent impoverished populations from enacting violent revolutions on their own governments. I’m imagining a world where the wealthy don’t simply try to earn even more money in order to insulate themselves from the problems they’ve created by “externalizing” the real costs of their business practices.

So the radical alternative I’m envisioning is simply a world where the most extractive and destructive practices don’t absolutely dominate us. Where people have the ability to work for one another if there are no corporate jobs available.

I can imagine a near future without people starving in the streets, without China cashing in its chips by purchasing America’s greatest companies and properties, and without a continuation of the shift of wealth from the poor to the rich. I can imagine it not getting significantly worse than it is now, but that will take a huge shift in power and attitude.

OSB: What do you see as the main stepping stones for this vision to become a reality?

DR: Well, from a policy standpoint, I think a shift in tax policy would do a lot: punish capital gains and reward dividends and revenue. Right now, we punish companies and people who earn money, and reward those who simply extract capital out of the economy. That has to be reversed.

People and companies have to look toward earning money with the thing they do, rather than by selling the company itself. You can earn money, or you can “flip” your business (sell it to short-term investors). The latter leads to really bad practices.

We also have to accept that growth is an artefact of a currency system, not necessarily a symptom of a healthy economy. There are some economies that may be full grown.

OSB: Thanks Douglas, you have given us plenty of food for thought. The proposal that the users might buy back Twitter seems to demonstrate the growing appetite for platforms which are owned and controlled by their members. Here’s hoping more people start to realise the benefits of member ownership and governance, and how this creates a virtuous cycle of value creation. As you say, it seems essential if we’re going to survive the great challenges of our time.

To stay up to date with the latest news about platform cooperatives and the new collaborative sustainable economy follow @open_coop and join the mailing list (form in the right hand column) and buy your tickets now.

Cross-posted from The Open Coop
Featured image credit: Frontline/ WGBH, second image credit Seth Kushner.

The post Re-writing the core code of business: A Q&A with Douglas Rushkoff appeared first on P2P Foundation.