A. Allen Butcher • The School of Intentioneering • [email protected] • February 24, 2019

This paper (of 8,384 words) was first published as a blog post at: http://www.Intentioneers.net serving as a preview of the material to appear in a forthcoming book. For a history by the same author of the gifting and sharing counterculture see: The Intentioneers’ Bible: Interwoven Stories of the Parallel Cultures of Plenty and Scarcity for sale at Amazon.com

Please note, several sections have been excerpted; the full texts are available through the “read more” hyperlink to the original post.

1. Idealism versus Self-Interest

It is not the private interests of the individual that creates lasting community, but rather the goals of humanity. — I Ching (ancient Chinese divination text)

The correlation to reality: When I surveyed former members of the egalitarian, communal, intentional community East Wind in Missouri about why they joined and why they left, people said that they joined for idealistic reasons like sustainable, ecological lifestyle, feminism, cooperation, equality and such, and left for personal reasons, like going back to school, or to pursue a career not available in the community, or to focus upon a relationship and children. The I Ching got it right, although this is in slight contradiction to item number 10 “Individuality versus Community.”

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2. Class-Harmony versus Class-Conflict

The mutual respect among people of different socio-economic statuses in non-communal intentional communities creates the peace of class-harmony, as opposed to a disrespect leading to the violence of Marxist class-conflict.

The correlation in reality: Jesus of Nazareth (the inspiration for Christianity), Robert Owen (English advocate of the early cooperative movement in which the term “socialist” originated in 1827), and Charles Fourier (French utopian writer who advocated a “formula for the division of profits among capital, talent, and labor” see: Edward Spann, 1989, Brotherly Tomorrows, p. 165) all showed that community does not require economic equality among people. “Class-harmony community” accommodates people of different social-economic statuses living and working together. Jesus, or those who created Christianity, along with Owen, and Fourier got it right!

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3. Intentional versus Circumstantial Community

Intentional community, in which people deliberately define and live common values, as opposed to circumstantial community where people happen to live in proximity by chance, illustrates the “communal sharing theory,” which states that the greater the experience people have of sharing and/or gifting, the greater will be their commitment to the community thus formed.

The correlation in practice: Sharing and gifting involves material objects as well as thoughts, beliefs, feelings, emotions, leadership, and power, the practice of which builds resilience for survival of the community’s unique identity. It is through practicing gifting and sharing in many different formats that the communities movement is continually growing, differentiating, and evolving. Labor-gifting is used in communities which involve the sharing of privately-owned property, like cohousing and class-harmony communities, and labor-sharing is used in communities which involve the sharing of commonly-owned property, specifically communal societies. Intentional communities having both private and common property, like community land trusts, may practice any form of time-based economy: labor-exchanging, labor-gifting, labor-sharing.

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4. Sharing versus Privacy

The “communal privacy theory” states that increasing levels of privacy, afforded by resources or powers entrusted to individuals (called “trusterty”), does not reduce communalism as long as the ownership and responsibility remains under communal ownership and control.

The correlation to practice: “Trusterty” is the process of entrusting commonly-owned assets or powers to individuals for personal use or for service to the community. Egalitarian communal society entrusts assets and powers to individuals and small groups. Trusterty also refers to the trusted asset or power, for example in land trusts the term refers to both natural resources and to the responsibilities of the trustees. (The term “trusterty” is attributed to the Russian anarchist, Prince Peter Kropotkin.)

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5. Cofamily versus Consanguineous Family

The “cofamily” affirms and expands the options or possibilities of human culture beyond the common forms of the family of single-parent, nuclear, extended, and blended families, to include small groups of adults in community who are not related by blood or marriage.

The correlation to practice: A “cofamily” (which may also be called an “intentional family”) is a small community of three-to-nine adults with or without children, with the prefix “co” referring to: collective, complex, cooperative, convoluted, communal, complicated, conflicted, or any similar term, except consanguineous. A cofamily may or may not be a group marriage, as in the plural-conjugal structures of polyamory and polyfidelity. A cofamily may stand alone as a small intentional community or be part of a larger community such as cohousing or a communal society as a “nested cofamily” (sometimes also called “small living groups” or SLGs) whether comprised only of adults or formed around the care of children or those with special needs.

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6. Family or Cofamily-Based Childcare versus Large-Group Communal Childcare

People often romanticize “communal childcare,” and it is well that they do! Communal childcare is a beautiful thing when it works, and it works best in small groups such as cofamilies and nested cofamilies, primarily due to the need to limit the number of adults who must make and keep agreements about the children.  Large-group communalism has an inherent bias against children: as couples forming in the community leave to start a family elsewhere; as adults without children are concerned that the children who are born into the community will likely leave eventually and not become members, after the community pays the expense of raising them; and as large-group communal childcare in which parents cede decision-making power over their children to the group has proven unsustainable over the long term. Yet the problems are mostly among the adults! Meanwhile, Daniel Greenberg presents in his study of children in community the quote from an anonymous community member saying, “For our young children, community is the closest they’re ever going to get in this life to paradise!” (Anonymous, paraphrased from Daniel Greenberg, Communities no. 92, Fall, 1996, p. 12) ***

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7. Solidarity versus Alienation

In community people clearly see that we are all in this together, while in the monetary economy it is understood that everyone is in it for themselves.

The correlation to experience: Time-based economies, whether labor-exchanging (e.g., Time Dollars), labor-gifting (e.g., volunteering, “giving back,” and “paying it forward”), or labor-sharing (i.e., whether anti-quota or vacation-credit labor systems), by valuing all community-labor equally no matter what is done or who is doing it, provide freedom from the alienation of monetary economics.

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8. Abstract Principle versus Unique Situation

Confusing the image for the essence is a common mistake. “Any idea of God is just that —an idea. Confusing the idea of God with the true ineffable nature of the Mystery is idolatry.” (Timothy Feke and Peter Gandy, Jesus and the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians, 2001, p. 27)

The correlation in community: The psychology professor Deborah Altus (Washburn University, Topeka, KS) explains that the Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner, who wrote Walden Two, a utopian fiction applying his theories of behavioral engineering, appreciated Sunflower House (KS) and Los Horcones (Mexico) because those communities affirmed empiricism (the scientific method) in a deliberate, systematic way, in contrast with Twin Oaks (VA) and East Wind (MO) in which the founders initially attempted to emulate Skinner’s utopian fiction Walden Two (1948) as a blueprint, although eventually evolving their own unique systems. In his 1949 book Paths in Utopia (p. 139) Martin Buber concurs with Skinner saying, “Community should not be made into a principle; it should always satisfy a situation rather than an abstraction. The realization of community, like the realization of any idea, cannot occur once and for all time; always it must be the moment’s answer to the moment’s question, and nothing more.” Emmy Arnold, wife of Eberhard Arnold, cofounders of the Society of Brothers or Bruderhof wrote, possibly in reference to the Bruderhof’s on-again-off-again relationship with the much older, larger, and more traditional Hutterites, “A life shared in common is a miracle. People cannot remain together for the sake of traditions. Community must be given again and again as a new birth.” (Emmy Arnold, 1974, Children in Community, 2nd edition, originally published 1963, p. 173)

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9. Communal Economics versus Exchange Economies

The well known Morelly’s Maxim written in the 18th century of “from each according to ability; to each according to need” is now updated in the 21st century to apply to groups as opposed to individuals by the present author in Allen’s Aphorism as “from all according to intent; to all according to fairness.” Ability is to intent; as need is to fairness.

The correlation in community: As Daniel Gavron wrote about the Kibbutz movement in Israel, the red line between communalism and the exchange economy is whether all labor is valued equally or whether differential compensation is used to reward different types of labor. “… [W]hereas previous changes in the kibbutz way of life, such as increasing personal budgets [see: 4. Sharing versus Privacy] and having the children sleep in their parent’s homes [see: 6. Family versus Communal Childcare], did not alter the fundamental character of the institution, the introduction of differential salaries indicated a sea change.” (Gavron, 2000, Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia, p. 9)

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10. Individuality versus Community

There must be brotherly [and sisterly] love, a wholeness of humanity. But there must also be pure, separate individuality, separate and proud. —D. H. Lawrence

The correlation in community: Many writers about community have focused upon the opposing dynamics of the individual versus the community, some suggesting the need for individuals to give up attachments to their own interests in order to support what brings and keeps the community together. Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s 1972 book Commitment and Community considers a large range of these issues. An example would be in communal groups where each member is given a private room, which is a basic need for individual privacy that communal groups generally recognize. Yet a dynamic seen in such groups is that some new members spend the first months of their membership focused upon fixing up their rooms, like building a sleeping loft or raised bed with storage below, installing a parquet floor, painting the room, building shelves and so on, then soon after it is done, they drop membership and leave. They never make the transition from focusing upon themselves to focusing upon the group. In the opposite case of over-bearing group-think and manipulative group processes, the individual loses the ability to think critically and independently (see: Tim Miller, 2016, “‘Cults’ and Intentional Communities,” Communities Directory 7th Ed., FIC; and Marlene Winell, 1993, Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving their Religion). Survival of an intentional community requires that at certain points the individual and the group must be interlocking, yet both must be sufficiently autonomous to resist submergence of one by the other. [This is somewhat contrary to item number 1 “Idealism versus Self-Interest.”]

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11. Social Pressure Justified by Idealism versus Dissenting Non-Compliance

When the irresistible force of personal needs hits the immovable object of the attachment to communal ideals, a cognitive dissonance results of people doing one thing while saying something contradictory about exactly what it is they are doing.

The correlation in community: For about a decade East Wind Community, about a quarter-century Twin Oaks Community, about sixty years the Kibbutz movements, and for probably a few centuries the Hutterite colonies, all struggled to make something work that tends to not work well in large communal societies; designing and maintaining communal childcare systems in which the community rather than the parents make all the decisions for the children. [See: 6. Family or Cofamily-Based Childcare versus Large-Group Communal Childcare] In many cases the community sentiment is essentially that of course a communal society must have a communal childcare system, while typically the children who grow up in communal childcare systems refuse to raise their own children the same way, resulting in their leaving the communal society to have children and sometimes causing the communal community itself to privatize or disband.

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12. The Parallel Cultures of Exchange Economies versus Communal Economics

While America is generally described as a “capitalist country” the dominant culture is actually fairly well balanced between the aspects of competition and of cooperation. The theory of “parallel cultures” as developed by the present author says that the two economic systems are intertwined or interwoven, such that the debt-based monetary system and the non-monetary time-based system are mutually dependent.

Although the monetary system gets all the glory (via economic metrics such as GNP/GDP), the fact is that industrial, agricultural, governmental and all other forms of production are dependent upon the uncounted labor which provides domestic and community services, usually performed by women. If the non-monetarily-compensated work in domestic reproduction, often called “women’s work,” were to be monetized, it would add significantly to the country’s GNP/GDP. As it is, the corporate/private and government/public world is dependent upon the non-monetized domestic labor of women and men for the raising of each generation of wage-earning and salaried employees.

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13. Utopian Countercultural Lifestyles versus Imposed Reality of the Dominant Culture

Cultural innovations often arise from utopian theory or from within intentional communities, or they are picked up by communities from the outside-world and adapted or evolved, then are disseminated back into the outside-world where they may result in changes in the dominant culture. Three examples of this dynamic are: feminism, legal structures for communalism, and freedom from taxation.

The correlations in community—Feminism: Charles Fourier (1772-1837) of France was an eccentric utopian philosopher and writer who focused upon cooperation rather than communalism, and like Robert Owen who inspired the cooperative movement in England, Fourier is credited with being an early inspiration to the French worker and consumer cooperative movements (Beecher and Bienvenu, pp. 66-7). Both Fourier and Owen inspired later class-harmony communities [see: 2. Class-Harmony versus Class-Conflict]. Using a pen-name, Fourier published in 1808 his Theory of the Four Trends and the General Destinies in which he stated that, “the extension of the privileges of women is the fundamental cause of all social progress.” Beginning in the 1840s, as Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu write in their 1971 book, The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier, this statement became “one of the battle cries of radical feminism,” contributing to the revolutionary movements of 1848 throughout Europe (B. & B., p. 196). Fourier is also “credited with coining or giving currency to the term … feminism” (Nicholas Riasanovsky, 1969, The Teaching of Charles Fourier, p. 208), which later became, along with the cooperative movement, two primary aspects of socialism, with the first use of the term “socialist” appearing in the Owenite London Cooperative Magazine in 1827. Feminism became a mass movement of its own through the suffragette and material-feminist organizing (see: Dolores Hayden, 1981, The Grand Domestic Revolution) of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with feminism’s second wave occurring during the radical protests and organizing of the 1960s and ‘70s. According to Rosabeth Moss Kanter in her 1972 book Commitment and Community, it was from a 1960s New York women’s liberation group that Twin Oaks Community adopted the word “co” to use as a neutral, non-gender-specific pronoun, in place of “he” and “she,” and “cos” in place of the possessive “his” and “hers” (Kanter, p. 23; see also Kinkade, The Collected Leaves of Twin Oaks, vol. 1, p. 115 and vol. 2, p. 23). In a letter from Kat Kinkade to Jon Wagner, professor of sociology at Knox College, Galesburg, IL, around 1980, Kinkade wrote about Twin Oaks and East Wind Communities that, “sexual equality … is fundamental to our idea of ‘equality,’ and equality is fundamental to our approach to changing society. There is no platform of our ideology that is more central.” To which Jon Wagner replied in his 1982 book Sex Roles in Contemporary American Communes, “These communities may be among the most nonsexist social systems in human history.” (Wagner, pp. 37-8)

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Motivations for Communitarian Gifting and Sharing

The intentioneering of cultural innovations in utopian theory and communitarian cultures is often motivated by the desire among people to live in ways more consistent with their greatest values and highest ideals of personal responsibility for self, society, and nature than what the dominant culture offers or supports. As explained in section 12 “The Parallel Cultures of Exchange Economies versus Communal Economics,” the gifting and sharing cultures give rise to monetary economics, which became the “dominant culture” expressing the negative values of possessiveness and competition, while monetary economics similarly gives rise to countercultural systems of gifting and sharing representing the positive aspects of cooperative culture first learned in eons of tribal culture. Ever since the advent of money people have devised forms of time-based economies to escape the evils of monetary economics, including endless warfare, mass slavery, wealth amidst poverty, and environmental decline.

When money is not used within a community, encouragement and reward for participation requires creative methods for expressing group affirmation and appreciation for the time and skills contributed by each person. Since there is no monetary reward for motivating work in the time-based economy, forms of positive reinforcement for contributing time in labor or work may include:

• Personal satisfaction for doing work valued and appreciated by others, or which serves the common good;
• Recognition by friends for one’s good work, especially when offered personally, and
• Knowing that other members are also doing the best quality work they can for the community.

This latter form of positive reinforcement results in a sense of group awareness and commitment, or esprit de corps to use a military term, which helps to avoid or decrease burnout, or the loss of the intention originally inspiring the individual due to the daily effort required to maintain commitment and participation.

There is a large amount of sociological and psychological material about what motivates people, suggesting that “carrot and stick” approaches which inspire hope-of-gain versus fear-of-loss is not the most important concern. Daniel Pink explains in his 2009 book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us that once our basic survival needs are met, our greatest motivation for what we do is the resulting personal growth and development that we realize, toward expressing our individual human potential. The author analyzes the components of personal motivation as being first autonomy, or the desire to direct our own lives, then mastery, or the desire to continually improve what we do (and the more it matters to others the better), and also the desire to be of service to an ideal or something that is larger than just one’s own life. Alfie Kohn writes in his 1999 book, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes that “artificial inducements” only work for a period of time, after which the lack of a meaningful context for what we do can cause people to lose interest in the bribes offered. Rewards can actually work against creativity as they discourage risk-taking when the safest way to earn a reward is to follow the methods designed and imposed by others. Kohn identifies the conditions for authentic motivation as collaboration with others, the meaningfulness of the work, and choice or self-direction, all of which can be provided in the social-economic-political design of intentional community.

Natural Law as the Unified-Field Theory of Human Society

The thirteen correlations of theory and practice above present fundamental dichotomies in human culture. Many of these and probably others can also be written as ironies of human culture, yet however presented they may also be considered to be behavioristic principles of “natural law,” and together affirmed as aspects of the unified-field theory of communitarianism, or of the practice of intentioneering, as expressed in the application of our highest values and ideals in our chosen lifestyle.

Natural law integrates in one coherent world view a set of moral principles for the design of spiritual, political, economic, and other social issues. These aspects of our existence at the juncture of the physical and the spiritual aspects of the universe justifies both common and private property by affirming respect for social, environmental, and personal responsibility in our applications of the laws-of-nature.

These correlations of intentional community, or of intentioneering theory and experience, represent at least some of the psychological laws of behaviorism. These balance the group’s right to self-determination in creating its social contract, including a behavior code and a system of property ownership and/or control, against the individual’s subjective needs and wants. The individual’s participation in the mutual processes of decentralized, self-governance, toward common expressions of “the good life,” results in our cultural evolution through successive approximations of paradise on Earth.

Definitions:

• Behaviorism (behavioral psychology) — A philosophical theory that all behavior ultimately results from external environmental influences upon, or conditioning of, the individual’s internal cognition, emotions, and attitudes.

• Natural Law (political or religious philosophy) — A body of unchanging moral principles influencing human conduct, whether recognized through reason or revelation.

• Intentioneering (compare with communitarianism) — The effort to design and live a preferred lifestyle or culture; coined from the terms “intentional community” and “behavioral engineering.”

Photo by Maia C

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For more information, please visit Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) and the Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC), which has a directory of ICs and a huge amount of other material. 

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Watch the video if you haven’t already and visit our site for further info:
www.we-guild.co.uk

Remember that it’s a project in the making and it needs your support! So you can help make it happen by doing all that social media stuff (liking, following and especially sharing it!) and join the mailing list.
Or if you can think of other ways to support us we’d love to hear from you.

Let’s make We-Guild happen!

Reposted from  We-Guild’s website

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SIGN THIS CALL WRITING TO: [email protected]

MACAO, an autonomous center for art, culture and research is now in danger.

In recent days the alt-right Salvini government decided to foster the repression against migrants and squatters with a new extremely fascist decree.

Meanwhile the local government of Milano is going to vote in the municipal council to privatize the building in which Macao is based, conferring the property to BNL, a real estate fund. The bank will auction the building, resulting in the eviction of Macao.

For years Macao has generated an extremely productive cultural program, generating and producing thousands of groups and projects. It is a symbol of art production as anti-gentrification, and is recognized as an international hub for research into the urban commons from legal, economic and theoretical perspectives.

Macao has strongly promoted and developed municipalism. This has been combined with developing an alternative economic ecosystem and civil rights through a transfeminist prospective.

Regarding the building, where Macao has grown up, we have been discussing different solutions with the municipality over the last 6 years (as “civic use”; an exchange with renovation investment; and finally even offering to buy, turning the property asset into a common) with the aim of fostering an innovative solution for the future of the space, according to a positive urban plan.

During August, the city government put the building quite secretly into a fund owned by the bank BNL, in order to have liquidity for the yearly economic budget of the municipality and cover their debts.

In this political moment in which there is apparently no alternative to alt-right aggression and neoliberal left cruelty, it is more important than ever to have autonomous infrastructures and to build alliances that cannot be broken by authoritarian repression.

We really need the support of international actors like you, who share with us a different political vision based on: Anti-nationalism and an active resistance to neoliberalism and fascism, in which we fight for social justice, solidarity economics, and the free circulation of knowledge.

Fighting together for radical municipalism, organizing solidarity networks, and fostering a real European alternative, means now a concrete step of solidarity to MACAO from you!

Sign this call writing to: [email protected] or make your one statement
Thanks!

The post MACAO: calling the future for solidarity appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The work of artist and activist, Cassie Thornton is included in the upcoming Playbour– Work, Pleasure, Survival exhibition at Furtherfield, curated by Dani Admiss. In this interview I wanted to explore the following questions as revealed in her current Hologram project:

• What do current conditions say about trust and care, and can we trust the current, governing systems to have our best interests at heart?
• How do we produce non-hierarchical trust and care that thrives outside of the doctor/patient relationship, which is especially important in the U.S., where it is a profit making industry?
• How do we reverse engineer all this tragedy, and put power back where it needs to be?
• How do we begin to build solidarity?

Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist from the U.S., currently living in Canada. Thornton is currently the co-director of the Reimagining Value Action Lab in Thunder Bay, an art and social center at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada.

Thornton describes herself as feminist economist. Drawing on social science research methods develops alternative social technologies and infrastructures that might produce health and life in a future society without reproducing oppression — like those of our current money, police, or prison systems.

Interview

Marc Garrett: Since before the 2008 financial collapse, you have focused on researching and revealing the complex nature of debt through socially engaged art. Your recent work examines health in the age of financialization and works to reveal the connection between the body and capitalism. It turns towards institutions once again to ask how they produce or take away from the health of the artists and workers they “support”. This important turn towards health in your work has birthed a series of experiments that actively counter the effects of indebtedness through somatic work, including the Hologram project.

The social consequences of indebtedness, include the formatting of one’s relationship to society as a series of strategies to (competitively) survive economically, alone, to pay the obligations that you has been forced into. It takes so much work to survive and pay that we don’t have time to see that no one is thriving. Those whom most feel the harsh realities of the continual onslaught of extreme capitalism, tend to feel guilty, and/or like a failure. One of your current art ventures  is the Hologram, a feminist social health-care project, in which you ask individuals to join and provide accountability, attention, and solidarity as a source of long term care.

Could you elaborate on the context of the project is, as well as the practices, and techniques, you’ve developed?

CT: Many studies show that the experience of debt contributes to higher levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide. Debt disables us from getting the care we need and leads us away from recognizing ourselves as part of a cooperative species: it is clear that debt makes us sick. In my work for the past decade, I have been developing practices that attempt to collectively discover what debt is and how it affects the imagination of all of us: the wealthy, the poor, the indebted, financial workers, babies, and anyone in-between. Under the banner of “art” I have developed rogue anthropological techniques like debt visualization or auxiliary credit reportingto see how others ‘see’ debt as an object or a space, and how they have been forced to feel like failures in an economy that makes it hard for anyone (especially racialized, indigenous, disabled, gender non-binary, or ‘immigrant’) to secure the basic needs (housing, healthcare, food and education) they need to survive, because it is made to enrich the already wealthy and privileged.

“The rise of mental health problems such as depression cannot be understood in narrowly medical terms, but needs to be understood in its political economic context. An economy driven by debt (and prone to problem debt at the level of households) will have a predisposition towards rising rates of depression.”⁴

After years of watching the pain and denial around debt grow for individuals and entire societies, I was so excited to fall into a ‘social practice project’ that has the capacity to discuss and heal some of this capital-induced sickness through mending broken trust and finding lost solidarity. This project is called the hologram.

MG: What kind of people were involved?

CT: The entire time I lived in the Bay Area I was precarious and indebted. I only survived, and thrived, because of the networks of solidarity and mutual aid I participated in. As the city gentrified beyond the imagination, I was forced to leave. I didn’t want to let those networks die. So, at first, the people who were involved were like me– people really trying to have a stake in a place that didn’t know how to value people over real estate and capital

The hologram project developed when, as I was leaving the city, I had invited a group of precariously employed, transient activists and artists to get together in the Bay Area for a week of working together. We aimed to figure out ways to share responsibility for our mutual economic and social needs. This project was called the “Intentional Community in Exile (ICE)” [the ICE pun was always there, now an ever more intense reference in the public eye] and it grew out of an opportunity offered by Heavy Breathing to choreograph an event at The Berkeley Art Museum. They allowed me to go above and beyond my budget to invite a group of 8 women together from across the US to choreograph methods of mutual aid: sharing resources, discussing common problems and developing methods for cooperating to co-develop an economic and social infrastructure that would allow us to thrive together, interdependently. What would it mean for our work as activists and artists to feel that we had roots within an intentional community, even if we didn’t have the experience of property that makes most people feel at home?

Facebook event: “In departing from the idea of a long term home, family, property, or ownership, ICE models a mutual aid society to sustain creative and political practices within a hostile economic system. This project is about finding ways to exit economic precarity by building human relationships instead of accumulating capital– or to make exile warm. After a one week convergence of a small group of collaborators, ICE presents a discussion and performance of life practices as well as frameworks for material and immaterial mutual support.”

The Hologram was one of many ideas that developed as part of this project. One of the group members, Tara Spalty, founder of Slowpoke Acupuncture, (and one of the two acupuncturists you will see at SF protests or homeless encampments) and I fell into this idea when combining our knowledge about the solidarity clinics in Greece, our growing indebtedness and lack of medical records, and the community acupuncture movement. Then the group brainstormed about what the process would be like to produce a viral network of peer support.

MG: What inspired you to do this project? (particularly interested in the Greek influences here and what this means to you)

CT: My practice of looking at debt became boring to me by 2015 as it became more and more clear that individual financial debt was a signal of a larger problem that was not being addressed. The hyper individualism produced by indebtedness allows us to look away from a much bigger deeper story of our collective debts, financial and otherwise. We don’t know what to do with these much bigger debts, which include sovereign debts, municipal debts, debts to our ancestors and grandchildren, debts to the planet, debts to those wronged by colonialism and racism and more. We find it so much easier to ignore them.

When visiting austerity-wracked Greece after living in Oakland, I noticed that Oakland appeared to have far more homeless people on the street. It made me realize that, while we label some places “in crisis,” the same crisis exists elsewhere, ultimately created and manipulated by the same financial oligarchs. The hedge funds that profit off of the bankruptcy in Puerto Rico are flipping houses in Oakland and profiting off of the debt of Greece. We’re all a part of the same global economic systems. The “crisis” in Greece is also the crisis Oakland and the crisis in London. For this reason, I have been interested in what we can all learn from activists, organizers and others in crisis zones, who see the conditions without illusions.

This led me to an interest in the the Greek Solidarity Clinic movement, which since “the crisis” there has mobilized nurses, doctors, dentists, other health professionals and the public at large to offer autonomous access to basic health care. I went to go visit some of these clinics with Tori Abernathy, radical health researcher. Another project using this social technology is called the Accountability Model, by the anonymous collective Power Makes Us Sick. These solidarity clinics are run by participant assembly and are very much tied in to radical struggles against austerity. But they have also been a platform for rethinking what health and care might mean, and how they fit together. The most inspiring example for me was in at a solidarity clinic in Thessaloniki, the second largest city in Greece. The “Group for a Different Medicine” emerged with the idea that they didn’t want to just give away free medicine, but to rethink the way that medicine happens beyond conventional models, including specifically things like gender dynamics, unfair treatment based on race and nationality and patient-doctor hierarchies. This group opened a workers’ clinic inside of an occupied factory called vio.me as place offer an experimental “healed” version of free medicine.

When new patients came to the clinic for their initial visit they would meet for 90 minutes with a team: a medical doctor, a psychotherapist and a social worker. They’d ask questions like: Who is your mother? What do you eat? Where do you work? Can you afford your rent? Where are the financial hardships in your family?

The team would get a very broad and complex picture of this person, and building on the initial interview they’d work with that person to make a one-year plan for how they could be supported to access and take care of the things they need to be healthy. I imagine a conversation: “Your job is making you really anxious. What can we do to help you with that? You need surgery. We’ll sneak you in. You are lonely. Would you like to be in a social movement?” It was about making a plan that was truly holistic and based around the relationship between health, community and struggles to transform society and the economy from the bottom-up . And when I heard about it, I was like: obviously!

So the Hologram project is an attempt by me and my collaborators in the US and abroad to take inspiration from this model and create a kind of viral network of non-experts who organize into these trio/triage teams to help care for one another in a complex way. The name comes from a conversation I had with Frosso, one of the members of the Group for a Different Medicine, who explained that they wanted to move away from seeing a person as just a “patient”, a body or a number and instead see them as a complex, three dimensional social being, to create a kind of hologram of them.

MG: Could you explain how the viral holographic care system works?

CT: Based on the shape above, we can see that we have three people attending to one person, and each person represents a different quality of concern. In this new model, these three people are not experts or authorities, but people willing to lend attention and to do co-research, to be a scribe, or a living record for the person in the center, the Hologram. We call these three attendees ‘patience’. Our aim is to translate the Workers’ Clinic project to a peer to peer project where the Hologram receives attention, curiosity and long term commitment from the patience looking after her, who are not professionals. Another project using this social technology is called the Accountability Model, by the anonymous collective Power Makes Us Sick.

So the beginning of the process, like that of the Workers’ Clinic, is to perform an initial intake where the three patience ask the Hologram questions which are provided in an online form, about the basic things that help or hurt her social, physical and emotional/mental health. When this (rather extended) process is complete, the Hologram will meet as a group every season to do a general check in. The goal of this process is to build a social and a physical holistic health record, as well as to continue to grow the patience understanding of the Hologram’s integrated patterns.

Ultimately, over time we hope to build trust and a sense of interdependence, so that if the Hologram meets a situation where she has to make a big health decision (health always in an expansive sense) about a medical procedure, a job, a move, she will have three people who can support her to see her lived patterns, to help her ask the right questions, and to support peer research so that the Hologram is not making big decisions unsupported.

But, in order for the Hologram to receive this care without charge and guilt free, she needs to know that her patience are taken care of as she is. I think this is one part of the project that acknowledges and makes a practice built from the work of feminists and social reproductive theorists – you can’t build something new using the labor of people without acknowledging the work of keeping those people alive; reproducing the energy and care we need to overturn capitalism needs a lot of support. Getting support from someone feels so different if you know they are being, well taken care of. This is also how we begin to unbuild the hierarchical and authoritarian structures we have become accustomed to – with empty hands and empty pockets.

And then, the last important structural aspect of the Hologram project is the real kicker, and touches on the mystery of what it means to be human outside of Clientelist Capitalism – that the real ‘healing’ (if we even want to say it!) comes when the person who is at the center of care, turns outward to care for someone else. This, the secret sauce, the goal and the desired byproduct of every holographic meeting– to allow people to feel that they are not broken, and that their healing is bound up in the health and liberation of others.

The viral structure, is built into this system and there is a reversal of the standard way of seeing the doctor and patient relationship. In this structure it is essential that we see the work of the Hologram as the work of a teacher or explicator, delivering a case that will ultimately allow the patience to learn things they didn’t previously know. This is the most important, (though totally devalued by money) potent and immediately applicable, form of learning we can do, and it is what the medical system has made into a commodity, at the same time as it is seen as ‘women’s work’ or completely useless.

MG: Could you take us through the processes of engagement. For instance, you say a group of four people meet and select one person who will become a Hologram, and that this means they and their health will become ‘dimensional’ to the group. Could you elaborate how this happens and why it’s important for those involved?

CT: We are about to experiment, this fall, with what it means for these groups to form in different ways. We will start with four test cases, where an invited, self-selected person will become a Hologram. She will be supported to select three Patience in a way that suits her, based on an interview and survey. The selection of Patience is a part of the process that we have not had a chance to refine. It is not simple for any individual to understand what support looks like for them, or who they want support from, if they’ve never really had it.

The experiments we will work through this fall will attempt to understand what changes in the experience of the whole Hologram when the Hologram is supported by Patience who are trusted friends and family, acquaintances or highly recommended strangers. An ‘objective’ perspective from an outside participant also adds a layer of formality to the project, because, instead of a casual gathering of friends, an unfamiliar person signals to the other members of the hologram to be on time, and make the meetings more structured than a regular friend to friend chat.

The onboarding process for the Hologram and the Patience includes a set of conversations and a training ritual, which are still quite bumpy. The two roles every participant is involved in, requires a different set of skills, and so they both involve a special kind of “training” that one can do in a group or independently. This “training” is a structured personal ritual that allows participants to witness and adapt their own communication habits so that they feel prepared to participate and set up trust, curiosity and solidarity for the group in the opening intake conversations.

At the completion of the intake process, the Hologram (1) transitions to become a Patience. At this time, the Hologram (1) begins a short training to transition to the other role, and she is supported by her Patience to do this work. At the conclusion of the Hologram’s (1) transition to Patience, and the completion of the new Hologram’s (2) intake process, the original Hologram’s (1) Patience become Holograms (3,4,5).

MG: The Hologram project was first trialed as part of an exhibition called Sick Time, Sleepy Time, Crip Time at the Elizabeth Foundation Project Space in New York City, March 31-May 13, 2017. What have you learnt in more recent undertakings of The Hologram project?

CT: Since the original trial one year ago, which lasted for 3 months, the research has shifted to looking at building skills and answering acute questions that will accumulate to support and build the larger project. Starting in the Spring of 2017, I began to offer the Hologram project as a workshop, where participants could test the communication model that is implicit in the Hologram format. The method for offering it is, as a performance artist and rogue architect, creating a situation in a space where people go through a difficult psycho social physical experience together. In the reflective conversations that follow, I ask the groups to use the personal pronoun ‘we’ for the entire duration of the conversation. The idea is that one person’s experience can be shared by the group, and even as temporary Patience we can take a leap and share their experience with them for a duration of time, allowing a Hologram to feel as if their experience is “our” experience. And this feeling that one is not alone in an experience, if carried into other parts of life, has the potential to break a lot of the assumptions and habits that we have inherited from living and adapting to a debt driven hellscape.

1. Graeber, David. The Newstatesman. We’re racing towards another private debt crisis –so why did no one see it coming? 18 August 2017. bit.ly/2we2Bv5
2. Kimberly, Amadeo. Austerity Measures, Do They Work, with Examples. The Balance. 2018. thebalance.com/austerity-measures-definition-examples-do-they-work-3306285
3. Amadeo, Kimberly. Medical Bankruptcy and the Economy: Do Medical Bills Really Devastate America’s Families? The Balance. Updated May 16, 2018. thebalance.com/medical-bankruptcy-statistics-4154729
4. Davies, Will. Wallin, Sara. Montgomerie, Johnna. Financial Melancholia –Mental Health and Indebtedness. PDF Edition. 2015. perc.org.uk/project_posts/financial-melancholia-mental-health-and-indebtedness/

Reposted from Furtherfield.

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The goal of the voting is not to put one experience above others; there is no prize for the one with more votes. This is an exercise of Coopetition, meaning that we seek cooperation but have introduce an element of competition to encourage public interaction and engagement that we hope will amplify transformative practices that we would like to see flourish worldwide.

Regardless of the vote results, we recognize the hard work, successes and victories of all 9 initiatives as well as the others portrayed in the Atlas of Utopias.

Transformative Cities aims to support these initiatives by giving them visibility in our website and allied organizations and partners, which includes:

• A long piece written by commissioned journalists under a media partnership between Transformative Cities and Open Democracy,
• the production of photos and graphics based on their initiative and,
• the organization of collective learning spaces, either online via webinars or physically in events like the annual New Politics conference organized by TNI and its partners.

Last but not least, the transformative Cities process is open and we aim to improve it along the way, please do contact us if have any suggestions or comments so the next edition contains even more collective intelligence.

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Hello y’all, I’m representing the Tech Workers Coalition.

The TWC is a network of progressive and left-wing workers throughout the tech industry who are trying to organize and bring the labor movement into Silicon Valley, particularly parts of it that have not been grounds for labor organizing thus far. You can consider us to be a kind of workers center, that facilitates the building of new communities and new networks that are separate and in opposition to the business interests of the tech industry.

We’re mostly made up of people in various white-collar occupations in the industry: programmers, engineers, product managers, and so forth. But it’s important to note that we really want to help organize the entire industry, across all occupations and stratas: everybody from cafeteria workers, to customer service reps, to data scientists. In fact, TWC originally started as a group whose main purpose was to help unionization campaigns among service workers, and to enlist the support of the skilled technical workers at various sites. But since then, our ambitions have grown, especially as the experience of being in solidarity with service workers has lead to more of us thinking of ourselves as workers as well, as part of the same struggle.

So with regards to labor organizing in and against platform capitalism, we’re very excited and enthusiastic about considering the possibilities for leveraging the strategic position of skilled technical workers in the tech industry, in conjunction with the ongoing movements of what we could call “platform workers”. In other words, we’d like to think seriously about the potential to build a class alliance between the workers that build platforms and the workers that use – or are used by – platforms.

For example, imagine if Amazon warehouse workers were able to coordinate with Amazon engineers. Or if Deliveroo workers could organize with Deliveroo programmers. Bringing in the skilled technical layers of platform capitalism into the labor movement opens up a whole realm of possibilities for what we can accomplish.

Of course, right now, we’re a bit of a ways off from any of that. There has been a lot of spontaneous organizing and unrest happening in the industry in the past couple of years, but still the key task right now for us is to start with the basics of agitation and organizing. This is where “workers’ inquiry” comes in.

Our use of workers’ inquiry is a bit different than what’s been discussed before. We’re not academics or researchers, we the workers are ourselves doing the inquiry – on ourselves!

Our premise is that getting workers to talk to each other about problems that they have in the workplace is a powerful way to agitate, and build toward organizing; and that for would-be organizers like the core of TWC, there is no way in hell that you can have an effective campaign if you don’t know what your coworkers are actually thinking about and care about. It’s also an effective way to better understand what we can call the “class composition” of the tech industry; or in other words, where are people coming from in terms of backgrounds and occupations, where are they specifically located in the industry, what supply chains they’re a part of, and so on.

The reason that these kinds of discussion sessions can be effective is because oftentimes, especially in tech, workers feel like their gripes and grievances are their own problems. But once you start hearing other workers openly complaining and being angry about certain aspects of the industry, you start to realize that these aren’t, in fact, individual problems, but systemic problems. You also might start to realize that maybe you’re not some kind of “entrepreneur” or a temporarily-embarrassed founder or startup CEO, but that you are in fact a worker, who is under surveillance and managed and exploited. You are a cog in capitalism, just like everybody else.

And so for the Tech Workers Coalition, a lot of what we’ve been doing is grounding our organizing around creating space to simply hang out and talk, and discuss our gripes and grievances with the industry, and help our fellow workers develop some class consciousness. Or at least a bad attitude about work. And in this way we can start to build the foundation on which an alliance between skilled technical workers and platform workers and other segments of the working class can be developed.

So how do we go about doing inquiries?

Mostly, we’ve done the straightforward thing of having an event for a couple of hours where people show up, break off into groups of 2-4, and go through a questionnaire. And then maybe have a big group discussion.

The questions inquire into different aspects of working in tech, ranging from the details on specific occupations and the commodities and services that are produced, to general grievances that people have, or have seen expressed around them. So questions can be pretty simple conversational topics, like “Where do you work? What’s your job title? What tools do you use?”, and they can also be somewhat agitating, like “what do you dislike most about your workplace? How many hours do you work every week? What’s the stupidest thing you’ve seen management do?”

This stuff may seem pretty basic, which it is. This isn’t really complicated or advanced stuff here. Again, it’s worth emphasizing that a key objective right now is to simply get people to talk to each other in a critical manner and engage in some mutual and collective agitation.

To this end, the general inquiry sessions have been relatively effective and there’s been some good positive feedback. Some people have appreciated just having a space where people can openly vent frustrations and gripes about the tech industry, as opposed to more mainstream networking spaces where the expectation is that you are very cheerful and optimistic and enthusiastic. So in our spaces, instead of having to spin working 80 hours a week as “oh the work is so challenging and I’m learning so much”, you can admit “yeah this actually really sucks, I’d rather have an actual life outside of the workplace”.

For others, it has been useful to have a space to ground themselves into local concrete issues, as opposed to the big-picture macro-political stuff that they are used to thinking about. A lot of us are already very politicized, but we tend to think about politics in a very abstract and global way; so it’s really helpful to have discussions that force us to think about our own lives and how politics and political economy is impacting us on a day-to-day basis and how the workplace can be a node through which you can make a difference both for yourself and for others.

There has even been at least one case where a fellow worker, who is now a very enthusiastic member of TWC, explicitly pinned a workers inquiry session as being a pivotal moment when he recognized himself as a worker rather than a professional or an entrepreneur and how suddenly all this pressure was lifted from him. I’m not special! I’m just a fucking cog! Who cares!

All in all, we’re definitely going to continue to use workers inquiry as a strategy to facilitate conversations and reflections, as well as genuine relationships.

So inquiries have been a great tool to help build relationships between workers, but it’s also been effective at helping us understand what kinds of grievances and gripes that people around us have, that are driving them into organizing spaces. Or in other words, it helps shine a light on why the hell we techies are getting all worked up even though we supposedly have it really good with nice salaries and ping pong tables.

We can generally categorize tech worker grievances into three areas.

The first is standard workplace issues: things like bad management, long working hours, salary disparities, etc. I think it’s noteworthy that tech workers can still be riled up about basic workplace issues despite being relatively privileged and economically secure. We still may be working 60-80 hours a week, with an abusive manager, and heavy surveillance at work, and so on. Long working hours is definitely one of the popular grievances. Another is transparency around salaries; this is especially relevant when it comes to patterns of women and people of color getting underpaid, but not having a good way to figure this out with hard numbers. All in all, with regards to organizing, the fact that basic workplace issues are still a source of unrest means that we can apply a lot of the old lessons of union organizing to the tech industry.

The second category is issues of what we could call the “social composition” of the workplace, specifically issues of diversity (or lack thereof), and racism and sexism. Sexual harassment is a particularly key point of contention in the tech industry, and a lot of workers are really keen on figuring out ways to deal with it. And the general lack of management interest in dealing with these types of issues can be a big source of disillusionment and anger. So a key goal moving forward is going to be crafting strategies for rank-and-file solutions to issues of racism and sexism. We’ve actually already had some level of organizing success in certain workplaces where people were able to put collective pressure on serial harassers and get them disciplined or kicked out.

The third category is ethical and political issues. This is mainly with respect to how a company generally fits into the larger political context. For example, a company’s management trying to smooch up Donald Trump can be a serious source of anger for a workforce which is largely anti-Trump. It’s worth noting that this kind of grievance has actually been a very visible source of unrest for some time now; for example, workers at big companies like Google and Comcast had walkouts to protest Trump’s immigration policies. The ethics of technology are also a hot-button topic right now; for example, people working for various kinds of data companies are getting increasingly uneasy with the realization that actually, they’re working for surveillance companies. Shortly after the 2016 US election, a whole bunch of tech workers signed on to a petition pledging to never work on tech that could be used for the surveillance and targeting of minority groups. There’s also a disconnect between workers and companies on issues of privacy and security; a lot of workers take seriously the importance of privacy, but of course this runs against the very reason why a lot of tech companies exist in the first place.

So, those are the three general categories of grievances among tech workers. Hopefully it’s a little more clear now why TWC is optimistic about the prospects for bringing skilled technical workers into a larger working class movement. And one more thing I would note about this is that among all those grievances, by far, the most prevalent motivation for people who are agitated and want to organize is around issues of solidarity, either with underrepresented minority groups, or with tech workers who are not in relative positions of privilege, like contract workers and temporary workers. And it’s worth repeating that TWC originally started as a group that wanted to get skilled technical workers to be in solidarity with service workers on tech campuses.

So with this in mind, maybe it’s not such a crazy idea to think that we could organize tech workers to disrupt the disruption of the labor market, and resist right alongside platform workers.

And just a couple of notes about our actual organizing. I’d like to say that in general, it’s been going really well. And actually it’s going a lot better than a lot of us expected. Late last year we set some goals for the organization for 2018, and already we’re hitting those goals or surpassing them. In addition, there’s a lot of spontaneous organizing that’s happening independently of each other. At one big workplace where we have a presence, we’re discovering that there are a bunch of other informal groups who are also organizing to pressure management or subvert the company or whatever. And this gets at the concept of “invisible organization” that some people mentioned earlier today. So TWC in no way has a monopoly on tech worker organizing, which is great. It means there is a lot of energy around this stuff. Although we’re definitely the coolest.

There was also a really interesting recent case where the engineers at a tech startup ran a really successful unionization campaign, and all 15 or so engineers and programmers were on board. But then, after about a week after they told the company, they all got fired. Which is kind of hilarious; a tech startup fired all their tech workers. But in any case it’s a great example of the contradictions that we’re talking about here, and last week TWC helped organize a rally and a picket outside the company and we had about 70 people show up. And one thing to keep in mind about this kind of stuff is that even if initial attempts at organizing are met with retaliation like this, at the end of the day, that’s just going to increase the gap between management and workers in the tech industry.

So yeah. Things are going good. And we’re excited for 2018.

Photo by Berliner.Gazette

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Overview of Thematic Working Groups

Participatory Tools for Democracy

Commons and democracy are intimately linked. This workshop addresses civic participation and ways to foster citizens’ involvement in the production of their cities through engagement with public bodies and direct forms of political action.

Lately, technology and digital tools are integral to these initiatives to enhance democratic processes. This workshop will consider this dynamic and look at the co-production of public policies and projects through digital platforms.

Participants are interested in analyzing changes produced by these new collaborative processes. They have experience in the production of tools and resources such as online maps, collective storytelling, repositories of experiences, and initiatives designed to support political decentralization and co-production, with and without support from political institutions. This work also includes the development of charters, contracts and structures between different urban actors involved in urban commons.around civic causes in this domain, and participate in telecommunications technological projects.

Currencies and financing of commons

This theme promotes currency and finance as fundamental to the commons and solidarity economy. How are alternative currencies and digital tools and platforms at work, and what are the infrastructures and material environments that support communing and collective responsibility in this sphere? The workshop will examine how we can multiply or upscale some of the initiatives, methods, frameworks, and formats that have already been explored locally.

Participants have expressed interest in strengthening networks and collaborative projects, developing tools to develop an economy based on the commons, as well as strategies and methodologies on P2P mechanisms of value assessment and exchange. They have experience in time-banking and various cooperatives, have developed crypto-currencies and mobilized economic resources and human partnerships; contribute to community building, disseminate and create awareness and commitment around civic causes in this domain, and participate in telecommunications technological projects.

Data commons and the collaborative city

This workshop brings together the topics of control of (civic) data and the collaborative economic models that depend on online platforms. There is increasing interest in exploring alternatives that respect data and promote its civic control, taking into account possibilities for different modes of production & collection of this data. In what way can we facilitate data management and control in line with the social common good?

The workshop will take into account how regulations and policies on open source and open data, on the one hand, and those on technology and decentralized infrastructure, on the other, can play a role in facilitating data sovereignty and new forms of local cooperativism.

Moving away from large corporation and capital-led city development, we have to rethink the Smart City model and imagine data commons that socialise the value of data. How do initiatives like guifinet and Fairbnb fit in?  The starting point for the workshop will be recent experiences in Barcelona and Amsterdam.

Embodied productions of commoning: Food, Health, and Leisure

This workshop takes a holistic view of health creation to include also food production and distribution as well as sport and leisure activities. It will address the different determinants of our physical and mental condition, based on social justice, solidarity economy, and respect to biophysical limits of ecosystems. The commons approach underlines the importance of self-organised, locally rooted, inclusive and resilient community networks and civic spaces in order to re-think the practices and the development of public policy-making in this domain.

Participants have experience and are interested in the interrelationship at all points of the journey from “Land to Fork”, including access to land, nutrition, food sovereignty, cultivation, etc.; new forms of distribution, including for recycling; access to medical knowledge and patient-guided health policies and services; democratization of healthcare and self-organization of citizen efforts to reduce bureaucratic hurdles; and reclaiming the field for grassroots sports while challenging norms to inspire new models of recreation.

Law for the Commons

In order to guarantee the protection and development of commoning practices, legal opportunities and tools need to be located and addressed. This workshop deals with the search for these opportunities in relation to pre-existing and potential urban commons projects. This can draw from existing knowledge and institutional analysis in management of traditional commons, as well as contemporary legal practices for local, national and European legislation. It can also investigate instances where these concepts have been applied at the local scale.

These include participants’ experiences in, for example, production of municipal regulations for shared administration, which protects urban commons (squares, gardens, schools, cultural commons, streets, etc.) and compels local governments to collaborate with citizens. Participants propose the generation of platforms to exchange existing knowledge and experiences in legal mechanisms, as well as the production of practical tools to be used at European and local levels in relation with legislation, norms and institutional interaction.

Right to the City (Public Space and Urbanism, Housing, Water & Energy)

This theme brings together different aspects of the configuration of the city: Public Spaces & Urbanism, Housing, Tourism, Water & Energy and Culture. Understanding the Right to the City as a collective and bottom-up creation of a new paradigm can help to provide an alternative framework to re-think cities and human settlements on the basis of social justice, equity, democracy and sustainability. The workshop will discuss processes of commercialization and privatization of public and common goods and resources; how commons can create forms of democratic urban management; and how re-municipalization processes of urban infrastructures can be linked to the commons discourse. It will also consider the policy frameworks for commons that can be implemented, how spaces can be collectively used for the common good and what kind of legal and economic frameworks are needed to stabilize communing practices.

There is a great diversity of experiences and interests within the group. Proposals include trans-local collaboration to develop perspectives on: urban rights, cultural ecosystems for integration within the city, commons-based housing plans, fighting gentrification and damaging tourism, among others. There is emphasis on sharing examples and tools and promoting the connection of practitioners, researches, professionals, and citizens with project initiators and grassroots actors. Participants draw from experiences including the redevelopment of brownfields and vacant properties, the creation of political platforms and public campaigning and engagement, and construction of community gardens and other spaces as learning environments for communing. Given the wide range of interests and backgrounds, for this theme we can also imagine a mix of general discussions and more specific working spaces, to be decided by the participants themselves, either in organizational process before the meeting or in situ.

Solidarity as a commons: Migrants and Refugees

In many countries, migrants and refugees are confronted by very repressive policies, and in some cases violence. In certain places, citizens are responding by getting involved in local activities to distribute food, clothes and other commodities, to provide information about asylum procedures or how to meet basic needs and human rights, to facilitate the inclusion of migrants or refugees in cities and cohabitation between people in neighborhoods, etc. At a time when policies about immigration and refugees in most European countries are inadequate and troubling, these mobilizations are extremely important and sharing experiences is key.

The purpose of this workshop is twofold. First, it aims to share experiences and knowledge about local citizen-developed initiatives to help migrants and refugees across Europe. In addition, the workshop will be an opportunity to discuss solidarity with migrants and refugees as a commons. Themes to discuss include: the effects on policies and policy makers of the production of solidarity by citizens, the modalities of governance among civil society organizations around their initiatives, and the forms of interactions with municipalities around the initiatives of civil society actors.

Participants have experience in local initiatives of solidarity and hospitality with migrants and refugees; are engaged in research and activism on urban commons focusing on migrant rights; or are involved in initiatives like ecovillage movements, commons support for artists at risk, or community social centers that work to develop new forms of participative work and cooperation to build solidarity.

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Reality is a bit more complex…

To prove that the sharing movement is alive and thriving, our dear friends from Shareable have been working on a very ambitious project: a collection of the most exciting and innovative cases of sharing and urban commons now underway around the world. With 137 case studies drawn from 80 cities in 35 countries focusing on housing, mobility, food, work, energy, land, waste, water, technology, finance and governance, the Sharing Cities movement is showing that local solutions can really tackle global problems.

Tom Llewellyn, Coordinator of the Sharing Cities Network, spoke to us about how these initiatives are paving the way to a better future.

Let’s start with the basics: how do you define a sharing city?  Is there a framework or methodology?

We set forth a series of 10 principles, rather than a specific framework or definition of what makes a sharing city. We feel that the idea of the sharing city is aspirational, meaning it is a process more than a finish line. In that sense, while there are a number of cities that have declared themselves to be sharing cities, there isn’t a single one that is all the way there yet.

Solidarity would be the first principle we feel a sharing city should work to meet. The idea is for people within the city to work together for the common good rather than competing for scarce resources. The sharing city is of, by and for all people, no matter their race, class, gender, sexual orientation or ability. At a core, these cities are primarily civic, meaning residents would be focused on taking care of each other as well as partner cities, creating a cross-city solidarity.

In your experience, is activating the urban commons more successful when done by grassroots organizations or by local governments?

This intersection was painted in honour of a grandmother who had planted a chestnut tree that died soon after she passed away. The neighbourhood gathers every year to commemorate the tree and reinvigorate the painting.

It takes both. The main idea of the commons, in general, is that for them to be successful it takes a community behind it – to manage that resource – and a certain amount of support from the government to make sure that resources can be managed in a sustainable fashion.

There is also a need to partner with the market forces. There are some great examples of that cooperation, one coming from Portland, Oregon called The City Repair Project. The community there wanted to rethink how to use the commonly held properties. They started by painting murals in the middle of intersections. It was done initially after a couple of children were run over in a neighbourhood, so residents came together to make sure it never happened again. They had a block party and painted the intersection with a mural as a memorial.

Initially, the city pushed back and they destroyed it. This caused a huge outrage in the city by the residents, not only those involved in the project. The government ended up legitimising the policy and allowing residents to paint their streets. Over time, some of the people involved in this project moved into the government, and are now able to help maintain the practice.

There are now more than 70 intersections painted with murals, many with benches on the corners, open libraries, etc. What is incredible is having the community driving it, the city supporting it by giving the permits for no cost at all as well as businesses involved. A number of local hardware stores have sponsored the projects, providing the paint and other resources. This is a great example of the relationships that can form around the commons and the balance between the community, the government and the market.

Have you noticed any interesting trends in the movement? Are some themes more popular, more successful, harder to implement, etc?

Yes! Food is the easiest place to start. Food is historically something that brings people together, be it community gardens or networks of food distribution, these policies are definitely amongst the most popularly adopted.

GrowNYC’s garden program builds and sustains community gardens, urban farms, school gardens, and rainwater harvesting systems across New York City.

A great example is the Grow NYC project. It started as a community that had an empty lot in their neighbourhood. They found out that it was owned by the city, so they worked with the local government and were able to turn it into a community garden. Through their research, they discovered there are 596 acres owned by the city. Some were held back for real estate development but a lot of them didn’t have plans in the near future. Now around 200 of those acres have been transformed into community spaces in less than 10 years. So it was the desire to come together around food that enabled the transformation of all those properties.

On the other hand, the hardest policies to implement are in areas where there is a history of ingrained institutions with a lot of power. The technology sphere is the best example, most notably internet service providers. In the US the market is dominated by three companies, so the entry barriers are immensely high. Yet there are also a number of projects trying to work their way, like FreiFunk in Germany where people have been able to set-up local community-driven internet networks. So even when businesses have a lot of control, there are ways to take a little bit of that back.

Many initiatives that work well in a city, sometimes cannot be scaled and should not be reproduced elsewhere, as the conditions that made it succeed cannot be easily replicated.  How can policy-makers and entrepreneurs better adopt the core learnings of the case studies presented?

This question is one that we reflected a lot when we were writing the book. We decided not to include cases that were hard to replicate in other cities or examples that only made sense in a particular context. The idea was that every single example is either commons-based or is enabling the participation of the community. And as proof, most of the things we chose have already been replicated.

What is the biggest myth or utopian dream that has been proven real by the projects you explored?

Our goal was to show what can actually be achieved; what we refer to as a concrete utopia, or that it pushes for that. Maybe the ideal sharing city does not exist anywhere right now, but the building blocks for that city exist; they are just all over the world. I believe proving that there are amazing projects in a variety of sectors across the world, breaks down the unachievable utopian critique.

Student Jordi PronkFoto tomada por: 19

Humanitas, the very first case study is a wonderful example.This Netherlands-based project has proven how intergenerational living works. This is an elder-care residence that also provides housing to students and young people. The exchange for living there is 30 hours of their time per month, engaging with the elderly community. The project has been so successful they have set up in multiple locations. This is a very encouraging concept when we think of the baby-boom generation globally ageing along with the housing-crisis the millennial generation is going through. This is a model for institutions to copy or for individuals to replicate.

Another great example of things that were thought impossible but are actually possible would be the Community Bill of Rights in the US. It allows a city or a county to draft civil laws that guarantee certain community rights, including the right to clean air, water, the protection of natural ecosystems, etc.

Now when a community passes a law (there have been over 200 so far) it can ban certain extractive businesses because they go against that community bill of rights. The best example is fracking. Many states have passed legislation to bypass local governments, so businesses were able to come in and destroy the local ecosystem. Up to this point, there hadn’t been any way for cities and communities to fight back. Now if companies want to frack they have to unequivocally prove that their activity isn’t going to hurt the environment.  And this was completely driven by the community, and a big number of organisations, most notably The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF). It is incredibly encouraging that out of the 200 cases, only four were taken to court, the rest have been unchallenged.

What are your favourite three case studies in the book and why?

The first one is rooted in France and is the re-municipalisation of water. Back in the early 1990’s, originating in France and then becoming a standard global practice, large multi-national corporations started privatising regional water systems. Veolia, Suez and others began buying water rights all over the world claiming they could provide cheaper services. Over time it became clear that the companies were not actually delivering a superior product, on the contrary, the quality had significantly decreased as they were not investing enough in the infrastructure. Hundreds of cities and regions handed over their water to a very few number of international corporations.

What is really encouraging – and why is one of my favourite policies in the book – is that since 2000 this trend has completely flipped. Between 2000 and 2015, 235 cities have taken back their water. The most notable example is Paris. In 2008 the city council voted against renewing the contract it had with Suez and Veolia and spent the next two years putting in place their management system. By 2010, the first year it operated the city saved 35 million euros and reduced by 8% the cost for the population.

Another one of my favourites, which is very simple and OuiShare actually pioneered, is the idea of the “zero waste party pack”. Cities have started to take this on as well. The city of Palo Alto, California, for example, has now 22 party-packs distributed throughout the city.

And finally, I would say Spacehive, a civic crowdfunding initiative in the UK. In their first five years, they have raised 6.7 million pounds for 306 projects, and many of these projects have been getting support directly from the Mayor of London. His office has pledged 800,000 pounds towards these community-proposed projects. It was basically a pound for pound match against the 900,000 pounds that had been raised. So citizen proposals getting support and being enabled by the local government works. Most of the times we hear about the public-private partnerships, and I see this as a public-commons partnership.

In need of more inspiration? Read about the rest of projects and city-policies described in the book!

The post Concrete examples for utopian ideals: how the Sharing Cities movement is paving the way appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Extracted from: https://www.facebook.com/RefugeesWelcomeGR/posts/1731879673741900

The phone line of the cooperative call service ‘Refugees to Refugees (R2R) Solidarity Call Center’ has begun to operate!

For three months now, refugees and people from the solidarity movement have been working cooperatively together, through open and democratic processes, in order to create a cooperative initiative that will provide information about transit, stay, or settlement in Greece, from refugees to refugees.

Thanks to the support of the hackborders team, the asterisk operator was recently set up and therefore the phone line for the call center is now ready!

This action will be an important milestone, because it is being developed by refugees themselves who speak the same language and have been through the same difficult experiences in transit. We hope that this can bring a level of trust and sincere collaboration among the people who contact and the people who work at Refugees 2 Refugees Solidarity Call Center.

We want to coordinate and interact with numerous individuals and collective initiatives throughout Greece and abroad, to strengthen solidarity with refugees and migrants and to be able to respond to all the common struggles together. With the current situation that refugees are encountering where they are, both in refugee camps and outside, we as a Call Center project can help to strengthen cooperation and communication among people living in concentration and in isolation, away from the cities, the solidarity movement and each other, with limited access to vital information about the common struggles and related latest news.

This cooperative project is one of the initiatives that FairCoop Thessaloniki is supporting for building a fair economy ecosystem. Our vision and objective is the creation and networking of a truly fair and participatory economy from below, open to all the people without discrimination, building bridges between the refugees’ solidarity movement and the alternative economy movement, with experiences like the Refugees 2 Refugees Solidarity Call Center.

The funds for the economic sustainability of the project, as well as for the equal distribution among the refugees working in this cooperative initiative, are coming from an international crowdfunding campaign for a collective fund that was created for the development of cooperative refugee initiatives, the Refugees Fund.”

Extracted from: https://coopfunding.net/en/campaigns/refugees-fund-faircoop/

Almost 3,000 people have lost their lives so far this year trying to reach safety in Europe. EU leaders cannot ignore this or turn their backs on its tragic consequences. After months of prevarication they still have not established a coordinated emergency response and have failed to fundamentally overhaul the failing asylum system. Now is the time for self-organized civil society to use direct action, and to directly support those in need. There is an urgent need for the provision of adequate and humane conditions for those arriving and to really help them to organize their lives for the long term in the new host countries.

REFUGEE FUND CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN.

Global governments, and especially the European Union, have shown their worst side with the events of recent times. Economic Rescue is being exchanged for popular sovereignty. Neoliberal control, wage and pension cuts, tax increases, layoffs and all kinds of privatization.

And governments, rather than give in to demands for democracy from citizens, use brutality to end their resistance. These are policies that sacrifice the interests of the majority to benefit the interests of a tiny minority.

Together with the sovereign and austerity crisis, we cannot forget the refugee crisis.

Almost 3,000 people have lost their lives so far this year trying to reach safety in Europe. EU leaders cannot ignore this or turn their backs on its tragic consequences. After months of prevarication they still have not established a coordinated emergency response and have failed to fundamentally overhaul the failing asylum system. Now is the time for self-organized civil society to use direct action, and to directly support those in need. There is an urgent need for the provision of adequate and humane conditions for those arriving and to really help them to organize their lives for the long term in the new host countries.

A new Faircoin fund for refugees.

This fund will focus on helping autonomous and self-managed projects involving refugees and solving their need to retain full control over the decisions made in their lives. For example new settlements, and the creation of productive and holistic initiatives with which they can fulfill their material and immaterial needs on a daily basis, while offering something useful to the society in which they find themselves.

Cooperative working initiatives can also be included, giving the newcomers an opportunity to become self-employed, beyond the control of states over their right to work. And of course grassroots solidarity movements who work on an open and participative basis can apply for their costs to be covered.

This proposal is also intended for those who have undergone forced displacement for economic and environmental reasons, and includes stateless people who are in the difficult situation of having no rights because of the behavior of their countries of origin or third countries that don’t recognize them as citizens.

The goal of this proposal is to get at least 500,000 Faircoins (the minimum amount to create a fund in FairCoop) towards the needs of refugees today in the world.

For this campaign you can pay with any currency, and the money received will be converted to Faircoin in order to be added to the fund.

Also you can yourself buy Faircoin (for example FairCoop offers https://getfaircoin.net) and so make your contribution in Faircoin.

Photos by Maliakos Nikos

Photo by United Nations Development Programme

The post Project Of The Day: Refugees to Refugees Solidarity Call Center appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Degrowth in Movements: Strengthening Alternatives and Overcoming Growth, Competition and Profit

About the authors and their positions

We write this text as editors and coordinators of the project Degrowth in Movement(s) with Dennis Eversberg. We see ourselves as part of the degrowth movement in Germany and Europe.

Corinna Burkhart first discovered degrowth during her studies through an internship at Research & Degrowth and has been working for Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie¹ since 2014. Dennis Eversberg is a sociologist and scientific collaborator at the DFG-funded Research Group on Post-Growth Societies at the University of Jena, where he studies the social composition, motivations and practices within the degrowth movement. Matthias Schmelzer is an economic historian and activist who works as a scientific collaborator at the University of Zürich and as a freelance collaborator at Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie. Nina Treu cofounded Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie in 2011 in Leipzig and has been carrying out work related to degrowth since 2014.

This text only answers questions 1 and 2 of the project. Questions 3, 4 and 5 are planned to be answered in autumn 2016 after a collective evaluation process with the authors in order to complete the general goal of the project.
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1. What is the key idea of Degrowth?

Overcoming growth, competition and profit – for a social-ecological and globally fair economy and way of life

The guiding economic and social principle of ‘higher, further, faster’ forces us into a social order of permanent competition in all areas of life. On the one hand, this leads to imperatives of social acceleration that overwhelm and exclude a great many people. On the other hand, this obsession with economic maximization is destroying the natural basis of human life and the ecosystems of plants and animals.

Degrowth represents a transformative path towards forms of economic activity and social (self-)organization centred on the welfare of all human beings and the preservation of the ecological basis of life. This requires both a fundamentally different way of interacting with each other on a daily basis as well as a profound cultural transformation, and the overcoming of capitalist ways of production with their imperatives of competition, growth and profit. Degrowth is not a finished model or plan that can be designed and then implemented —it is far more about re-politicizing the main aspects of our lives and economies in order to jointly conceive, test and fight for alternatives. The common values of this transformation are awareness, solidarity and cooperation. The goal: a life of dignity and self-determination for all human beings. And to make this possible, it is necessary to develop social practices and concepts in which humans see themselves as part of the planetary ecosystem and live accordingly.

A poster which is part of the game and education method “Game of good life”. (Image: Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie)

Degrowth is a movement explicitly focused on the highly industrialised countries of the Global North, even though social movements from the Global South are important allies and partners —for example, those discussions shaped by indigenous traditions such as buen vivir, post-extractivism and the grassroots ecological movements of the poor. Rich countries must reduce their consumption of raw materials, resources and land, as well as their emissions and waste production, to a level that is sustainable in the long run and that allows the countries in the South to have equal access to development opportunities.

Alternatives envisioned by the degrowth movement

The following concepts for an alternative society are central to the degrowth movement:

• A focus on a good life for all and therefore on the satisfaction of concrete human needs. This includes concepts such as slowness, ‘time prosperity’² and conviviality, in other words, quality in human relationships and the greatest possible freedom from all forms of domination.
• An emphasis on the changeability of social orders and an orientation towards sufficiency — instead of a fixation on technological novelties and increased efficiency— as strategies for solving ecological problems. From the point of view of degrowth, the idea that it is possible to completely decouple economic growth from the use of resources has been refuted by history and is technologically and politically unrealistic. This makes it necessary to search for alternatives beyond the concepts of ecological modernization and green growth.
• A truly collective political process to decide what products and services there should be more of and —especially— what there should be less of in the future. From the degrowth perspective, areas which could be dismantled are e.g. the fossil-fuel and industrial sectors, the military, the arms industry and the advertising sector, and individual and air transport. Areas that could be expanded, on the other hand are e.g. social and collective infrastructures, an ecological circular economy, decentralised and renewable energy sources existing as commons, care work, education and a solidarity economy.
• A redistribution of income and wealth on a national and global level, and a transformation of social security systems. In addition to an unconditional basic income —not only as money, but also in the form of social infrastructure— many are demanding a maximum wage.
• A focus on the reproduction of life, where the production and processing of goods is subordinate to human welfare, instead of the other way around. A potential first step in this sense would be a radical reduction in wage labour for all.
• Freedom from the one-sided Western development paradigm, in order to enable a self-determined shaping of society and a good life in the Global South.
• An expansion of democratic forms of decision-making in all areas, including the economy, in order to enable true political participation. Testing and practising of grassroots and consensus-oriented processes are fundamental to the movement.
• Regionally-based, but also open and interconnected economic circles. Because international trade deepens social divisions and prevents ecological sustainability, it is necessary to move towards a deglobalization of economic relations. However, degrowth does not stand for cultural isolation, homogenous ‘bioregions’, or economic protectionism for the sake of competitiveness, but for open forms of democratic relocalisation.

All these elements share the central idea that changes towards a socially just and ecologically sustainable society and economy at a global level are only possible through a combination of different strategies: In this sense, science and research are just as important as activism and practical projects that seek to provide alternatives in the here and now.

Degrowth is also far more than just a criticism of economic growth —it is about creating the conditions for a good life for everybody. Thus, conservative, racist-nationalist and sexist currents of thought that also criticise growth go against the essence of degrowth and its fundamental orientation towards a good life and equal rights and freedoms for all human beings worldwide; there is no place for them in degrowth.

The full courtyard of the University of Leipzig during the Degrowth Conference 2014. (Image: CC-BY-SA, Eva Mahnke)

A brief history of the degrowth movement

Now an international movement, the beginnings of degrowth can be found in France in the early 2000s. However, the concept of economic growth has been the subject of criticism for almost as long as it has existed. Since the 1970s, both the widely-read study, The Limits of Growth (1972), and the work of a wide range of intellectuals and economists such as André Gorz, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen or Claudia von Werlhof have contributed significantly to the development of this current of thought.

In 2002, the publication in France of a special edition of the magazine Silence on the subject of décroissance (French for ‘degrowth’) sparked a new wave of debate surrounding the criticism of growth; and the first International Conference on Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity took place in Paris in 2008. During the conference the English word ‘degrowth’ was used, leading to its subsequent adoption in the international scientific debate. After this, international conferences on degrowth took place in Barcelona in 2010, in Venice in 2012 and in Leipzig in 2014. Since the first conference in 2008, the number of attendees has risen continuously and has included scientists from a wide range of areas as well as activists and practitioners. The conferences are a meeting point and a place of debate, learning and networking for the degrowth movement; and at the same time, they provide it with greater public attention. So far, the most important events for the degrowth movement in the German-speaking countries have been the degrowth conference in Leipzig in 2014 with more than 3000 participants, the Beyond Growth?! congress in Berlin in 2011 organised by Attac, and the recently created Degrowth Summer School, which took place for the second time in 2016 at the Climate Camp in the German Rhineland.³
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Critical self-reflection as a path to anti-capitalism: socially homogenous, but diverse in its contents – and critical of capitalism

The degrowth movement in Germany is highly decentralised, and has neither a formal network nor an organizing centre. Rather it is composed of a great diversity of individual and collective actors.

There are, firstly, certain organizations that work directly in the context of the degrowth movement, for example the Netzwerk Wachstumswende together with the Förderverein Wachstumswende⁴ , or the Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie, which maintains the German degrowth web portal and initiates and supports projects listed there. Since the Beyond Growth?! congress in Berlin in 2011, there has also been an Attac working group with the same name that is active throughout Germany —and some local Attac groups work on the subject as well. In addition to these relatively large or well-known groups and institutions, there are also many smaller, generally local, actors working in the area of growth criticism and alternatives to growth. This has become especially apparent thanks to the positive response to the degrowth conference in Leipzig in 2014 and the wide range of events it hosted. Furthermore, a variety of individuals or departments in other large organizations not solely focused on degrowth, such as political foundations and environmental organizations, also contribute actively to the degrowth debate through events, participation in discussions, or publications. Finally, many ecologically-oriented economists also study the subject of degrowth, particularly in the context of the Vereinigung für ökologische Ökonomie (VÖÖ) (German Society for Ecological Economics) and the Vereinigung für ökologische Wirtschaftsforschung (VÖW) (German Association for Ecological Economic Research). Last but not least, the Institut für ökologische Wirtschaftsforschung (IÖW) (Institute for Ecological Economy Research) maintains the blog www.postwachstum.de, and since 2008 the University of Oldenburg has regularly hosted lecture series on the post-growth economy.

On the whole, the greatest amount of progress in the degrowth movement has been achieved thanks to the large, grassroots organizational teams involved in the international degrowth conference 2014 in Leipzig and the Degrowth Summer Schools in 2015 and 2016 in the lignite-mining region of the German Rhineland.

Degrowth in Europe

In addition to the above actors in the German degrowth movement, there has also been a growing degrowth movement in other regions, especially Southern Europe. For example, the international conferences started in Paris in 2008 were then continued by the group Research & Degrowth (R&D), which is active in Spain and France. R&D works mainly in the area of science, is especially active in Barcelona and surroundings, and seeks to promote the dissemination of degrowth ideas in the academic world. In France, the movement mainly revolves around the periodicals Silence and La Décroissance; as well as the Parti pour la Décroissance (‘Party for Degrowth’), which in addition to its political activities is also active in the dissemination of information. In Italy, the group Rete per la decrescita (‘Network for Degrowth’) conducts scientific research, whereas the Movimento per la Decrescita Felice (‘Movement for Happy Degrowth’), strongly rooted in local groups, promotes the idea of voluntary simplicity and seeks to provide an example of an alternative, ‘good practice’. Eastern European groups working for degrowth have received increased attention and acquired momentum thanks to the degrowth conference in autumn 2016 in Budapest. Furthermore, there is an ever-increasing range of research in addition to small-scale practical projects in various European countries (e.g. Can Decreix⁵ in France) related to a greater or lesser degree to degrowth.

Alliances and cooperation

In addition to the groups directly carrying out growth-critical work, there are, both in Germany and in other regions of the global north, close ties with and within the alternative economies scene: commons, solidarity economies, transition towns, common good economies, sharing economies, plural economies, common gardens, free and swap shops, etc. — and often the borders between these movements and degrowth are not necessarily clear-cut. There are also noteworthy instances of cooperation with scientific institutes, development aid organizations and political foundations, and individual representatives of political parties.

Publishing and practicing

Degrowth is, on the one hand, a proposal for profound societal transformation; and in this sense, much of the work focuses on firing up social and academic debate through publications⁶ , websites, events and conferences. On the other hand, degrowth is also the common element of a great many hands-on projects, where it manifests itself through concrete political and everyday practices. Thus, the large degrowth events are organised by grassroots organizational teams —the food is regional, organic and vegan and is prepared collectively, and financing comes exclusively from politically compatible organizations. Typical practices in degrowth circles are, for example: mobility that is as ecological as possible, cooperation with vegetable co-ops, living in common housing spaces or other alternative forms of living, and participation in direct actions.

 

The general consensus in the German degrowth movement

A survey carried out with participants at the degrowth conference in Leipzig in 2014 provides information on the ideas and ideals of those individuals that are practically active within the degrowth spectrum.⁷ The study shows that the people active in the degrowth scene are mainly from student, academic and urban middle-class circles; the majority are between 20 and 35 years old; most are white; and many of the younger individuals become politicised through degrowth. Irrespective of any other possible differences between them, the people that see themselves as part of the degrowth movement share a common, growth-critical vision. This vision can be summarised in general terms as follows:

Growth without environmental destruction is an illusion. Therefore, economic shrinkage in the industrialized countries will be inevitable. This includes that we will have to abstain from certain amenities we have grown used to. The transformation towards a post-growth society needs to be peaceful and emerge from below; it amounts to overcoming capitalism, and female emancipation must be a central issue in the process

(see Eversberg/Schmelzer 2015).⁸

Currents in the post-growth discourse

At the same time, the growth-critical discourse is characterised by the heterogeneity of its contents. Still attempts to categorise the diverse actors critical of growth are made. In the German post-growth debate, it is possible to distinguish through the texts of certain key figures the conservative current, represented prominently by Meinhard Miegel, the social-reformist current, represented by Angelika Zahrnt, and the sufficiency-oriented current, personified mainly by Niko Paech. In addition, there are also feminist and anti-capitalist currents —although these, unlike the previous cases, revolve less around specific individuals. The differences mainly reflect typical positions found within the post-growth spectrum that can be read about in many books and articles. It is important to note, however, that the post-growth debate cannot be unequivocally equated with degrowth as a discourse and movement. For example, discussions and events in recent years have shown that in particular the conservative current of criticism à la Miegel is not reflected in the younger and more international degrowth scene.

Political and content-related currents in the degrowth movement

Another way of describing the range of contents and internal tensions within the degrowth movement is provided by the aforementioned survey, which reveals five main currents: Sufficiency-oriented Critics of Civilization, the moderate Immanent Reformers, a transitory group of Voluntarist-Pacifist Idealists, the Modernist Rationalist Left and the Alternative Practical Left (for a detailed overview see Eversberg/Schmelzer 2016). This shows the diversity within the degrowth movement with regard to, among other things:

• content and perspective (from a closeness to nature, to techno-optimism, to radical anti-capitalism);
• forms of organization (from large organizations, to alternative projects, to associations of activists);
• political practices (from petitions, to direct action, or even to dropping out of society altogether)
• political backgrounds (from a low level of politicization, to alternative circles, to the classic left-wing).

Demonstration “enough is enough for all” at the end of the Degrowth Conference 2014 in Leipzig. (Image: Klimagerechtigkeit Leipzig)

This breadth of interest provides the degrowth movement with a wide range of potential alliances and many degrowth activists also see themselves as a part of other movements and currents of thought —among others, those represented in the project Degrowth in Movement(s). Degrowth is thus often seen as a common ground or platform; a collective space for both action and debate.
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Literature and links

Degrowth is not only a label for an ongoing discussion on alternatives, and not just an academic debate, but also an emerging social movement. Regardless of many similarities, there is quite some lack of knowledge as well as scepticism, prejudice and misunderstanding about the different perspectives, assumptions, traditions, strategies and protagonists both within degrowth circles as well as within other social movements. Here, space for learning emerges – also to avoid the danger of repeating mistakes and pitfalls of other social movements.

At the same time, degrowth is a perspective or a proposal which is or can become an integral part of other perspectives and social movements. The integration of alternatives, which are discussed under the discursive roof of degrowth, into other perspectives often fails because of the above mentioned scepticisms, prejudices and misunderstandings.

The multi-media project “Degrowth in movement(s)” shows which initiatives and movements develop and practice social, ecological and democratic alternatives. Representatives from 32 different fields describe their work and history, their similarities & differences to others and possible alliances. From the Solidarity Economy to the Refugee-Movement, from Unconditional Basic Income to the Anti-Coal-Movement, from Care Revolution to the Trade Unions – they discuss their relationship to degrowth in texts, videos, photos and podcasts.

The project was run by the “Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie” (Laboratory for New Economic Ideas) in Germany, so most of the authors are from there. However, there are a couple of clearly international perspectives and most of the movements work far beyond the national level.

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