For Layne Hartsell and Emanuel Pastreich, looking at the commons-based models might be worth it in the case of North Korea. According to our South Korean friends, their progressive President, a ‘left-Clintonian’ in their view, is doing a lot for peace and de-nuclearization but the approach is to let loose extractive industry once a peace accord is achieved. Here is a possible alternative approach.

Originally published on atimes.com

Emanuel Pastreich, Layne Hartsell: Could an emergent North Korea provide the world with a new, from-scratch benchmark of sustainable, collaborative economic and social development? With geopolitical change and emerging technologies, the idea of a national “commons” now looks increasingly feasible.

Relations between North and South Korea are changing so rapidly, the pressing question is no longer what the next step in this process of reconciliation will be, but rather where the peninsula is heading in the political, economic and cultural senses.

A door is opening for the institutional transformation of the “Hermit Kingdom” with new concepts and technologies. The implementation of new approaches to government and the building of new infrastructure could make North Korea an inspiring experiment that other nations can model.

However, amid promising developments on the Korean Peninsula, media report that multinationals are planning to establish an extractive economy that will generate quick wealth from the exploitation of North Korea’s rich mineral resources and cheap labor.

The profits will not benefit impoverished North Koreans, but rather international investors. This suggests that Wall Street, or its Japanese or Chinese equivalents, will develop North Korea’s economy according to the blueprint offered by postwar Iraq.

But North Korea does not have to choose between following the backward economic policies of North Korea’s Labor Party, which have produced stagnation and poverty, nor must it embrace a consumption-based neoliberal “development” policy run by global investment banks and the consulting firms that they fund.

There is an alternative: a third way for North Korea to leapfrog dirty and exploitative “growth” but still reach sustainable economic and political success.

Embracing the 21^st-century commons

This “third way” for North Korea is a collaborative economy and society. This means embrace of the emerging global commons in education, politics, manufacturing and economics made possible by P2P (peer-to-peer) systems and commons-oriented production (for example Linux, Wikipedia). Because North Korea is in essence starting from scratch, it can adopt the Internet of Verification (such as blockchain and holochain) in a more comprehensive manner than has been done elsewhere.

Such economic innovations will be shared and participatory, in the sense that socialist economies were, but the decision-making process will be distributed throughout society so as to avoid authoritarian politics, and thereby empower communities to set priorities.

This approach will allow North Korea to benefit from the advantages of internationalization without allowing international finance to dictate what North Korea will become. Concrete proposals for such a sharing economy that are viable alternatives to exploitative and extractive market economies have been made by the P2P Foundation in Amsterdam and the Commons Foundation in Seoul.

North Korea can empower its people by integrating them into the global P2P economy that links individuals with their peers in South Korea and around the world, so that they can realize their full potential through commons-based micro-manufacturing controlled by neither the state nor by Wall Street. Rather than being exploited for cheap labor, or cheap mineral resources, North Korea can develop a model for positive globalization powered by people, not by capital.

Pre-modern Korea provides an example of the kind of fundamental conceptual shift required. The Japanese colonial strategy of 1910-45 demolished the shared communities of mutual support that once thrived in Korean villages, by means of the Japanese equivalent of enclosure acts that deprived most Koreans of their land and traditional means of production.

Choi Yong-gwan, founder of the Commons Foundation, explains how the commons is no new idea in Korea. “The village contracts (hyanghak) … defined roles in the community, but did not assign absolute ownership. Those village contracts were destroyed during the Japanese colonial period. The deepening inequality born of inhuman competition and the resulting concentration of wealth started then.”

The commons could provide a model for how wealthy nations can work with those less developed in a constructive, non-exploitative manner by creating shared economies focused on citizens. Moreover, because a commons economy is not about foreign investment or about exploiting labor, it does not fit into the standard models of economic interaction described in the current United Nations sanctions against North Korea. It therefore offers a realistic window of hope.

Although Western media portray North Korea as a bizarre, isolated and mysterious nation, recent negotiations with South Korea have revealed that it is like other developing nations struggling to find a place in a ruthless globalized order dominated by financial institutions. The innovations the authors of this article are proposing do not consist of a particular technology, but rather of an open platform that gives North Korea access to knowledge, to technology, to expertise and to financial resources from around the world that will permit it to make an economic transition without falling under the domination of oligarchs.

Commons 101: What to do

North Korea has little modern technology – but also has little of the commercialism or the consumer fetishism that have ripped apart the cultures of other nations. It therefore offers unprecedented opportunities for institutional innovation of which other counties are not capable, precisely because North Korea’s start point is zero.

North Korea could require that all buildings employ solar power; that manufacturing allow for open-source innovations at the local level; that services be shared between families without a middleman; and that local governments be allowed to develop ties with other local governments in other countries for education and social exchange.

North Korea could establish innovative financial systems that nourish local cooperatives employing cryptocurrencies and crowd funding as means to build local economic autonomy while also allowing foreign investment in the form of crowd funding, or micro-investments by supporters around the world.

North Korea could put together a shared economy wherein everything, from vacuum cleaners and saws, to washing machines and solar power generators, is held together in trust for the community. It could set up programs for the barter of services (from caring for children or the elderly to cleaning and cooking) that recognize contributions of all citizens. It could pair elderly people with young people, and farmers with city dwellers, to create new cultural and economic synergies.

North Korea lacks quality highways and related dependencies on automobiles. Therefore, cities with shared transportation, all-electric transportation, or even urban planning that eliminates the need for automobiles are possible in North Korea.

The adoption of a commons – of a shared economy rooted in regional agriculture and micro-manufacturing – is essential to reduce the unsustainable overproduction that plagues East Asia today and which not only promotes waste and economic disparity, but is also a major factor behind military conflicts.

North Korea’s opening could present a priceless opportunity to establish a healthy model of P2P internationalization.

Commons 101: How to do it

South Korea should play a major role, not only because it shares a common language, but also because it has established powerful precedents for a P2P economy.

South Koreans have displayed tremendous enthusiasm for participatory politics, culminating in the “Candlelight Revolution” of 2016 that brought millions of citizens together to demand an end to corrupt politics.

Seoul launched a program to create local villages across the city four years ago that provides a powerful platform for a sharing economy. And the city has recently committed US$54 million to establish blockchain systems throughout Seoul and to train a new generation of experts to use them effectively.

North Korea needs a P2P advisory committee that focuses on the ethical implications of economic and technological change, not on short-term profits. South Koreans can play this role, but it will also be important to obtain advice from around the world about how to avoid the traps emerging economies fall into.

North Korea has extensive deposits of coal, uranium, iron, gold, zinc and rare-earth minerals worth around $6 trillion, according to South Korean mining company Korea Resources. One of the first recommendations of the P2P advisory committee might be a freeze on the exploitation of subsurface resources until Pyongyang possesses sufficient expertise to assess the long-term environmental impact of such efforts.

The vetting of all proposals for the mining of resources; for the building of transportation infrastructure; and for the development of urban spaces by a P2P network of experts could be important first steps.

North Korea must avoid getting into heavy debt during the first stage of its opening. The committee could help it craft policies that ensure short-term returns for investors are not a factor in planning, while also assuring that there is no risk of capital flight. To prevent a situation in North Korea similar to the rise of oligarchs after the fall of the Soviet Union, people should be empowered to form community banks and create participatory financing mechanisms.

North Korea does not have to be a mysterious, closed, inscrutable remnant of the Cold War that must “catch up” with the “advanced” industrialized world. Rather, North Korea can be an inspiring experiment – a space wherein blockchain technologies, micro-manufacturing, a sustainable energy infrastructure and a P2P approach to internationalization ushers in a new era for itself, for Northeast Asia – and for the world.

Emanuel Pastreich is president of the Asia Institute (asia-institute.org), a think-tank that addresses challenges including climate change, the impact of technological change on society, and rapid shifts in international relations. He has written about the environment, technology, globalization, international relations and business in Asia for various journals, and has authored two books in English, five in Korean and one in Chinese.

This article was co-authored with Layne Hartsell, a fellow at the P2P Foundation who focuses on the philosophy of ethics and technology. He is also the director of the Technology Convergence and 3E (energy, environment and economy) Program at the Asia Institute in Seoul.

Photo by Clay Gilliland

The post North Korea and ‘The Commons’: Blank slate for a new kind of nation? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A series of Collaboration Incubator workshops are being put out into the world to gather like-minded people to combine forces for building global grassroots democracy. I am Philine Krosse, a ‘transformation architect’ from the Netherlands, who was following links one morning and stumbled upon the website of Vanilla Way.

Without a second thought, I enrolled for the Berlin workshop from 5 to 7 October 2018.

I felt I needed something of a different order to grow further’

Yet after enrolling, I thought, why would I want to contribute to this movement? Why did I feel so strongly that this movement was something through that I could develop myself further. Also, I have never considered helping building a global democracy? For many years, I had been pondering, searching and diving into the deep of the big questions. I learned a lot from different people, literature and by designing and developing initiatives for communal healing and transformation to make collective sustainable development possible. Since a while, I felt I needed something of a different order to grow further and improve my work.

I had an inspiring talk with Manuela Bosch, one of the initiators of the Collaboration Incubator  about the intentions and drive that lead to this program. She explained to me, that this program isn’t about building a global institution. It is about finding creative and innovative ways to address local issues that impact us all globally – issues that cross borders and therefore can’t be resolved solely by one institution, one country or the existing global institutional governing bodies.

What if everything we ever tried were only prototypes of democracy? What if we don’t actually know how real democracy could look like? This thinking by Otto Scharmer (Theory U) inspired the tagline of the Collaboration Incubator: “Momentum building for global democracy”.  Within the Incubators, different existing local initiatives and movements are called to work on a vision and potentially also projects for a democratic society across boarders. Boarders not only in a geographical sense, but also in sense of sector, culture, class and any paradigm.

the required solutions are already existing, but there is a lack of cohesive effort

Participants of the Incubator in Berlin in May 2018 are putting their names up on the collaborative projects they want to support.

Facilitated through social technologies like Dragon Dreaming, Evolutionary Work and Social Presencing Theater, we are learning to maximize the knowledge, tools and resources that are available, to connect with others and organize change.  This is particularly powerful when combined with the increasing awareness of the importance of a more conscious lifestyle whether on an individual, community or organizational scale.  Our assumption is, that the required solutions are already existing, but there is a lack of cohesive effort that can only come from stepping out of our comfort zones for interdisciplinary organizing. This is what the people from the Vanilla Way network believe they can help to facilitate: connecting people with shared intentions and addressing issues that can’t be coordinated from top down with tools made for collaborative grassroots organizing.

we can only be as global as the reach of the network is

Enlarging the pool of diversity among the participants is one of the highest goals and greatest challenges.  Diversity comes for example by bringing people together from different socio-economic-religious-political backgrounds, but also from the wealth of experience an individual brings from their work and field of interest. The diversity topic is challenging, since first: we can only be as global as the reach of the network is; secondly: Diversity is dependent on our financial resources, too – this is why we i.e look for patrons for one-on-one scholarships and other ways of independent funding; and thirdly: Levering diversity depends more than ever on our own leadership capacity to deal with race, gender and inclusivity topics.

Through her work as trainer for the collaborative project design framework Dragon Dreaming, Manuela experienced that workshop participants are connecting fast and deep, but after meeting in a workshop focused on skill learning, it’s difficult to keep collaborating, even though good intentions are there. “There needs to be a reason for people to keep reconnecting. The activists and leaders I am speaking to, seem to have no more time to waste in workshops. At the same time people do want to network, connect on a deeper level and learn. Why not use the combined intelligence of a diverse group of people coming together interested in the collective change processes that are necessary? When we make time to travel and meet over three days, let’s work on the pressing question of what we can do for global issues! Could it be possible to work on a collective dream and also not let it’s realization be left to chance, but intentionally work on it? There is no guarantee to come to conclusion on this over the three days, but it’s worth to try!”

find good ways to use the resources we have wisely, plus all of our creativity

There seems to be an opening now, a commitment to come together and collaborate better. This program is contributing to what is already happening on so many levels and places. And, there is still so much work to do. Many active in organizing societal change feel there is no time to rest! Therefore another main goal of the incubator is about inspiring for self-care, so that we don’t burn out on the way. It is so important to find good ways to use the resources we have wisely, plus all of our creativity, to make sure that our power and energy endures all the way. The way of activism this Incubator supports is meant to be straight forward and honest, yet unexpected and joyful.

In the recent Collaboration Incubator in May 2018 in Berlin the participants learned through a Social Presencing Theater 4D Mapping Report to May 2018 Incubator experiment about the importance of borders. We learned, they are not only separating us. They really help us to collaborate better across our fields and different stakeholders. If we look at borders that exist in the natural world, for example the zone between the river and the forest, this is where the most biodiversity can be found. In permaculture this zone is called ecotone. Also personal relationships provide a classic example. Maybe others experience this, too: When we put too much attention onto another person, trying identifying with them and their actions, we are faster questioning whether we agree with them or not. The possibility of conflict can become greatly increased.

connect with many people, interdisciplinary and diverse, with less resources or effort!

When we focus on the third identity, though, the in-between or intersections that exists between A and B, our collaboration can be more effective, lighter and even deeply strengthen both individuals or fields. We don’t have to agree on everything, yet accept each other as the mutual partners and siblings in a global family, that we are. Each with our own skills, strength and knowledge to work on collective solutions. This way it might become possible to connect with many people, interdisciplinary and divers, with less resources or effort. It is the art of connecting through the heart in seeing and acknowledging each other and at the same time staying focused around our own work, own needs and shared vision.

Beyond envisioning and planning, practicing collaboration by creating a shared piece of tape-art in the Incubator in May 2018 in Berlin.

The program can be called a success, when every participant has been able to take away at least one key learning or key link to a resource crucial for their current work or life. The contribution to global distributed democracy can be a side-effect and will keep building its momentum through continuous commitment of many over time. “If we are going to support the creation of a giant collaborative field, will depend pretty much on the participants and outcomes of the Incubators and especially what will happen between the ongoing workshops. If the Collaboration Incubator is helping unleash the connections between the existing movements, so that they can better recognize their own qualities and give each other direct help, we will move into this direction”, the organizers of the Collaboration Incubator hope.

the wisdom and spirit that is already in our bodies, heads, hearts, souls can come to the surface more easily’

To share the knowledge and keep developing and integrating internet based technology to coordinate our efforts and make our network power visible is important. As an underestimated addition to this I believe in connecting people and their visions on a deeper level face-to-face. The wisdom and spirit that is already in our bodies, heads, hearts, souls will come to the surface more easily. After writing this article I know that this is my motivation and intention to participate.

Lead photo, Celebratory activity during Collaboration Incubator in Berlin in May 2018. All photos, ©Momo-C.Gumz .

The post Collaboration Incubators for Practicing Democracy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This book, in the STEPS Centre’s Pathways to Sustainability series, looks at how six grassroots innovation movements around the world have developed and what challenges they face.

Download the Accepted Manuscript of Chapter 1 (pdf, Open Access)

Innovation is increasingly invoked by policy elites and business leaders as vital for tackling global challenges like sustainable development. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that networks of community groups, activists, and researchers have been innovating grassroots solutions for social justice and environmental sustainability for decades. Unencumbered by disciplinary boundaries, policy silos, or institutional logics, these ‘grassroots innovation movements’ identify issues and questions neglected by formal science, technology and innovation organizations. Grassroots solutions arise in unconventional settings through unusual combinations of people, ideas and tools.

Grassroots Innovation Movements examines six diverse grassroots innovation movements in India, South America and Europe, situating them in their particular dynamic historical contexts. Analysis explains why each movement frames innovation and development differently, resulting in a variety of strategies. The book explores the spaces where each of these movements have grown, or attempted to do so. It critically examines the pathways they have developed for grassroots innovation and the challenges and limitations confronting their approaches.

With mounting pressure for social justice in an increasingly unequal world, policy makers are exploring how to foster more inclusive innovation. In this context grassroots experiences take on added significance. This book provides timely and relevant ideas, analysis and recommendations for activists, policy-makers, students and scholars interested in encounters between innovation, development and social movements.

This book is part of the STEPS Centre’s Pathways to Sustainability book series.

CONTENTS

Part 1: Overview
1. Introduction
2. A Conceptual Framework for Studying GIMs
Part 2: The Cases 
3. Movement for Socially Useful Production
4. Appropriate Technology Movement
5. Peoples’ Science Movements
6. Makerspaces, Hackerspaces and Fablabs
7. Social Technologies Network
8. Honey Bee Network
Part 3: Lessons
9. Grassroots Innovation Movements: Lessons for Theory and Practice
10. Conclusions: Constructing Pathways for Sustainability with the Grassroots

Order the book from Routledge (you can get a 20% discount by using the order code FLR40)

Photo by eoringel

The post Book of the Day: Grassroots Innovation Movements appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is appealing to the liberal mind — it provides an apparent middle ground and removes the need to question the logic of the global economy. We can continue on our current trajectory if we make the “right” reforms and get the “right” kind of technology.

The hope of green growth is embedded everywhere, from the majority of domestic economic plans to major international policy schemes like the Paris Climate Agreement and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. By uncritically supporting these policies, we are unwittingly perpetuating the neoliberal fantasy of infinite growth on a finite planet.

The Logic of “Green Growth”

In some ways, the math is quite simple. We know that the Earth can only safely sustain our consumption at or below 50 billion tons of stuff each year. This includes everything from raw materials to livestock, minerals to metals: everything humans consume. Right now, we’re using about 80 billion tons each year — roughly 60 percent more than the safe limit. In order for growth to be “green,” or at least not life-destroying, we need to get back down to 50 billion tons while continuing to grow GDP.

A team of scientists ran a model showing that, under the current business-as-usual conditions, growth will drive global resource use to a staggering 180 billion tons per year by 2050. That’s more than three times the safe limit. This type of economic growth threatens all life on this planet.

In the hopes of finding more optimistic results, the UN Environment Program conducted its own research last year. The team introduced various optimistic assumptions, including a carbon price of $573 per ton and a material extraction tax, and assumed rapid technological innovation. They found that even with these policies, we will still hit 132 billion tons of consumption per a year by 2050.

In a recent article in Fast Company, Jason Hickel, a leading economic anthropologist, argues that there is no evidence to support green growth hopes. He concludes that although we will need all the strong policies we can get — carbon taxes, resources extraction taxes, more efficient technology, etc. — the only way to bring our economy back in line with our planet’s ecology is to reduce our consumption and production.

This is the core problem that no one wants to address. This is the taboo of Western civilization — the ground zero of values. It is the reason we make up fictions like green growth.

In order to start imagining and achieving real alternatives, we first have to dispose of the false solutions and distractions that pervade the discourse on social change. Right now, it is incumbent on the progressive movement to challenge green growth or any other prophylactic logic that keeps us bound within the ideological concrete of growth as our only option.

Growth as Distributed Fascism

Our global economy is a Ponzi scheme. We have a debt-based economic system that requires growth to exceed interest rates in order for money to be valuable. The World Bank and others tell us that we have to grow the global economy at a minimum of 3 percent per year in order to avoid recession. That means we will double the size of the global economy every 20 years.

For capital holders — rich countries and the rich within countries — this makes complete sense. They disproportionately benefit from the growth system. Growth is the source of their power. It is what keeps them not just rich, but ever-richer — which means ever-more powerful. They are where they are in this system because their interests align with the “Prime Directive” of the system: more capital for its own sake. The reason the people currently in power are in power is because they believe in growth, and because they are good at delivering it. That is the sole qualification for their jobs. Of course, they are not going to be able to see the problems growth causes; they are, by job-definition and personal identity, growth-fanatics.

As for the rest of us, we are tied into this system because growth is the basis for our livelihood, it is the source of our jobs, and our jobs are what allow us to survive in the debt regime.

It’s a tightly woven system that requires our collective complicity. Although we may know that every dollar of wealth created heats up the planet and creates more inequality, we are tied into the system through necessity and a set of values that tells us that selfishness is rational, and indeed, the innately and rightly dominant human behavior we must orient around. We’re coerced into a form of distributed fascism where we as individuals extract more, consume more, destroy more and accumulate more, without ever being able to step back to see the totality of a more holistic worldview.

Post-Growth as Localism

So, what must be done? The first place to start is to challenge the growth dependency of the current operating system. Then we start looking for the antidote logic. Capitalism is characterized by its imposition of monolithic values — the final outcome of the “American Dream” is for everyone to live as consumers in pre-fabricated houses; leveraged by Wells Fargo mortgages; living off Citibank credit cards; wearing Nike shoes; distracted by Facebook, Google and Apple products; drinking Nestle bottled water; and eating Monsanto laboratory foods, while bobbing our heads to Miley Cyrus or Jay-Z.

The antigen to monoculture is polyculture — many ways of being and living. This requires a transition to localism, which is another way of saying ways of life in which we are connected to our environment, so we see and understand the impacts of our consumption. Localism creates contexts in which we can look into the eyes of the people who make our clothes and grow our food, so that our choices can be informed by their impact on human relationships and well-being, not just convenience and a price tag.

This means working to strengthen local communities and create far more self-sufficient economies. Luckily, we have on hand ready guides and knowledge in the Indigenous cultures that have survived longest on this planet, and whose way of organizing and being are in greatest harmony with the biosphere. It means actively opting out of globalized industrialism as much as we can, by creating interdependence through sharing and cooperation, rather than dependence on economic trade and extraction.

At a national level, we could start by ditching GDP as an indicator of success in favor of more holistic measures, like the Genuine Progress Indicator or a Bhutanese style Gross National Happiness, which are built around life-centric, intrinsic values and take account of negative externalities like pollution and resource degradation. We could roll out a new money system that doesn’t necessitate endless growth and debt. And we could put caps on material use, so that we never extract more than the planet can regenerate.

This type of post-growth thinking must become the central organizing principle of society the way “self-determination” was the operating principle of post-World War I society (at least in rhetoric). Localization should be the rallying cry of both nation-states and communities alike who are nimble and brave enough to transcend the shadows of scarcity and self-interest. Localism requires a sensitivity and attunement to local contexts, geographies, histories and cultures. It requires us to contract new types of relationships with each other, with ourselves, with the state, and with Nature itself.

There is no traditional blueprint for these types of economic models. This may seem daunting. But our current trajectory is even more daunting. Unless a politically significant mass of people actively rejects the false god of growth and chooses a different path, our current economic system will crash under its own weight and take most life as we know it with it. As the late British economist David Fleming reminds us, “Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.”

Alnoor Ladha is a co-founder and executive director of The Rules, a global collective of activists, writers, researchers, coders and others focused on addressing the root causes of inequality, poverty and climate change.

Photo by Aimée Wheaton

The post From “Green Growth” to Post-Growth appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“JUSTA is a holistic network that connects indigenous artisans, global designers, and sustainable projects. We connect artisans with self-sustaining development, creative expression, and holistic empowerment within family and community. Our design project, Global Just Designs, connects conscious consumers with original, upcycled, neotribal designs that bridge indigenous tradition with contemporary sustainable style.”

The post Movement of the Day: JUSTA for transparent supply chains appeared first on P2P Foundation.