Radical Realism for Climate Justice. A Civil Society Response to the Challenge of Limiting Global Warming to 1.5°C

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial is feasible, and it is our best hope of achieving environmental and social justice, of containing the impacts of a global crisis that was born out of historical injustice and highly unequal responsibility.

To do so will require a radical shift away from resource-intensive and wasteful production and consumption patterns and a deep transformation towards ecological sustainability and social justice. Demanding this transformation is not ‘naïve’ or ‘politically unfeasible’, it is radically realistic.

This publication is a civil society response to the challenge of limiting global warming to 1.5°C while also paving the way for climate justice. It brings together the knowledge and experience of a range of international groups, networks and organisations the Heinrich Böll Foundation has worked with over the past years, who in their political work, research and practice have developed the radical, social and environmental justice-based agendas political change we need across various sectors.

Radical Realism for Climate Justice includes the following eight volumes:

A Managed Decline of Fossil Fuel Production by Oil Change International shows that the carbon embedded in already producing fossil fuel reserves will take us beyond agreed climate limits. Yet companies and governments continue to invest in and approve vast exploration and expansion of oil, coal and gas. This chapter explores the urgency and opportunity for fossil fuel producers to begin a just and equitable managed decline of fossil fuel production in line with the Paris Agreement goals.

Another Energy is Possible by Sean Sweeney, Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED) argues that the political fight for social ownership and democratic control of energy lies at the heart of the struggle to address climate change. Along with a complete break with investor-focused neoliberal policy, this “two shift solution” will allow us to address some of the major obstacles to reducing energy demand and decarbonizing supply. “Energy democracy” must address the need for system-level transformations that go beyond energy sovereignty and self-determination.

Zero Waste Circular Economy A Systemic Game-Changer to Climate Change by Mariel Vilella, Zero Waste Europe explains and puts numbers to how the transformation of our consumption and production system into a zero waste circular economy provides the potential for emission reductions far beyond what is considered in the waste sector. Ground-breaking experiences in cities and communities around the world are already showing that these solutions can be implemented today, with immediate results.

Degrowth – A Sober Vision of Limiting Warming to 1.5°C by Mladen Domazet, Institute for Political Ecology in Zagreb, Croatia, reports from a precarious, but climate-stabilized year 2100 to show how a planet of over 7 billion people found diversification and flourishing at many levels of natural, individual and community existence, and turned away from the tipping points of catastrophic climate change and ecosystem collapse. That world is brought to life by shedding the myths of the pre-degrowth era – the main myth being that limiting global warming to 1.5°C is viable while maintaining economic activities focused on growth.

System Change on a Deadline. Organizing Lessons from Canada’s Leap Manifesto by The Leap by Avi Lewis, Katie McKenna and Rajiv Sicora of The Leap recounts how intersectional coalitions can create inspiring, detailed pictures of the world we need, and deploy them to shift the goalposts of what is considered politically possible. They draw on the Leap story to explore how coalition-building can break down traditional “issue silos”, which too often restrict the scope and impact of social justice activism.

La Via Campesina in Action for Climate Justice by La Via Campesina in Action for Climate Justice by the international peasants movement La Via Campesina highlights how industrialized agriculture and the corporate food system are at the center of the climate crisis and block pathways to a 1.5°C world. In their contribution, La Via Campesina outline key aspects of system change in agriculture towards peasant agro-ecology and give concrete experiences of organized resistance and alternatives that are already making change happen.

Re-Greening the Earth: Protecting the Climate through Ecosystem Restoration by Christoph Thies, Greenpeace Germany calls to mind that greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture and the destruction of forests and peatlands contribute to global warming and dangerous climate change. His chapter makes the case for ecosystem restoration: Growing forests and recovering peatlands can sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and protect both climate and biodiversity. This can make untested and potentially risky climate technologies unnecessary – if emissions from burning fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas emissions are phased out fast enough.

Modelling 1.5°C-Compliant Mitigation Scenarios Without Carbon Dioxide Removal by Christian Holz, Carleton University and Climate Equity Reference Project (CERP) reviews recent studies that demonstrate that it is still possible to achieve 1.5°C without relying on speculative and potentially deleterious technologies. This can be done if national climate pledges are increased substantially in all countries immediately, international support for climate action in developing countries is scaled up, and mitigation options not commonly included in mainstream climate models are pursued.

We hope that the experiences and political demands, the stories and recommendations compiled in this publication will be as inspiring to all of you as they are to us.

Lili Fuhr and Linda Schneider

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What happens next is unpredictable at one level and entirely predictable at another. Regardless of what humans decide to do, the twenty-first century will be a time of “abrupt and irreversible” changes in the web of life. Earth system scientists have a rather dry term for such a fundamental turning point in the life of a biospheric system: state shift. Unfortunately, the ecology from which this geological change has emerged has also produced humans who are ill-equipped to receive news of this state shift. Nietzsche’s madman announcing the death of god was met in a similar fashion: although industrial Europe had reduced divine influence to the semi-compulsory Sunday-morning church attendance, nineteenth-century society couldn’t imagine a world without god. The twenty-first century has an analogue: it’s easier for most people to imagine the end of the planet than to imagine the end of capitalism.

We need an intellectual state shift to accompany our new epoch. The first task is one of conceptual rigor, to note a problem in naming our new geological epoch the Anthropocene. The root, anthropos (Greek for “human”), suggests that it’s just humans being humans, in the way that kids will be kids or snakes will be snakes, that has caused climate change and the planet’s sixth mass extinction. It’s true that humans have been changing the planet since the end of the last ice age. A hunting rate slightly higher than the replenishment rate over centuries, together with shifting climate and grasslands, spelled the end for the Columbian Plains mammoth in North America, the orangutan’s overstuffed relative the Gigantopithecus in east Asia, and the giant Irish elk Megaloceros giganteus in Europe. Humans may even have been partly responsible for tempering a global cooling phase 12,000 years ago through agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions.

Hunting large mammals to extinction is one thing, but the speed and scale of destruction today can’t be extrapolated from the activities of our knuckle-dragging forebears. Today’s human activity isn’t exterminating mammoths through centuries of overhunting. Some humans are currently killing everything, from megafauna to microbiota, at speeds one hundred times higher than the background rate. We argue that what changed is capitalism, that modern history has, since the 1400s, unfolded in what is better termed the Capitalocene. Using this name means taking capitalism seriously, understanding it not just as an economic system but as a way of organizing the relations between humans and the rest of nature.

Seven Cheap Things

In our new book, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (University of California Press), we show how the modern world has been made through seven cheap things: nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives. Every word in that sentence is difficult. Cheap is the opposite of a bargain — cheapening is a set of strategies to control a wider web of life that includes humans. “Things” become things through armies and clerics and accountants and print. Most centrally, humans and nature don’t exist as giant seventeenth-century billiard balls crashing into each other. The pulse of life-making is messy, contentious and mutually sustaining. Our book introduces a way to think about the complex relationships between humans and the web of life that helps make sense of the world we’re in and suggests what it might become.

As a teaser, let’s return to those chicken bones in the geological record, a capitalist trace of the relation between humans and the world’s most common bird, Gallus gallus domesticus. The chickens we eat today are very different from those consumed a century ago. Today’s birds are the result of intensive post-World War II efforts drawing on genetic material sourced freely from Asian jungles, which humans decided to recombine to produce the most profitable fowl. That bird can barely walk, reaches maturity in weeks, has an oversize breast, and is reared and slaughtered in geologically significant quantities (more than 60 billion birds a year). Think of this relationship as a sign of Cheap Nature.

Already the most popular meat in the United States, chicken is projected to be the planet’s most popular flesh for human consumption by 2020. That will require a great deal of labor. Poultry workers are paid very little: in the United States, two cents for every dollar spent on a fast-food chicken goes to workers, and some chicken operators use prison labor, paid twenty-five cents per hour. Think of this as Cheap Work.

In the US poultry industry, 86 percent of workers who cut wings are in pain because of the repetitive hacking and twisting on the line. Some employers mock their workers for reporting injury, and the denial of injury claims is common. The result for workers is a 15 percent decline in income for the ten years after injury. While recovering, workers will depend on their families and support networks, a factor outside the circuits of production but central to their continued participation in the workforce. Think of this as Cheap Care.

The food produced by this industry ends up keeping bellies full and discontent down through low prices at the checkout and drive-through. That’s a strategy of Cheap Food.

Chickens themselves are relatively minor contributors to climate change — they have only one stomach each and don’t burp out methane like cows do — but they’re bred in large lots that use a great deal of fuel to keep warm. This is the biggest contributor to the US poultry industry’s carbon footprint. You can’t have low-cost chicken without abundant propane: Cheap Energy.

There is some risk in the commercial sale of these processed birds, but through franchising and subsidies, everything from easy financial and physical access to the land on which the soy feed for chickens is grown — mainly in China, Brazil and the United States — to small business loans, that risk is mitigated through public expense for private profit. This is one aspect of Cheap Money.

Finally, persistent and frequent acts of chauvinism against categories of human life — such as women, the colonized, the poor, people of color and immigrants — have made each of these six cheap things possible. Fixing this ecology in place requires a final element — the rule of Cheap Lives.

Yet at every step of this process, humans resist — from the Indigenous peoples whose flocks provide the source of genetic material for breeding through poultry and care workers demanding recognition and relief to those fighting against climate change and Wall Street. The social struggles over nature, money, work, care, food, energy and lives that attend the Capitalocene’s poultry bones amount to a case for why the most iconic symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone but the Chicken McNugget.

All this is forgotten in the act of dipping the chicken-and-soy product into a plastic pot of barbeque sauce. Yet the fossilized trace of a trillion birds will outlast — and mark the passage of — the humans who made them. That’s why we present the story of humans, nature and the system that changed the planet as a short history of the modern world: as an antidote to forgetting.

Civilizational Collapse

It’s not some genetic code — or some human impulse to procreate — that has brought us to this point. It’s a specific set of relationships between humans and the biological and physical world. Civilizations don’t collapse because humans reproduce too fast and starve, as Robert Malthus warned in his Essay on the Principles of Population. Since 1970, the number of malnourished people has remained above 800 million, yet few talk of the end of civilization. Instead, great historical transitions occur because “business as usual” no longer works. The powerful have a way of sticking to time-honored strategies even when the reality is radically changing. So it was with feudal Europe. The Black Death was not simply a demographic catastrophe. It also tilted the balance of forces in European society.

Feudalism depended on a growing population, not only to produce food but also to reproduce lordly power. The aristocracy wanted a relatively high peasant population, to maintain its bargaining position: many peasants competing for land was better than many lords competing for peasants. But feudalism was a system born of an earlier climate. Historians call this the Medieval Warm Period — it was so balmy that vineyards reached Norway. That changed at the dawn of the fourteenth century. Climate may not be destiny, but if there is a historical lesson from climate history, it’s that ruling classes don’t survive climate transitions. Feudalism’s class-enforced monocultures crumbled in the face of the Little Ice Age: famine and disease quickly followed.

As a result, with the onset of the Black Death, webs of commerce and exchange didn’t just transmit disease — they became vectors of mass insurrection. Almost overnight, peasant revolts ceased being local affairs and became large-scale threats to the feudal order. After 1347 these uprisings were synchronized — they were system-wide responses to an epochal crisis, a fundamental breakdown in feudalism’s logic of power, production and nature.

The Black Death precipitated an unbearable strain on a system already stretched to the breaking point. Europe after the plague was a place of unrelenting class war, from the Baltics to Iberia, London to Florence. Peasant demands for tax relief and the restoration of customary rights were calls that feudalism’s rulers could not tolerate. If Europe’s crowns, banks and aristocracies could not suffer such demands, neither could they restore the status quo ante, despite their best efforts. Repressive legislation to keep labor cheap, through wage controls or outright re-enserfment, came in reaction to the Black Death. Among the earliest was England’s Ordinance and Statute of Labourers, enacted in the teeth of the plague’s first onslaught (1349–51). The equivalent today would be to respond to an Ebola epidemic by making unionization harder.

The labor effects of climate change were abundantly clear to Europe’s aristocrats, who exhausted themselves trying to keep business very much as usual. They failed almost entirely. Nowhere in western or central Europe was serfdom reestablished. Wages and living standards for peasants and urban workers improved substantially, enough to compensate for a decline in the overall size of the economy. Although this was a boon for most people, Europe’s 1 percent found their share of the economic surplus contracting. The old order was broken and could not be fixed.

Capitalism emerged from this broken state of affairs. Ruling classes tried not just to restore the surplus but to expand it. That was easier said than done, however. East Asia was wealthier, so although its rulers also experienced socio-ecological tribulations, they found ways to accommodate upheaval, deforestation and resource shortages in their own tributary terms. One solution that reinvented humans’ relation to the web of life was stumbled upon by the Iberian aristocracy — in Portugal and Castile above all. By the end of the fifteenth century, these kingdoms and their societies had made war through the Reconquista, the centuries-long conflict with Muslim powers on the peninsula, and were so deeply dependent on Italian financiers to fund their military campaigns that Portugal and Castile had in turn been remade by war and debt.

The mix of war debt and the promise of wealth through conquest spurred the earliest invasions of the Atlantic. The solution to war debt was more war, with the payoff being colonial profit on new, great frontiers. The modern world emerged from systematic attempts to fix crises at this frontier. What followed was an epochal transition: one that reinvented the surplus around a cocktail of banking, slaving, and killing.

The Perspective of World-Ecology

Our view of capitalism is part of a perspective that we call world-ecology. World-ecology has emerged in recent years as a way to think through human history in the web of life. Rather than begin with the separation of humans from the web of life, we ask questions about how humans — and human arrangements of power and violence, work and inequality — fit within nature. Capitalism is not just part of an ecology but is an ecology — a set of relationships integrating power, capital and nature. So when we write — and hyphenate — world-ecology, we draw on older traditions of “world-systems” to say that capitalism creates an ecology that expands over the planet through its frontiers, driven by forces of endless accumulation.

To say world-ecology is not, therefore, to invoke the “ecology of the world” but to suggest an analysis that shows how relations of power, production and reproduction work through the web of life. The idea of world-ecology allows us to see how the modern world’s violent and exploitative relationships are rooted in five centuries of capitalism and also how these unequal arrangements — even those that appear timeless and necessary today — are contingent and in the midst of unprecedented crisis. World-ecology, then, offers something more than a different view of capitalism, nature and possible futures. It offers a way of seeing how humans make environments and environments make humans through the long sweep of modern history.

This opens space for us to reconsider how the ways that we have been schooled to think of change — ecological, economic, and all the rest — are themselves implicated in today’s crises. That space is crucial if we are to understand the relationship between naming and acting on the world. Movements for social justice have long insisted on “naming the system” because the relationships among thought, language and emancipation are intimate and fundamental to power. World-ecology allows us to see how concepts we take for granted — like Nature and Society — are problems not just because they obscure actual life and history but because they emerged out of the violence of colonial and capitalist practice.

Modern concepts of Nature and Society were born in Europe in the sixteenth century. These master concepts were not only formed in close relation to the dispossession of peasants in the colonies and in Europe but also themselves used as instruments of dispossession and genocide. The Nature/Society split was fundamental to a new, modern cosmology in which space was flat, time was linear and nature was external. That we are usually unaware of this bloody history — one that includes the early-modern expulsions of most women, Indigenous Peoples and Africans from humanity — is testimony to modernity’s extraordinary capacity to make us forget.

World-ecology therefore commits not only to rethinking but to remembering. Too often we attribute capitalism’s devastation of life and environments to economic rapaciousness alone, when much of capitalism cannot be reduced to economics. Contrary to neoliberal claptrap, businesses and markets are ineffective at doing most of what makes capitalism run. Cultures, states and scientific complexes must work to keep humans obedient to norms of gender, race and class. New resource geographies need to be mapped and secured, mounting debts repaid, coin defended. World-ecology offers a way to recognize this, to remember — and see anew — the lives and labors of humans and other natures in the web of life.

The afterlives of cheap things

There is hope in world-ecology. To recognize the webs of life-making on which capitalism depends is also to find new conceptual tools with which to face the Capitalocene. As justice movements develop strategies for confronting planetary crisis — and alternatives to our present way of organizing nature — we need to think about the creative and expanded reproduction of democratic forms of life.

A wan environmentalism is unlikely to make change if its principal theory rests on the historically bankrupt idea of immutable human separation from nature. Unfortunately, many of today’s politics take as given the transformation of the world into cheap things. Recall the last financial crisis, made possible by the tearing down of the boundary between retail and commercial banking in the United States. The Great Depression’s Glass-Steagall Act put that barrier in place to prevent future dealing of the kind that was understood to have knocked the global economy into a tailspin in the 1930s. American socialists and communists had been agitating for bank nationalization, and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Dealers offered the act as a compromise safeguard. When twenty-first-century liberal protesters demanded the return of Glass-Steagall, they were asking for a compromise, not for what had been surrendered to cheap finance: housing.

Similarly, when unions demand fifteen dollars an hour for work in the United States, a demand we have supported, a grand vision for the future of work is absent. Why should the future of care and food-service workers be to receive an incremental salary increase, barely enough on which to subsist? Why, indeed, ought ideas of human dignity be linked to hard work? Might there not be space to demand not just drudgery from work but the chance to contribute to making the world better? Although the welfare state has expanded, becoming the fastest-growing share of household income in the United States and accounting for 20 percent of household income by 2000, its transfers haven’t ended the burden of women’s work. Surely the political demand that household work be reduced, rewarded and redistributed is the ultimate goal?

We see the need to dream for more radical change than contemporary politics offers. Consider, to take another example, that cheap fossil fuel has its advocates among right-wing think tanks from India to the United States. While liberals propose a photovoltaic future, they can too easily forget the suffering involved in the mineral infrastructure on which their alternative depends. The food movement has remained hospitable to those who would either raise the price of food while ignoring poverty or engineer alternatives to food that will allow poverty to persist, albeit with added vitamins. And, of course, the persistence of the politics of cheap lives can be found in the return to supremacism from Russia and South Africa to the United States and China in the name of “protecting the nation.” We aren’t sanguine about the future either, given polling data from the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago which found that 35 percent of baby boomers feel blacks are lazier/less hardworking than whites and 31 percent of millennials feel the same way.

While maintaining a healthy pessimism of the intellect, we find optimism of the will through the work of organizations that see far more mutability in social relations. Many of these groups are already tackling cheap things. Unions want higher wages. Climate change activists want to revalue our relationship to energy, and those who’ve read Naomi Klein’s work will recognize that much more must change too. Food campaigners want to change what we eat and how we grow it so that everyone eats well. Domestic worker organizers want society to recognize the work done in homes and care facilities. The Occupy movement wants debt to be canceled and those threatened with foreclosure and exclusion allowed to remain in their homes. Radical ecologists want to change the way we think about all life on earth. The Movement for Black Lives, Indigenous groups and immigrant-rights activists want equality and reparation for historical injustice.

Each of these movements might provoke a moment of crisis. Capitalism has always been shaped by resistance — from slave uprisings to mass strikes, from anticolonial revolts through abolition to the organization for women’s and Indigenous peoples’ rights — and has always managed to survive. Yet all of today’s movements are connected, and together they offer an antidote to pessimism. World-ecology can help connect the dots.

We do not offer solutions that return to the past. We agree with Alice Walker that “activism is the rent I pay for living on the planet” and that if there is to be life after capitalism, it will come through the struggles of people on the ground for which they fight. We don’t deny that if politics are to transform, they must begin where people currently find themselves. But we cannot end with the same abstractions that capitalism has made, of nature, society and economy. We must find the language and politics for new civilizations, find ways of living through the state shift that capitalism’s ecology has wrought.

Weighing the injustices of centuries of exploitation can resacralize human relations within the web of life. Redistributing care, land and work so that everyone has a chance to contribute to the improvement of their lives and to that of the ecology around them can undo the violence of abstraction that capitalism makes us perform every day. We term this vision “reparation ecology” and offer it as a way to see history as well as the future, a practice and a commitment to equality and reimagined relations for humans in the web of life.

This essay is an abridged excerpt from the introduction of Moore and Patel’s new book, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet, published by University of California Press in the US, Verso Books in the UK and Black, Inc. in Australia and New Zealand.

Originally published in ROAR Magazine Issue #7: System Change.

Illustration by David Istvan

The post Unearthing the Capitalocene: Towards a Reparations Ecology appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The rise of so many right-wing nationalist movements around the world—Brexit, Donald Trump, the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, anti-immigrant protests throughout Europe—have their own distinctive origins and contexts, to be sure. But in the aggregate, they are evidence of the dwindling options for credible change that capitalist political cultures are willing to consider. This naturally provokes the question: Why are the more wholesome alternative visions so scarce and scarcely believable?

Political elites and their corporate brethren are running out of ideas for how to reconcile the deep contradictions of “democratic capitalism” as it now exists. Even social democrats and liberals, the traditional foes of free-market dogma, seem locked into an archaic worldview and set of political strategies that makes their advocacy sound tinny. Their familiar progress-narrative—that economic growth, augmented by government interventions and redistribution, can in fact work and make society more stable and fair—is no longer persuasive.

Below, I argue that the commons paradigm offers a refreshing and practical lens for re-imagining politics, governance and law. The commons, briefly put, is about self-organized social systems for managing shared wealth. Far from a “tragedy,” the commons as a system for mutualizing responsibilities and benefits is highly generative. It can be seen in the successful self-management of forests, farmland, and water, and in open source software communities, open-access scholarly journals, and “cosmo-local” design and manufacturing systems.

The 2008 financial crisis drew back the curtain on many consensus myths that have kept the neoliberal capitalist narrative afloat. It turns out that growth is not something that is widely or equitably shared. A rising tide does not raise all boats because the poor, working class, and even the middle class do not share much of the productivity gains, tax breaks, or equity appreciation that the wealthy enjoy. The intensifying concentration of wealth is creating a new global plutocracy, whose members are using their fortunes to dominate and corrupt democratic processes while insulating themselves from the ills afflicting everyone else. No wonder the market/state system and the idea of liberal democracy is experiencing a legitimacy crisis.

Given this general critique, I believe that the most urgent challenge of our times is to develop a new socio-political imaginary that goes beyond those now on offer from the left or right. We need to imagine new sorts of governance and provisioning arrangements that can transform, tame, or replace predatory markets and capitalism. Over the past 50 years, the regulatory state has failed to abate the relentless flood of anti-ecological, anti-consumer, anti-social “externalities” generated by capitalism, largely because the power of capital has eclipsed that of the nation-state and citizen sovereignty. Yet the traditional left continues to believe, mistakenly, that a warmed-over Keynesianism, wealth-redistribution, and social programs are politically achievable and likely to be effective.

The 2008 financial crisis drew back the curtain on many consensus myths that have kept the neoliberal capitalist narrative afloat.

Cultural critic Douglas Rushkoff has said, “I’ve given up on fixing the economy.  The economy is not broken.  It’s simply unjust.” In other words, the economy is working more or less as its capitalist overseers intend it to work. Citizens often despair because struggle for change within conventional democratic politics is often futile—and not just because democratic processes are corrupted.  State bureaucracies and even competitive markets are structurally incapable of addressing many problems. The limits of what The System can deliver—on climate change, inequality, infrastructure, democratic accountability—are on vivid display every day. As distrust in the state grows, a very pertinent question is where political sovereignty and legitimacy will migrate in the future.

The fundamental problem in developing a new vision, however, is that old ideological debates continue to dominate public discourse. Politics is endlessly rehashing many of the same disagreements, failing to recognize that deep structural change is needed. There is precious little room for new ideas and projects to incubate and grow. New visions must have space to breathe and evolve their own sovereign logic and ethics if they are to escape the dead end of meliorist reformism.

As I explained in a recent piece for The Nation magazine insurgent narratives and projects are actually quite plentiful. Movements focused on climate justice, co-operatives, transition towns, local food systems, alternative finance, digital currencies, peer production, open design and manufacturing, among others, are pioneering new post-capitalist models of peer governance and provisioning. While fragmented and diverse, these movements tend to emphasize common themes: production and consumption to meet household needs, not profit; bottom-up decision making; and stewardship of shared wealth for the long term. These values all lie at the heart of the commons.

For now, these movements tend to work on the cultural fringe, more or less ignored by the mainstream media and political parties. But that is precisely what has allowed them to evolve with integrity and substance. Only here, on the periphery, have these movements been able to escape the stodgy prejudices and self-serving institutional priorities of political parties, government agencies, the commercial media, philanthropy, academia, and the entrenched nonprofit-industrial complex.

Why is the public imagination for transformation change so stunted? In part because most established institutions are more focused on managing their brand reputations and organizational franchises. Taking risks and developing bold new initiatives and ideas are not what they generally do. Meanwhile, system-change movements are generally dismissed as too small-scale, trivial or apolitical to matter. They also fade into the shadows because they tend to rely on Internet-based networks to build new sorts of power, affordances (structural capacities for individual agency), and moral authority that mainstream players don’t understand or respect. Examples include the rise of the peasant farmers’ group La Via Campesina, transnational collaboration among indigenous peoples, platform co-operatives that foster sharing alternatives to Uber and Airbnb, and the System for Rice Intensification (a kind of open source agriculture developed by farmers themselves).

Rather than try to manage themselves as hierarchical organizations with proprietary franchises, reputations, and overhead to sustain, activists see themselves as part of social movements working as flexible players in open, fluid environments. Their network-driven activism enables them to more efficiently self-organize and coordinate activities, attract self-selected participants with talent, and implement fast cycles of creative iteration.

System-change movements tend to eschew the conventional policy and political process, and instead seek change through self-organized emergence. In ecological terms, they are using open digital networks to try to create “catchment areas,” a landscape in which numerous flows converge (water, vegetation, soil, organisms, etc.) to give rise to an interdependent, self-replenishing zone of lively energy. As two students of complexity theory and social movements, Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze write:

When separate, local efforts connect with each other as networks, then strengthen as communities of practice, suddenly and surprisingly a new system emerges at a greater level of scale. This system of influence possesses qualities and capacities that were unknown in the individuals. It isn’t that they were hidden; they simply don’t exist until the system emerges. They are properties of the system, not the individual, but once there, individuals possess them. And the system that emerges always possesses greater power and influence than is possible through planned, incremental change. Emergence is how life creates radical change and takes things to scale.

The old guard of electoral politics and standard economics has trouble comprehending the principle of emergence, let alone recognizing the need for innovative policy structures that could leverage and focus that dynamic power. It has consistently underestimated the bottom-up innovation enabled by open source software; the speed and reliability of Wikipedia-style coordination and knowledge-aggregation, and the power of social media in catalyzing viral self-organization such as the Occupy movement, the Indignados and Podemos in Spain, the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, and Syriza in Greece. Conventional schools of economics, politics and power do not comprehend the generative capacities of decentralized, self-organized networks. They apply obsolete categories of institutional control and political analysis, as if trying to understand the ramifications of automobiles through the language of “horseless carriages.”

Instead of clinging to the old left/right spectrum of political ideology—which reflects the centrality of “the market” and “the state” in organizing society—we need to entertain new narratives that allow us to imagine new drivers of governance, production and culture. In my personal work, I see the enormous potential of the commons as farmers and fisherpeople, urban citizens and Internet users, try to reclaim shared resources that have been seized to feed the capitalist machine—and to devise their own governance alternatives. In this, the commons is at once a paradigm, a discourse, a set of social practices, and an ethic.

Over the past five years or more, the commons has served as a kind of overarching meta-narrative for diverse movements to challenge the marketization and transactionalization of everything, the dispossession and privatization of resources, and the corruption of democracy. The commons has also provided a language and ethic for thinking and acting like a commoner—collaborative, socially minded, embedded in nature, concerned with stewardship and long-term, respectful of the pluriverse that makes up our planet.

If we are serious about effecting system change, we need to start by emancipating ourselves from some backward-looking concepts and vocabularies. We need to instigate new post-capitalist ways of talking about the provisioning models and peer governance now emerging. Influencing unfolding realities may be less about electing different leaders and policies than about learning how to change ourselves, orchestrate a new shared intentionality, and hoist up new narratives about the commons.

This essay first appeared in 21st Century Global Dynamics, Volume 10, Issue 62, September 21, 2017.

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 International license

Notes

1 The Digger Archives: http://www.diggers.org/digger_dollar.htm
2 Garret Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science (Vol. 162, Issue 3859, 1968), pp. 1243-1248.
For one critique of Hardin’s model, see Ian Angus, “The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons”:
http://climateandcapitalism.com/2008/08/25/debunking-the-tragedy-of-the-…

The post Re-imaging Politics through the Lens of the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Before you say no, take a moment to really ask yourself whether it’s the system that’s best suited to build our future society.

Jason Hickel and Martin Kirk: In February, college sophomore Trevor Hill stood up during a televised town hall meeting in New York and posed a simple question to Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. He cited a study by Harvard University showing that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism, and asked whether the Democrats could embrace this fast-changing reality and stake out a clearer contrast to right-wing economics.

Pelosi was visibly taken aback. “I thank you for your question,” she said, “but I’m sorry to say we’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.”

The footage went viral. It was powerful because of the clear contrast it set up. Trevor Hill is no hardened left-winger. He’s just your average o—bright, informed, curious about the world, and eager to imagine a better one. But Pelosi, a figurehead of establishment politics, refused to–or was just unable to–entertain his challenge to the status quo.

Fifty-one percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

It’s not only young voters who feel this way.

A YouGov poll in 2015 found that 64% of Britons believe that capitalism is unfair, that it makes inequality worse. Even in the U.S., it’s as high as 55%. In Germany, a solid 77% are skeptical of capitalism. Meanwhile, a full three-quarters of people in major capitalist economies believe that big businesses are basically corrupt.Why do people feel this way? Probably not because they deny the abundant material benefits of modern life that many are able to enjoy. Or because they want to travel back in time and live in the U.S.S.R. It’s because they realize—either consciously or at some gut level—that there’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital, and do it more and more each year, regardless of the costs to human well-being and to the environment we depend on.

Because let’s be clear: That’s what capitalism is, at its root. That is the sum total of the plan. We can see this embodied in the imperative to grow GDP, everywhere, year on year, at a compound rate, even though we know that GDP growth, on its own, does nothing to reduce poverty or to make people happier or healthier. Global GDP has grown 630% since 1980, and in that same time, by some measures, inequality, poverty, and hunger have all risen.

Gains are seen as the natural property of the investor class. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

We also see this plan in the idea that corporations have a fiduciary duty to grow their stock value for the sake of shareholder returns, which prevents even well-meaning CEO’s from voluntarily doing anything good—like increasing wages or reducing pollution—that might compromise their bottom line. Just look at the recent case involving American Airlines. Earlier this year, CEO Doug Parker tried to raise his employees salaries to correct for “years of incredibly difficult times” suffered by his employees, only to be slapped down by Wall Street. The day he announced the raise, the company’s shares fell 5.8%. This is not a case of an industry on the brink, fighting for survival, and needing to make hard decisions. On the contrary, airlines have been raking in profits. But the gains are seen as the natural property of the investor class. This is why JP Morgan criticized the wage increase as a “wealth transfer of nearly $1 billion” to workers. How dare they?What becomes clear here is that ours is a system that is programmed to subordinate life to the imperative of profit.

There’s something fundamentally flawed about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into capital. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

For a startling example of this, consider the horrifying idea to breed brainless chickens and grow them in huge vertical farms, Matrix-style, attached to tubes and electrodes and stacked one on top of the other, all for the sake of extracting profit out of their bodies as efficiently as possible. Or take the Grenfell Tower disaster in London, where dozens of people were incinerated because the building company chose to use flammable panels in order to save a paltry £5,000 (around $6,500). Over and over again, profit trumps life.It all proceeds from the same deep logic. It’s the same logic that sold lives for profit in the Atlantic slave trade, it’s the logic that gives us sweatshops and oil spills, and it’s the logic that is right now pushing us headlong toward ecological collapse and climate change.

Millennials can see that capitalism isn’t working for the majority of humanity, and they’re ready to invent something better. Illustration: Ignotus the Mage/Flickr

Once we realize this, we can start connecting the dots between our different struggles. There are people in the U.S. fighting against the Keystone pipeline. There are people in Britain fighting against the privatization of the National Health Service. There are people in India fighting against corporate land grabs. There are people in Brazil fighting against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. There are people in China fighting against poverty wages. These are all noble and important movements in their own right. But by focusing on all these symptoms we risk missing the underlying cause. And the cause is capitalism. It’s time to name the thing.What’s so exciting about our present moment is that people are starting to do exactly that. And they are hungry for something different. For some, this means socialism. That YouGov poll showed that Americans under the age of 30 tend to have a more favorable view of socialism than they do of capitalism, which is surprising given the sheer scale of the propaganda out there designed to convince people that socialism is evil. But millennials aren’t bogged down by these dusty old binaries. For them the matter is simple: They can see that capitalism isn’t working for the majority of humanity, and they’re ready to invent something better.

What might a better world look like? There are a million ideas out there. We can start by changing how we understand and measure progress. As Robert Kennedy famously said, GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play . . . it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

We can change that. People want health care and education to be social goods, not market commodities, so we can choose to put public goods back in public hands. People want the fruits of production and the yields of our generous planet to benefit everyone, rather than being siphoned up by the super-rich, so we can change tax laws and introduce potentially transformative measures like a universal basic income. People want to live in balance with the environment on which we all depend for our survival; so we can adopt regenerative agricultural solutions and even choose, as Ecuador did in 2008, to recognize in law, at the level of the nation’s constitution, that nature has “the right to exist, persist, maintain, and regenerate its vital cycles.”

Measures like these could dethrone capitalism’s prime directive and replace it with a more balanced logic, that recognizes the many factors required for a healthy and thriving civilization. If done systematically enough, they could consign one-dimensional capitalism to the dustbin of history.

None of this is actually radical. Our leaders will tell us that these ideas are not feasible, but what is not feasible is the assumption that we can carry on with the status quo. If we keep pounding on the wedge of inequality and chewing through our living planet, the whole thing is going to implode. The choice is stark, and it seems people are waking up to it in large numbers: Either we evolve into a future beyond capitalism, or we won’t have a future at all.

Dr. Jason Hickel is an anthropologist at the London School of Economics who works on international development and global political economy, with an ethnographic focus on southern Africa.  He writes for the Guardian and Al Jazeera English. His most recent book, The Divide: A Brief History of Global Inequality and Its Solutions, is available now.

Martin Kirk is cofounder and director of strategy for The Rules, a global collective of writers, thinkers, and activists dedicated to challenging the root causes of global poverty and inequality. His work focuses on bringing insights from the cognitive and complexity sciences to bear on issues of public understanding of complex global challenges.

Originally published at Fast Company

Lead Photo by Ignotus the Mage

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We hope the film Re-imagine the Future provoked your interest in exploring its themes more deeply. The quest to build attractive, functional alternatives to the world ordained by neoliberal economics is, in fact, growing. A kaleidoscope of innovations around the world is showing that the market and state are not the only players. A burgeoning Commons Sector is emerging and starting to flourish.

This webpage is a portal into the growing world of system-change activism, experimentation, legal and policy innovation, academic research and political analysis. Consider these links an invitation to enter into this world yourself. After all, the answers are not going to come from somewhere else; they have to start with us, personally and locally, and expand outward. We need to re-imagine the future.

Index

• What is the Commons?
• Key Commons Websites
• Activists/Thinkers Concerned about System Change
• Notable Movements
• 25 Significant Commons Projects
• Books and Essays
• Films & Videos

What is the Commons?

• The Commons, Short and Sweet
• Introductory resources

Key Commons Websites

• Bollier.org
• Commons Strategies Group
• Commons Transition
• The Commoner (UK)
• Digital Library of the Commons
• International Association for the Study of Commons
• International Journal of the Commons
• Law for the Commons wiki
• Maps in the Spirit of the Commons
• On the Commons
• P2P Foundation
• Remix the Commons
• Shareable
• Sustainable Economies Law Center

Activists/Thinkers Concerned about System Change

• Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment
• Schumacher Center for a New Economy
• Next System Project
• Democracy Collaborative
• New Economy Coalition
• Great Transition Initiative
• P2P Foundation
• The Corner House (UK)
• Stir magazine (UK)

Notable Movements

(an incomplete list)

• Co-operatives
• Transition Towns, US / Transition Network
• Social and Solidarity Economy (in French)
• Degrowth
• Peer Production
• La Via Campesina
• Indigenous Peoples / First Peoples Worldwide
• Care Work
• Climate Change / Climate Action Network
• Community Empowerment: Democracy Collaborative / Institute for Local Self-Reliance / Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund / Movement Generation

25 Significant Commons Projects

• Alaska Permanent Fund and other stakeholder trusts
• Berkshares and alternative currencies
• Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons
• The city as a commons
• Cecosesola (Colombia)
• Community land trusts
• Creative Commons licenses
• Enspiral: social enterprise with shared vision and values
• Farm Hack: open source farm equipment
• Free software
• Guifi.net (Spain): community wifi
• HowlRound, a knowledge commons by and for the theater community
• Customary land commons in Africa
• multistakeholder co-operatives
• Museums as commons
• Open access scholarly journals
• Open design and open hardware
• Open Educational Resources
• Potato Park (Peru)
• System of Rice Intensification, open source agronomy for rice
• Timebanking

….and countless other examples. See Patterns of Commoning and the Digital Library on the Commons.

Books and Essays

• Peter Barnes, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons
• David Bollier, Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Commons
• — “Commons as a Paradigm for Social Transformation” (Next System Project, April 2016).
• — and Silke Helfrich, editors, The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (Levellers Press, 2012).
• Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei, The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community (Berrett-Koehler, 2015).
• Commons Strategies Group, “State Power and Commoning: Transcending a Problematic Relationship” (June 2016).
• Giacomo D’Alisa et al., Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era (Routledge, 2014).
• Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004).
• Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership (Farrar Straus, 2011).
• —- , The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (Vintage, 1983/2007)
• Peter Linebaugh: The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberty and Commons for All (University of California Press, 2008).
• Mary Mellor, Debt or Democracy: Public Money for Sustainability and Social Justice (Pluto Press, 2016).
• Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
• Douglas Rushkoff, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity (Portfolio, 2016)
• Derek Wall, The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom: Commons, Contestation and Craft

Films & Videos

• The Promise of the Commons (2013). 50 minutes. Focuses on natural resources commons in the global South, with special attention to land grabbing and land rights in India, Nepal, Mexico. 20-minute version.
• The Commons (2103). A left-libertarian-anarchist perspective on the commons that explains the logic of capitalism and the potential of the commons to meet needs beyond the state and market. 36 minutes. Script for video narration.
• Peter Linebaugh: Who Owns the Commons? on The Laura Flanders Show. An interview with historian and author Peter Linebaugh on the 800^th anniversary of the Magna Carta and the significance of that legal document and the struggle behind it today. 2015. 18 minutes.
• Better Not More: Principles and Practices Towards the next Economy. This video provides an overview of activist movements to decomodify nature, re-imagine the character of work, liberate knowledge and democratize wealth. 5 minutes. Produced by Kontent Film and Edge Funders Alliance.
• Podcast, “The Deeper Magic of the Commons.” Host James Lindenschmidt interviews a range of commons scholars and activists. 2016.

Lead image by Nullfy; additional images by Michel Desbiens, Jaap Joris and Michael Dunne.

This post was originally published in Bollier.org. You can find complementary material at Anna Grear’s site.

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Many arguments for the legalization of cannabis and psychedelics draw on their relative harmlessness. Countering the rationale of prohibition, we can point out that compared to legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, psychedelics are extremely safe. Given statistics comparing the annual number of alcohol-related deaths in the U.S. (88,000) to the number of cannabis-related deaths (zero), the hysterical warnings of prohibitionists that legalization would destroy society as we know it seem ridiculous.

In fact, the prohibitionists are correct. The legalization of cannabis, LSD, MDMA, psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, and the other psychedelics would indeed mean the end of society as we know it. The threat that conservative political forces have identified is real. They recognize, if only unconsciously, the revolutionary social and political potential these substances carry.

Psychedelics can bestow expanded consciousness, perceptions, and ways of being that are incompatible with those that undergird our society. Psychedelics have the power to subvert the alienation, competition, anthropocentrism, linear ordering of time and space, standardization of commodities and social roles, and reduction of reality to a collection of things that propel the world-destroying machine of modern civilization. They disrupt the defining mythology of our civilization, the Story of Separation.

The elements of the Story of Separation listed above also embed our economic system, which means that the spread of cannabis and psychedelics could have negative economic effects—that is, when we define economic benefit as the growth in monetized goods and services. They promise less consumption of goods and services, not more. The modern self, alienated from nature and community, has an endless craving to consume and possess, seeking to grow in compensation for the lost infinity of the interconnected, inter-existent, true self that psychedelics reveal.

Beware, then, of arguments that legalization is good for the economy. It won’t be, but it will accelerate a transition toward a different kind of economy. The psychedelic experience reveals its lineaments: less quantity and more quality, fewer “services” and more relationships, fewer “goods” and more beauty, less competition and more community, less accumulation and more sharing, less work and more play, less extraction and more healing. This is utterly at odds with the present economic system.

The present economic system compels and requires growth in order to function. Growth here means growth of goods and services exchanged for money; it means quantitative growth, growth in a measurable quantity. It is the external, collective correlate of the ever-expanding ego, the separate self. As we identify less with that self, conventional economic logic begins to break down. No longer does it make sense that we are fundamentally in competition with each other. No longer does it make sense for scarcity to be the foundational premise of economic life. No longer does it make sense that more for you should be less for me. No longer is security and control of resources the highest priority in making economic choices. Psychedelics thereby help reverse the centuries-old economic usurpation of human life, the mentality of the transaction that has encroached on human relations

For the discrete and separate self in a universe of other, it is quite rational to treat everything outside oneself— animals, plants, water, minerals, and even other people—as instruments of one’s own utility. After all, if you are separate from me, then what happens to you need not affect me. What happens to the honeybees, to the frogs, to the coral reefs, to the rhinos and elephants, need not affect us. We just need to recruit sufficient energy and information to insulate ourselves from the blowback, to engineer new solutions to the problems caused by previous solutions. Nature becomes a collection of “resources,” and no longer a living intelligence. And that is just how our economy treats it.

Clearly, this strategy is a recipe for ecocide, blind to interdependency and ignorant of any intelligence in the workings of the world. Yet it pervades our systems of technology, industry, money, medicine, education, and politics. Psychedelics, then, promise to change all of these.

There is therefore something a little disingenuous in political arguments for legalization that seek to assure nervous politicians that nothing much will change besides savings on police, courts, and penitentiaries, and perhaps more effective psychiatric treatments. Come on folks, we all know better than that. Is any psychedelic activist devoting his or her precious time on earth to serve a slightly better version of the current regime of oppression and ecocide? For a long time, chastened by the counterreaction to the 60s awakening, we’ve hidden our hope and desire that “this could change everything” behind political delicacy and neutral academic language. The time for that is perhaps soon coming to an end. The risk of assurances like, “Don’t worry, no dramatic social changes will happen” is that we implicitly affirm that such social changes are to be avoided; that things as they are are acceptable.

The revolutionary potential of psychedelics lies first and foremost in their power to reveal the Story of Separation as nothing but that:, a story. When that happens, nothing built on that story makes sense any more. Yet there seems to be a problem translating that realization into systemic change. Fifty years after the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s, our systems of money, politics, imperialism, and ecological destruction seem more powerful than ever. The world that psychedelics vitiate trundles onward, despite declarations that they would change everything. Here’s Alan Watts, making a similar point to the one I’ve been making:

Mystical experiences often result in attitudes that threaten the authority not only of established churches, but also of secular society. Unafraid of death and deficient in worldly ambition, those who have undergone mystical experiences are impervious to threats and promises….Use of psychedelics in the United States by a literate bourgeoisie means that an important segment of the population is indifferent to society’s traditional rewards and sanctions.

One can hardly read these words, written in 1968, without a twinge of cynicism. Superficially, at least, Watts’ proclamation seems to have been overly optimistic. Looking at the number of hippies who went on to become lawyers and accountants, it is clear that a mystical experience does not necessarily render one impervious to “society’s traditional rewards and sanctions.” The experience invites us out of the story-of-self and the story-of-the-world that we’d taken for reality itself, but there has been no firmly established new story to greet us. We emerge from the experience surrounded by the infrastructure of the old story. The apparatus of modernity shouts that story at us from every quarter. No wonder vivid mystical realizations gradually fade: into principles one must strive hard to remember and practice; into memories of another realm seemingly sundered from our own; finally into a formless ennui that mutes every ambition and punctuates every accomplishment with a question mark.

Why does this happen? One might cite a psychospiritual explanation: that we are flown to a place that eventually we must reach on foot; that we need to experience the territory in between, and thereby rework the habits and heal the wounds that maintain the inertia of who-we-were. Yes, but there is an equally important outer explanation that, we shall see, mirrors the inner: No experience can magically extricate anyone from the matrix of institutions that scaffold our society. We come back from the trip into the same economic system, the same physical surroundings, the same social pressures as before. The Story of Separation has enormous inertia. Its forms surround us and pull us relentlessly toward conformity, however unreal and unworthy of our wholehearted participation they may seem.

In other words, a mystical experience may invite you to quit your job, but even those who have the courage to do it usually face the reality that our economy does not reward the modes of creativity that draw them. I know I am generalizing here, but no one can deny that generally speaking, there is more money to be made by destroying wetlands to build ports than in striving to protect them; more money marketing product than rebuilding community. Leaving the old, there is not usually a “new story” to greet us with ready-made positions, livelihood, and social identity.

Yet Alan Watts was not wrong. It is just that in the psychedelic moment of the 1960s, we underestimated the robustness of the edifice of civilization and could not foresee the trajectory of the transition process. Perhaps there are mystical experiences that immediately and irrevocably change ones life and disintegrate its structures. More often though, the experience goes underground, working us from the inside, hollowing out the psychic infrastructure of the old normal. Its forms remain for a time, but they become more and more fragile.

The same hollowing out is happening on the collective level, as the attitudes that informed prohibition seem increasingly archaic. Listening to politicians, one gets the sense that a great majority of them personally disagree with the drug war, but must espouse the opposite opinion in public for fear of being devoured by the media and other politicians—who themselves privately oppose the drug war too but join in the feeding frenzy so as not to become victims themselves. Not a happy commentary on human nature, but we can take solace from the implication that the ideological core of drug prohibition is decaying. The outward structures of prohibition are a rapidly thinning shell.

And it’s not just the drug war. Our leaders seem to lack the deep, unquestioning faith in the project of civilization and all its accompanying narratives that was nearly universal a generation or two ago. The tropes of that era seem archaic today: the onward march of science, bringing democracy to the world, the conquest of nature, better living through chemistry, the wonders of atomic energy, higher, faster, better, new and improved. Even the boisterous flag-waving of the political right seems more an identity statement than an abiding patriotism. Without real conviction, no wonder politics has become largely a matter of image, spin, optics, and messaging.

Our leaders no longer believe their own ideology, if they have one. Their public statements and private convictions are irredeemably opposed; everyone is trapped in a drama in which few believe. That is another reason why the end of prohibition portends a much bigger shift: it is an admission that the emperor has no clothes. Because what political truism was more unquestionable than “drugs are bad”? The bugbear called “drugs” is now admitted to be a valid form of medicine, psychotherapeutic research, and even recreation. What other unmentionables will be next? After all, public confidence in the fairness and soundness of the economic system, political system, educational system, health care system, global police state, and so on is no less shaky than support for the War on Drugs.

Even as the psychic core of the old world hollows out (thanks in part to psychedelics), the external structures that hold us in that world are crumbling too. A mere generation ago, the pursuit of the “worldly ambitions” that Watts refers to reliably delivered at least the semblance of power, security, and control to the bulk of the world’s privileged. No longer. Today, even those who jump through all the hoops still have no guarantee of a place at the ever-shrinking table of normalcy. Play by all the rules, and still the institutions of marriage, healthcare, education, law, and economy fail us. The infrastructure of the old story that pulls us back from the world that psychedelics reveal as possible is losing its grip. As the hollowing-out from the inside meets the disintegration on the outside, cracks appear in the shell of our world. The impending ascendency of cannabis and psychedelics to legitimacy is one of them, and it will widen the others.

Photo by Moyan_Brenn

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For those of you have been following the commons for a while, my essay will have a lot of familiar material.  But I also came to some new realizations about language and the commons, and why the special discourse about commoning and enclosures is so important. I won’t reproduce the entire essay – you can find it here as a pdf download or as a webpage at the Next System Project – but below I excerpt the opening paragraphs; the section on the discourse of the commons; and the conclusion.

Introduction

In facing up to the many profound crises of our time, we face a conundrum that has no easy resolution: how are we to imagine and build a radically different system while living within the constraints of an incumbent system that aggressively resists transformational change? Our challenge is not just articulating attractive alternatives, but identifying credible strategies for actualizing them.

I believe the commons—at once a paradigm, a discourse, an ethic, and a set of social practices—holds great promise in transcending this conundrum. More than a political philosophy or policy agenda, the commons is an active, living process. It is less a noun than a verb because it is primarily about the social practices of commoning—acts of mutual support, conflict, negotiation, communication and experimentation that are needed to create systems to manage shared resources. This process blends production (self provisioning), governance, culture, and personal interests into one integrated system.

This essay provides a brisk overview of the commons, commoning, and their great potential in helping build a new society. I will explain the theory of change that animates many commoners, especially as they attempt to tame capitalist markets, become stewards of natural systems, and mutualize the benefits of shared resources. The following pages describe a commons-based critique of the neoliberal economy and polity; a vision of how the commons can bring about a more ecologically sustainable, humane society; the major economic and political changes that commoners seek; and the principal means for pursuing them.

Finally, I will look speculatively at some implications of a commons-centric society for the market/state alliance that now constitutes “the system.” How would a world of commons provisioning and governance change the polity? How could it address the interconnected pathologies of relentless economic growth, concentrated corporate power, consumerism, unsustainable debt, and cascading ecological destruction?

Why the Discourse of the Commons Matters

The language of the commons is, first, an instrument for reorienting people’s perceptions and understanding. It helps name and illuminate the realities of market enclosure and the value of commoning. Without the commons language, these two social realities remain culturally invisible or at least marginalized—and therefore politically inconsequential.

Commons discourse provides a way to make moral and political claims that conventional policy discourse prefers to ignore or suppress. Using the concepts and logic of the commons helps bring into being a new cohort of commoners who can recognize their mutual affinities and shared agenda. They can more readily assert their own sovereign values and priorities in systemic terms. More than an intellectual nicety, the coherent philosophical narrative of the commons helps prevent capital from playing one interest off against another: nature verse labor, labor verse consumers, consumers verse the community. Through the language and experiences of commoning, people can begin to move beyond the constrictive social roles of “employee” and “consumer,” and live more integrated lives as whole human beings. Instead of succumbing to the divide-and-conquer tactics that capital deploys to neutralize demands for change, the language of the commons provides a holistic vision that helps diverse victims of market abuse recognize their shared victimization, develop a new narrative, cultivate new links of solidarity and—one can hope—build a constellation of working alternatives driven by a different logic.

The potential of the commons discourse in effecting change should not be underestimated. I see the darkly brilliant counterexample of cost-benefit analysis discourse, which American industry in the 1980s succeeded in making the default methodology for environmental, health, and safety regulation. This gambit neutered a set of social, ethical and environmental policies by grafting onto them the language of market economics and quantification. The discourse effectively eclipsed many elements of statutory law and changed the overall perception of regulation. I see the commons discourse as a similar kind of epistemological intervention: a systemic way to reclaim social, ecological, and ethical values for managing our shared wealth.

As the foregoing discussion implies, the commons movement seeks to change our very conception of “the economy.” Rather than consider “the market” as an autonomous, “natural” realm of society that somehow exists apart from the Earth’s natural systems and our social needs, commoners seek to integrate the social, ecological, and economic. Karl Polanyi, in his landmark book The Great Transformation, explained how market culture in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries gradually supplanted kinship, custom, religion, morality, and community to become the primary ordering principle of society.[7] That transformation must be reversed; unfettered capital and markets must be re-embedded in society and made answerable to it. We must make capital investment, finance, production, corporate power, international trade, and so on, subordinate to societal needs.

Along with allied movements, the commons movement seeks to develop institutions and norms for a post-capitalist, post-growth order. This means confronting the monoculture of market-based options with a richer, more vibrant sense of human possibilities than those offered by the producer/consumer dyad. The book that I recently edited with Silke Helfrich, Patterns of Commoning, profiles several dozen fascinating, successful commons that draw upon different human capacities and social forms. These include community forests, local currencies, Fab Labs, municipal water committees, farmland trusts for supporting local family farming, indigenous “biocultural heritage” areas for stewarding biodiversity, permaculture farming, “omni-commons” structures that provide administrative/ legal support to commons-based enterprises, and many others.

Such mutualized systems of provisioning must be developed and extended. They represent socially and ecologically benign alternatives to the debt-driven economy catering to unquenchable market demand. (A brief side note: legal and organizational forms are no guarantee for breaking the logic of capitalism—one need only look at the decline of many co-ops into quasi-corporatism and managerialism. Still, such forms can provide the potential for moving to more benign forms of consumption, if not post-consumerist social mores.)

Conclusion

Because the commons movement is a pulsating, living network of commoners around the world, it is difficult to set forth a clear blueprint or predict the future. The future paradigm can only arise through an evolutionary co-creation. Still, we can already see the expansive, self-replicating power of the commons idea as it is embraced by highly diverse groups: Francophone commoners in eight countries, who hosted a two-week commons festival in October 2015 with more than 300 events; urban activists who are reconceptualizing the “city as a commons”; Croatians fighting enclosures of their public spaces and coastal lands; Greeks developing a “Mediterranean imaginary” of the commons to fight neoliberal economic policies; indigenous peoples defending their ethnobotanical and biocultural traditions; digital activists mobilizing to devise new forms of “platform cooperativism”; and so on. The commons language and framework helps develop unexpected new synergies and forms of solidarity.

As a meta-discourse that has core principles but porous boundaries, the commons has the capacity to speak at once to the worlds of politics, governance, economics, and culture. Importantly, it can also speak to the alienation associated with modernity and people’s instinctive needs for human connection and meaning, something that neither the state nor the market, as they are now constituted, can do. The commons paradigm offers a deep philosophical critique of neoliberal economics, with hundreds of functioning examples that are increasingly converging. But as an action-oriented approach to system change, everything will depend upon the ongoing energy and imagination of commoners, and would-be commoners, to develop this globally-networked living system.

The anonymous Invisible Committee in France has observed that “an insurrection is not like a plague or forest fire—a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It takes the shape of music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythms of their own vibrations.” That describes the unfolding odyssey of the commons movement, whose rhythms are producing a lot of resonance.

Cross-posted from Bollier.org

The post Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The weak reforms enacted after the 2008 financial crisis….the ineffectuality of climate change negotiations over the course of twenty-one years….the social polarization and stark wealth and income inequality of our time. Each represents a deep structural problem that the neoliberal market/state seeks to ignore or only minimally address. As more Americans come to see that the state is often complicit in these problems, and only a reluctant, ineffectual advocate for change, there is a growing realization that seeking change within the system of electoral politics, Washington policy and the “free market” can only yield only piecemeal results, if that. There is a growing belief that “the system is rigged.” People have come to understand that “free trade” treaties, extractivist development, austerity politics and the global finance system chiefly serve an economic elite, not the general good. As cultural critic Douglas Rushkoff has put it, “I’ve given up on fixing the economy. The economy is not broken. It’s simply unjust.”

Struggle for change within conventional democratic arenas can often be futile, not just because democratic processes are corrupted by money and commercial news media imperatives, but because state bureaucracies and even competitive markets are structurally incapable of addressing many problems. The disappointing Paris climate change agreement (a modest commitment to carbon reductions after a generation of negotiations) suggests the limits of what The System can deliver. As distrust in the state grows, a very pertinent question is where political sovereignty and legitimacy will migrate in the future. Our ineffectual, unresponsive polity may itself be the problem, at least under neoliberal control.

The failures of The System come at the very time that promising new modes of production, governance and social practice are exploding. Twenty years after the World Wide Web went public, it has become clear that decentralized, self-organized initiatives on open networks can often out-perform both the market and state – a reality that threatens some core premises of capitalism.[1] The people developing a new parallel economy – sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity, as in Greece and Spain – are neither politicians, CEOs or credentialed experts. They are ordinary people acting as householders, makers, hackers, permaculturists, citizen-scientists, cooperativists, community foresters, subsistence collectives, social mutualists and commoners: a vast grassroots cohort whose generative activities are not really conveyed by the term “citizen” or “consumer.”

Through network-based cooperation and localized grassroots projects, millions of people around the world are managing all sorts of bottom-up, self-provisioning systems that function independently of conventional markets and state programs (or sometimes in creative hybrids). They are developing new visions of “development” and “progress,” as seen in the buen vivir ethic in Latin America, relocalization movements in the US and Europe, and the FabLabs and makerspaces that are reinventing production for use.

The new models also include alternative currencies, co-operative finance and crowdequity investments to reclaim local control….transition and indigenous peoples’ initiatives to develop sustainable post-growth economies….the growing movement to reclaim the city as a commons…. and movements to integrate social justice and inclusive ethical commitments into economic life. The scope of this blessed unrest suggests that even as establishment politics continues as if the 2008 crisis never happened, insisting that austerity policies are the answer, the actual terrain of governance, production, social economics and vernacular culture is shifting radically. For those with eyes to see, serious structural changes are underway.

The challenge facing members of the EDGE Funders Alliance is how to comprehend these tectonic shifts and develop a fresh vision with practical alternatives. How can philanthropic practices nourish the emerging paradigm of progressive change? For EDGE, this inquiry is a natural progression. EDGE has long focused on the need for a Just Transition that can bring forth new configurations of fair, democratic and inclusive governance and provisioning.[2] Still, the complexity and diversity of the system changes occurring suggest that grantmakers need to explore better ways to make sense of innovation at the edge, and to leverage it more aggressively. Progressive foundations need new venues and tools for identifying the most promising strategic opportunities, reinventing grantmaking processes, and collaborating more closely with vanguard thinkers, activists and policy innovators — as well as communities advancing systemic alternatives on the ground. This essay is an attempt to give better definition to what a process of Just Transition might look like in 2016 and beyond – and how progressive philanthropy might adapt to new realities and support transition efforts around the world.

1. Portrait of a Paradigm Shift: The New Emerging from The Shell of the Old

If an old paradigm is indeed waning, then the ways in which we understand new patterns of action cannot unthinkingly incorporate the worldview and vocabularies of The Old. They must reflect a new set of values and operational logics. They must give closer attention to fledging projects and ideas on the peripheries of the mainstream. Our discourse itself must slip the shackles of prevailing economic thought, such as the idea that money and wealth are identical; that the state and policy are the most important drivers of change; and that top-down, hierarchical control structures, whether state or corporate, are the best systems for meeting needs.

The dominant narrative of contemporary politics and public life is, of course, free market economics as the fundamental ordering principle for society. It enshrines the primacy of unlimited growth as an indicator of societal progress, aggressive competition for selfish gain, individualism unconstrained by community, and centralized hierarchies of administration and control. Insurgent narratives attempting to challenge the neoliberal framework, while fragmented and diverse, tend to emphasize certain common themes:

o Production and consumption for use, not profit;

o Bottom-up, decentralized decisionmaking and social cooperation;

o Stewardship of shared equity and predistribution of resources;

o An ethic of racial and gender inclusivism, transparency and fairness;

o Community self-determination and place-making over market dictates;

o A diversity of models adapted to local needs.

If there is a common thread to be seen in the great variety of movements seeking system-change, it is a rejection of a machine-like economy and Margaret Thatcher’s claim that “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” System-change advocates assert a humanistic vision of society as a living, biodiverse system. Countless social and moral economies stress the importance of stewarding the earth and all living systems; the priority of people’s basic needs over market exchange; and the importance of participation, inclusion and fairness in successful resource management and community governance.

The Twelve Principles of Permaculture, for example, emphasize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that we cannot focus on any separate element in isolation. We must focus on the proper relationships within an ecosystem, of which human beings are but one part. As first principles, permaculturists thus urge that any human interventions aim to care for the earth (so that all life systems can continue and multiply), care for people (so that they have access to resources necessary to their existence), and return any surplus (so that the system can continue to meet the needs of the earth and people). From these ideas flow many related ideas such as “catch and store energy,” “apply self-regulation and accept feedback,” “produce no waste,” and “design from patterns to details.” These principles may provide useful guideposts to funders as they consider what types of projects will “break the frame” of the current system and advance sustainable, humane alternatives.

The principles of permaculture complement the design principles for successful commons identified by the late Professor Elinor Ostrom, and highlight the need for focusing on new types of governance. A commons of farmland, a forest or a fishery succeeds, Ostrom found, because people are able to devise their own locally appropriate governance rules from the bottom up. Everyone is invited to participate in the governance, and everyone has access to low-cost conflict-resolution mechanisms. A variety of system-change movements around the world are now exploring ways to re-imagine governance structures – not just for commons, but for the state as well, and its relationship to markets.

Open Networks, Activism and Emergence

What’s notable about so many system-change movements is that their sovereign visions of change are incubating on the edges of mainstream politics and policy. They are often small-scale, grassroots endeavors that go unrecognized by conventional political discourse and policies. Even large progressive NGOs may marginalize or ignore these initiatives (as enumerated in Section 3) as too small or disaggregated to matter. Yet just as the best ideas that emerge on Internet platforms generally arise on the edge, where diverse innovation flourishes, so countless grassroots projects around the world serve as indispensable embryos of system-change. They are focused on building out their distinct vision on their own terms, eschewing reliance on law and macro-policy as their primary drivers. The DIY predisposition stems in part from the sheer difficulty of achieving things through government, the general lack of public funding, and the inherent limits of law and bureaucracy in actualizing change. But it also stems from a recognition of the great creative powers of individuals and communities, which the state and market as now constituted have no use for.

At both the grassroots level and in digital culture, system-critical organizations are reconfiguring themselves to leverage the power of open networks. Examples include the rise of the peasant farmers’ group La Via Campesina, the System for Rice Intensification (a kind of open source agriculture developed by farmers themselves), and transnational collaboration among indigenous peoples. Rather than trying to manage themselves as hierarchical organizations with proprietary franchises, reputations, and overhead to sustain, they are reinventing themselves as flexible players in open, fluid environments – as players in dynamic, collaborative movements. These new modes of network-driven activism succeed through the efficient self-organization of self-selected participants, supple coordination of activities, and fast cycles of creative iteration.

Such convergences can spur system change through emergence. In ecological terms, open networks often resemble “catchment areas” of a landscape in which numerous flows – water, vegetation, soil, organisms, etc. – come together and mutually give rise to an interdependent, self-replenishing catchment area: a lively, energy-rich zone.[3] Social change movements should emulate this dynamic as a way to foster emergence and system-change. As two students of complexity theory and social movements, Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, write:

When separate, local efforts connect with each other as networks, then strengthen as communities of practice, suddenly and surprisingly a new system emerges at a greater level of scale. This system of influence possesses qualities and capacities that were unknown in the individuals. It isn’t that they were hidden; they simply don’t exist until the system emerges. They are properties of the system, not the individual, but once there, individuals possess them. And the system that emerges always possesses greater power and influence than is possible through planned, incremental change. Emergence is how life creates radical change and takes things to scale.[4]

The old guard of electoral politics and standard economics has trouble comprehending the principle of emergence (or catchment), let alone recognizing the value of policy structures that could leverage and focus that dynamic power. It has consistently underestimated the bottom-up innovation enabled by open source software; the speed and reliability of Wikipedia-style coordination and knowledge-aggregation; and the power of social media and open platforms. Politicians have been stunned by the swarms of protesters that rallied for “net neutrality” policies in the US, and by the viral self-organization of the Occupy movement, the Indignados and Podemos in Spain, the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, and Syriza in Greece. Conventional schools of economics, politics and power do not comprehend the generative capacities of decentralized, self-organized networks. They apply obsolete categories of institutional control, as if trying to understand the ramifications of automobiles through the language of “horseless carriages.”

So, today: If we are serious about effecting system change, we need to emancipate ourselves from backward-looking concepts and vocabularies, and learn new ways of understanding social movements pioneering new patterns of human potential, provisioning and governance. Although system-change is often focused on transforming societal institutions and policies, it is equally an inner transformation — a re-examination of the concepts and words to which we have become acculturated. Wemust learn to change ourselves in light of the unfolding realities. And we need to hoist up new imaginaries as placeholders while we explore the field and experiment with the particulars.

Instead of clinging to the old left/right spectrum of political ideology, for example – which reflects the centrality of “the market” and “the state” in organizing society – we need to entertain new narratives that allow us to re-imagine new drivers of governance, production and culture. The challenge is to popularize new models from the edge that are more inclusive, participatory, transparent and socially convivial – ones that go beyond what is offered by electoral politics, the administrative state and market structures. How can the dozens of loosely associated transnational “tribes,” all sharing aspirations for system change, begin to collaborate more closely and federate themselves? Can they create new types of local/global culture and political power? The answers can only emerge through mutual exploration and co-creation.

These insights underscore the importance of the long view. It takes time to cultivate emergent structures – to learn from experiments, failures, peers, changing conditions, etc. It is therefore important to hold fast (yet flexibly) to a larger vision of society rather than chase isolated transactional reforms that do not contribute to to transformational goals. Many commentators such as Jeremy Rifkin argue persuasively that we are in the midst of epochal transitions in technology, communications, energy, and so on. With commensurate resolve and intelligence, funders must take full cognizance of long-term structural trends and design grantmaking strategies that assure socially equitable, democratic and ecologically sustainable outcomes..

2. Twin Strategies: Starve the Old While Building the New

A major problem in building a “new system” is that so many urgent contemporary problems must be addressed through the “old system” – existing government systems and law; concentrated, extractive markets; and corrupted electoral processes – at least in the short term. No socially concerned person can ignore these arenas of power. Yet it is equally clear that these systems will not self-reform themselves or automatically give rise to the transformational changes needed. Disruptive external catalysts and pressure are essential because “working within the system” tends to diminish the impetus and ambitions for change, as the past fifty years of citizen activism has shown.

It is therefore imperative to break the “attention frame” of the existing system of power – in economics, law, politics, culture — which subtly dictates the spectrum of credible, “respectable” options. So long as the neoliberal market/state remains the governing framework for acceptable change, the range of permissible solutions will be inadequate. Only a structural reconfiguration of power and new sorts of institutions will open up transformative solution-sets. And this can only be achieved by artfully engineering, sector by sector, a new socio-ecological economy with its own efficacy, values and moral authority.

Thus, along with a grand strategy of “Starving and Stopping” (within the Old), serious support must be given to “Building the New.” This means active, informed support for experimentation, outlier projects, deep conceptual thinking and analysis, strategy convenings, relationship building, and movement-building. It means developing an infrastructure to support an expanding web of learning, institutions and affiliations that help Build and Replicate the New. Since the basic goal is to catalyze a paradigm-shifting emergence (which arises in unpredictable, nonlinear ways), it is misguided to try to apply old-paradigm quantitative metrics to the early-stage instances of a new paradigm.

To give a rough sense of the Big Picture, this infographic depicts some key strategic fronts in the struggle to Starve the Old and Build the New. (This image was developed by Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project with the Climate Justice Alliance’s Our Power Campaign.)

As a matter of practical politics, it is complicated to simultaneously try to dismantle the old system from within while also attempting to Build the New. This is well illustrated by the struggle to develop transition strategies for climate change. Moving away from carbon-based fuels and finance capitalism and towards renewable energy and a post-consumerist economy must take place primarily within the old (corrupted, archaic) political and policy apparatus. But the fight to Starve the Old can be greatly assisted if it is connected to and coordinated with efforts to Build the New. The demonstration of feasible alternatives (renewable energy, cooperativism, relocalization, etc.) is itself a way to shift political momentum and the moral center of gravity toward system change. To work, this requires that alternatives incubated outside the existing system achieve a sufficient coherence, intelligibility, scale and functionality.

Two analogues illustrate this dynamic: The rise of Linux and other open source programs were significant socio-economic events because they weakened the market power and stature of Microsoft and other types of proprietary software; suddenly other options were credible and available. Similarly, a constellation of local food and anti-GMO movements, working mostly outside of policy arenas, have pioneered an alternative vision for growing, buying and enjoying food. This has forced agribusiness to change, stimulated new policy initiatives (anti-GMO labeling, e.g.) and shifted the conversation about what’s possible. Political and policy dimensions are not the primary focus but the secondary effects of Building the New. In both of these cases, the impetus for change came from innovative provisioning models; robust participatory communities; and an earned moral credibility that is widely recognized.

So rather than regard the Building of the New as too risky or marginal (because it is seen as peripheral to mainstream politics debate and today’s headlines), it is important to see emergent ventures as the real engine for long-term system change. A focus on Building the New is the only way that we can break out of the logic of the current political and economic system, and begin to validate and develop viable alternative systems. Building the New helps us see the limitations of what can be done within the parameters of existing paradigms while opening us up to alternative systems of knowledge and social practice. We need to draw upon diverse ways of knowing and being – culturally, ecologically, politically – as embodied in indigenous communities, peer production networks, ethnic and gender minorities, urban movements, and others.

The lessons gleaned from Building the New can be affirmatively used to advance a Just Transition. Two examples: Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation is now documenting the thermodynamic efficiencies of peer production (i.e., mass networked collaboration), such as the open design and local manufacturing of motor vehicles, household appliances and countless other products. These findings could help validate a whole universe of actors that are considered fringe phenomena in mainstream climate policy debate. Similarly, various commons activists are documenting how subsistence commons for farmlands, fisheries, forests and water, among other resources, function as more ecologically responsible alternatives to the extractive market economy, while still meeting people’s needs in locally responsive ways. Such commons represent attractive post-growth models. But this theater of action, too, is largely ignored by macro-policy players who prefer capital-friendly pricing of “ecosystem services,” “market solutions” and regulatory approaches.

How to Starve the Old while Building the New is obviously a complicated topic that demands much more scrutiny and debate. But this general framework provides a solid, holistic orientation to the broader challenges. It shifts the focus from individual project silos to the web of relationships among them, and to the larger vision of change. It also makes clear the intimate connections between Starving the Old and Building the New, and the need to align the flow of players and resources to create a new “catchment area for change.”

3. Building the New Requires Different Processes and Institutions — and a New Narrative

Building the New has a special importance in our times because we increasingly live in an institutional void of politics. As Dutch political scientist Maarten Hajer: “There are no clear rules and norms according to which politics is to be conducted and policy measures are to be agreed upon. To be more precise, there are no generally accepted rules and norms according to which policy making and politics are to be conducted.”[5] (original emphasis) The machinery of politics and government still exists, of course, but it has been captured by the large market players and its processes warped. Neoliberal policies have “hollowed out” government over the past generation, literally and politically, by crippling many state functions or transforming them into empty formalisms or distractions. The notional social contract that has stabilized conflicts among capital, labor and the general public is being incrementally dismantled.

Many NGOs and movements persist in “working within the system,” gamely hoping that success there will matter. This path is inescapable, of course; The System is too important to ignore. But it is also true, as massive protests in many countries have made clear, that neoliberal capture of representative government is arguably the biggest structural barrier to change today. The resulting void in legitimate governance, intensified by impediments to democratic participation, makes it even more imperative strategically to Build the New as a way to transform The Old.

Many citizens who in earlier generations might have engaged with politics and policymaking now see that route as pointless or secondary; they have shifted their energies toward “transnational, polycentric networks of governance in which power is dispersed,” writes Hajer. We thus see the emergence of new citizen-actors and new forms of mobilization seeking system change. This consists not just of periodic cultural surges such as Occupy, the Arab Spring, the Indignados and Syriza, but long-term movements focused on cooperatives, degrowth, the solidarity economy, Transition Towns, relocalized economies, peer production, the commons, and countless niche projects. Voting and other classical notions of citizenship now seem archaic and even futile, especially when contrasted with open Internet platforms and local projects that enable more meaningful forms of participation and results.

Much of the political energy for change in the late 1960s and early 1970s came from the invention of a new organizational form, the public interest group – a body of expert-advocates acting as proxies for the general public in various policy arenas, and mostly funded by individuals and institutional philanthropy. In 1969, nearly one-third of the Harvard Law School class applied to work with Ralph Nader in his brand of public-interest advocacy. Nearly two generations later, following the neoliberal takeover of the body politic and the rise of the Internet, creative idealists intent on making social change are far more likely to apply their energies to practical projects in local circumstances and digital apps, wikis and collectives. They are inventing network-based guilds like Enspiral, alternative currencies like the Bangla-Pesa in poor neighborhoods in Kenya, and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team to provide online mapping to assist first-responders after natural disasters. In such spaces, there are simply many more opportunities for participation, control, responsibility and satisfying outcomes than conventional politics and policy.

But if the two realms could somehow work more closely together? It could be tremendously catalytic. To be sure, the initiatives of many social entrepreneurs do not necessarily move beyond their niches or transform the mainstream paradigm. The challenge of catalyzing emergence remains something of a mystery and art. However, based on its study of living systems, complexity science suggests that there must be a “requisite variety” before a new order can sufficiently develop and supplant the old. To be able to address the external complexity of the world, the archetypes of the insurgent order must have a corresponding internal complexity of their own; resilience theory and the open source paradigm suggest that the new order will be based on a certain modularity, redundancy and diversity. Finally, as Donella Meadows and her colleagues argue in their 1992 update to Limits to Growth, the old order must not only reach its limits to grow, it must also “run out of the ability to cope” with rising incremental costs, declining marginal returns and soaring (unmanageable) complexity.

This analysis suggests some of strategic points of intervention for Building the New and making social change today. We need to learn more about promising new provisioning and governance models – i.e., new organizational forms. System-change players need focal points around which they can organize themselves, build relationships and learn from each other. New “sense-making” projects and institutions are needed to synthesize and interpret unfolding developments. All of these approaches require new modes of philanthropy to support them. But since Building the New is likely to occur in out-of-the-way, unfamiliar and international locations, some timely questions include: What do some of these efforts look like? What are they trying to accomplish? What new logic and vision are they trying to actualize, and how?

4. Some Key Movements Creating System-Change (An Incomplete List)

While this paper has focused on large conceptual themes, it is important to locate the struggle for a Just Transition within a sprawling universe of concrete initiatives. Specific projects pioneered by grassroots innovators and participation are the engines for system change – complemented, as possible, with supportive policy structures and infrastructure. This grassroots base is arguably the first priority because no political advocacy and policy change will succeed or endure without a diversified foundation of locally engaged practitioners. Moreover, experimentation and collaboration are essential in developing the practical new models for change. So….here are brief descriptions of some salient clusters of system-critical movements (among many others that could be named).

Cooperative Movement: Multistakeholder cooperatives / urban land trusts / cooperative finance / platform cooperativism

Global South Advocacy: Resistance to extractivism / Via Campesina / indigenous peoples / buen vivir / Nature’s rights

Social Inclusion: Racial and gender equity / migration and immigration / wealth & income inequality / Black Lives Matter

Climate Justice: Divestment & reinvestment / renewables & efficiency / North-South equity / finance reform

Post-Capitalist Local, Living Economies: Transition towns / Social and Solidarity Economy / Degrowth / Relocalization

Eco-Responsible Provisioning & Stewardship: Socio-ecological farming, fishing and forestry / renewable energy / decentralized infrastructure

Care Work: Families & eldercare / ecosystem stewardship / community work / arts & culture

Cities as commons: Collaborative cities / Public-commons partnerships

Digital Culture: Creative Commons / Open access publishing / Net neutrality / Intellectual property reform

Commons-based Peer Production: Open Source / Open Design and Manufacturing / Platform Cooperativism

Food Sovereignty: Agro-ecological / permaculture / Slow Food / CSAs / Fresno Common / seed sharing

Alternative Finance and Money: Money system reform / public banks / blockchain ledger / complementary currencies

Transversal Meta-Work: Commons analysis & discourse / post-capitalist economics and culture change / deep research / inter-movement relationship-building

5. Challenges for Philanthropy in Building the New

Building the New poses new challenges for traditional philanthropy because it can be quite difficult to step into the unknown. It’s not necessarily clear how to distinguish between credible and far-fetched plans, or to predict suitable timelines for progress — or even how to define success in a world in which “failure” is often a necessary building block of learning. It can be difficult to make intelligent evaluations of new-paradigm bellwethers, who tend to be idiosyncratic individuals acting in singular circumstances, and among small peer groups and underdeveloped fields. Finally, it can be difficult to assess whether and how a proposed project truly advances system change, or whether it simply modestly improves things within existing structures. There are no definitive answers to any of these concerns, but it is important for grantmakers to ask these questions of themselves and grantees.

If we accept the premise that a new paradigm will be emergent, then the process of fostering the new world struggling to be born will be different than known processes. It will be more of an immersive, participatory process of collaborative discovery and co-creation, rather than something that influential experts will design in advance, implement and impose. Open networks have underscored the point that change occurs through many independent agents operating in a holistic living system. It is not just the Earth’s ecosystems that are interconnected, but our cultural behaviors and political institutions. Thus change-making in a globally integrated world is highly dynamic, evolving and participatory. It is necessarily collaborative, not just with other change-agents, but with a larger web of other grantmakers and institutional allies.

In light of these realities, the EDGE Funders Alliance is structuring its annual Just Giving gathering in 2016 to be less a conference than a facilitated retreat that actively engages all participants. Traditional workshops will be replaced by ongoing “engagement lab” discussions led by EDGE members and many inspiring and thoughtful civil society partners. In other words, the dialogues between grantees and grantmakers will aim to deepen mutual understanding of Just Transition narratives and practice. The goal is to encourage learning from each other and identify timely, strategic opportunities that promote systemic alternatives at the local, national, and international levels. Instead of segregating initiatives by “issue areas” or movements, it is our hope that the interconnected nature of social, economic, environmental and governance challenges will be highlighted. We hope this leads to closer coordination in moving money for resourcing change.

We believe that the struggle to imagine and build a post-neoliberal capitalist system can only emerge through iterative, exploratory processes. It will require many small, decentralized projects that speak to local needs and sensibilities. Top-down policies and infrastructures are often needed to assist this process, but the horizontal connections among frontline innovators, and between them and conventional policy advocacy, must be robust.

Orchestrating a better alignment between these two theaters of action – Starving the Old and Building the New – is likely to unleash new self-feeding energies and collaborations and, one hopes, new catchment areas for change. Conventional politics and advocacy will not rally for paradigm-shifting initiatives unless they are allied with outsider visionaries. Conversely, if these visionaries have only thin ties to conventional political and legal players, their bold new ideas may well wither on the vine, unable to protect themselves in a hostile environment.[6]

Through its Just Giving 2016 conference, periodic retreats and a Co-Learning Collaborative, EDGE Funders Alliance seeks to instigate better ways to stimulate system-change and promote equity and sustainable practice today, within a framework that recognizes the need for deep social and ecological transformation over the long term. These processes are admittedly experimental and some may not succeed. But intelligent forms of mutual collaboration, learning and support are absolutely necessary in building a philanthropy commensurate with the challenges facing the world.

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This essay was developed with generous support from the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Berlin, Germany.

The post Progressive Philanthropy Needs to Spur System Change appeared first on P2P Foundation.