Ed Mayo: Co-operation has always attracted visionary thinkers and Robin Murray, who passed away recently, was one.

Robin was an Associate of Co-operatives UK from 2010, alongside a host of distinguished affiliations, such as the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Young Foundation.

He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at the LSE. He then joined the London Business School, where he lectured in Economics, moving to the Institute of Development Studies, at the University of Sussex, where he was a Fellow for 20 years.

In the 1980s, he was appointed by Ken Livingstone, London Mayor, as Director of Industry for the Greater London Council, helping to promote a new industrial strategy which at a time of rapid economic change, with a hollowing out of industry in the capital, had extraordinary success. Robin worked with a team of talented colleagues, including Michael Ward, who went on to found the Centre for Local Economics Strategies, and Hilary Wainwright, later founder of Red Pepper.

In 1985, he helped to found Twin and Twin Trading – fair trade pioneers with a focus on the practical development of co-operatives in supply chains overseas. Twin’s sister was Traidcraft, founded out of the Christian churches, whereas Twin’s roots were in the trade union and co-operative sectors.

In the 1990s, he served as Director of Development in the Government of Ontario, returning with a passion for green enterprise. He also co-wrote the first pamphlet for the think-tank Demos on reforming taxation, which made him front page news for a short while. That wasn’t what he craved.

A true collaborator …

Robin was someone who enjoyed collaboration, with a breadth of interests and a passion for learning. As Stephen Yeo comments, Robin’s own achievements were “always drowned by his enthusiasms for what his friends and comrades had done”.

In 2011, true to that, he delivered on a commission that I had approached him to lead, which was to look at the future of the co-operative sector. The report Co-operation in the Age of Google was hugely influential here in the UK and overseas.

He made it clear that the sector had lost some of the cutting edge that it had arguably held before, identifying the extent to which co-operative methodologies had been adapted for use outside of the formal co-operative sector.

His recommendations embraced ambition – a passionate supporter of the case for co-operative education, he argued for the establishment of a Co-operative University (a concept which is moving closer) as well as an Innovation Programme, which started work at Co-operatives UK the following year, with the first Co-operative Innovation Prize, run in partnership with the Department for Business and with Robin on the judging panel.

At Co-operative Congress in 2011, Robin presented his findings and stayed talking with co-operative development practitioners in the bar with characteristic charm and politeness until 3am in the morning.

He also served on the Wales Commission on Co-operatives and Mutuals. As good as that report was, the flow of creative and substantive emails from Robin as a Commissioner encouraging a look at wider options, such as a co-operative investment bank for Wales modelled on Caja Laboral in Spain, pointed to what could have been.

… and social innovator

When the idea of ‘social innovation’ started to gain recognition, Robin travelled widely to spread the word. He emailed me after visiting Crumlin Gaol in Belfast. He was there to talk about social innovation in the context of peace and reconciliation. Later he was shown round the gaol – “so shocking” he reported “that I find it hard to write about”.

But write about he did: “I was with one of the people who had been interned there in the 70s and who had (bravely, I thought) decided to return. Talk about co-operation! The extraordinary and terrible world of the prisoners. The prisoner’s dilemma which is all about individualism is in some ways the opposite of what seems to characterise life there.

“The ex prisoner was the one who has been the driver of the Irish language movement in the Falls Road, which now has 41 schools that teach Irish across the communities. One of his favourite words is meitheal, that is pronounced mehal, which he translated as together, or what one days when there is a break in the weather and adjoining farms work together to save the hay. But we might translate as mutual or co-operative.”

In recent years, as an Associate of Co-operatives UK, Robin was active in working with Pat Conaty and Laurie Gregory among others on the challenges of social care and the kind of innovations that could develop a person-centred approach. He was drawing in part on his time at the Design Council, in part on his acute sense of how to make mutuality work in business terms, for commercial advantage. He was an active supporter of his local co-operatives, in Hackney, where he lived, and Cumbria, where he rested.

John Restakis this week called Robin “a beacon of hope, insight, and optimism for so many of us.” Hilary Wainwright said that “Robin exuded vigour and hope. And he infected those around him with his mood”. Michel Bauwens, of the P2P Foundation, has written that “my conversations with him had been electrifying, and we stayed in touch, meeting a few times in between. He was an amazing man and his life story left me speechless. He was a true hero!”

The LSE economist Carlota Perez is collecting Robin’s writings with the intention to publish these as an online collection.

My last time with Robin was spent by his bed, talking about values and how co-operatives work well when their values inspire them to be courageous, to do new things.

To the end, he was hopeful and I sign off this tribute with his own words of hope:

“The informal information economy is open and global. It is driven by interest and enthusiasm rather than money. The bulk of its traffic is free. It is taking time to digest the implications of these changes, and for those involved to work out what rules are necessary to govern behaviour. Some have seen it as a new form of the commons, and looked at codes of behaviour that have been developed by those using common land or fishing grounds. But this informal economy is more than sharing a common resource, for with the web the resource is unlimited. It is a site for relationships, and where joint projects are involved, it requires the kind of qualities found in those pioneer communities where everyone worked together to raise the roof of a home.

“It is growing with the speed and diversity of a tropical forest. It is informal and astonishingly inventive. It shares many of the same values and practices of formal co-operatives, and opens up numerous possibilities for a meshing between them. William Morris’s News from Nowhere depicted a world based on mutualism that for more than a century was seen as utopian. But in the last decade it has emerged as a reality not on the banks of the Thames but in the world of the web.”

• To mark Robin’s death, Co-operatives UK has published in an open form a chapter by Robin Murray from the recent multi-authored book, Co-operative Advantage: co-operation, innovation and how sharing business ownership is good for Britain. You can read it here.
• Read other tributes to Robin from Divine Chocolate,  openDemocracy, The Young Foundation and Co-operatives Wales.

The post Robin Murray: a tribute appeared first on P2P Foundation.

An important new book offering a vision of commons-based law has just arrived!  The Ecology of Law:  Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community, argues that we need to reconceptualize law itself and formally recognize commoning if we are going to address our many environmental problems.

The book is the work of two of the more venturesome minds in science and law – Fritjof Capra  and Ugo Mattei, respectively. Capra is a physicist and systems thinker who first gained international attention in 1975 with his book The Tao of Physics, which drew linkages between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. Mattei is a well-known legal theorist of the commons, international law scholar and commons activist in Italy who teaches at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and at the University of Turin. He is also deputy mayor of Ch­ieri in the northern region of Italy.

The Law of Ecology is an ambitious, big-picture account of the history of law as an artifact of the scientific, mechanical worldview – a legacy that we must transcend if we are to overcome many contemporary problems, particularly ecological disaster. The book argues that modernity as a template of thought is a serious root problem in today’s world.  Among other things, it privileges the individual as supreme agent despite the harm to the collective good and ecological stability. Modernity also sees the world as governed by simplistic, observable cause-and-effect, mechanical relationships, ignoring the more subtle dimensions of life such as subjectivity, caring and meaning.

As a corrective, Capra and Mattei propose a new body of commons-based institutions recognized by law (which itself will have a different character than conventional state law).

It’s quite a treat to watch two sophisticated dissenters outline their vision of a world based on commoning and protected by a new species of “ecolaw.” Capra and Mattei start their story by sketching important parallels between natural science and jurisprudence over the course of history. Both science and law, for example, reflect shared conceptualizations of humans and nature.  We still live in the cosmological world articulated by John Locke, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, all of whom saw the world as a rational, empirically knowable order governed by atomistic individuals and mechanical principles. This worldview continues to prevail in economics, social sciences, public policy and law.

The audacity of The Ecology of Law is its claim to explain the pathologies of modernity as they affect life today:  how this worldview prevents us from effectively addressing our many ecological catastrophes, and how jurisprudence as now conceived is a key element of this problem.  Modernity is based on the sanctity of private property and state sovereignty, write Capra and Mattei, an order that presumes to be an “objective,” natural representation of reality. Distinctions such as “private” and “public,” and “individual” and “collective,” are also presumed to be self-evident descriptions of reality.

For those of us involved with the commons, of course, we know that this is a highly reductionist and misleading way of understanding the world.  Commoning proposes more integrated categories for understanding how human beings function in the world.  In actual experience, individuals are nested within collectives, and they develop and flourish as individuals only in cooperating with others.  Similarly, subjective experience and objective fact are not isolated; they blur together.  The either/or divisions of modernity are a kind of consensual social fiction.

Law in modern societies is one of the most important tools for affirming (misleading) categories of thought.  For example, law presumes that if there is no external limit imposed on an individual citizen, each is free to act as a “rational actor” to extract as much from nature as he/she wishes.  This is presumed to improve upon nature, create value and advance human progress – a social DNA that has run amok and is destroying the planet.  In the worldview of modernity, individuals are imagined as the primary agents of change, and as isolated agents without history, social commitments or context.  This gives individuals permission to be as self-regarding and hedonistic as they wish, a dangerous capitalist-libertarian delusion that continues to hold deep sway.

Imagining a post-capitalist future, then, is not simply about passing a new law or instituting a new set of policies.  It requires that we confront our deep assumptions about worldview.  What we need, Capra and Mattei argue, is a major paradigm shift in the worldview of science and law that reflects a different understanding of nature and human beings.  We need to shift from a paradigm that sees the world as a machine, to a systemic, ecological paradigm that sees the world as a network of interdependencies.

We need to see that law is not something that exists independently “out there” as an objective reality.  It is a socially constructed order; a power that we must reclaim.  “Law is always a process of commoning,” Capra and Mattei write, reminding us that law emerges from communities of commoners.  This insight can help us build a new “ecolegal order” with three strategic objectives, they argue:  to disconnect law from power and violence (the nation-state); to make communities sovereign; and to make ownership generative.

It’s impossible to summarize all of the rich threads flowing through The Ecology of Law, so let me settle here for sharing a flavor of the argument made by the authors:

The most important structural solution to the rush toward final disorder is to restore some harmony between human laws and the laws of nature by giving law back to networks of communities. If the people were to understand the nature of law as an evolv­ing common, reflecting local conditions and fundamental needs, they would care about it. People would understand that the law is too important to remain in the hands of organized corporate interests.  We are the makers and users of the law.

An ecological understanding of law, the only revolution pos­sible through culture and genuine civic engagement, overcomes both hierarchy and competition as “correct” narratives of the le­gal order. It seeks to capture the complex relationships among the parts and the whole—between individual entitlements, duties, rights, power, and the law—by using the metaphor of the network and of the open community sharing a purpose.

Instead of being alienated from the law governing them, the participants in [commons] are their own law-givers and en­forcers; they stand outside of any power concentration and or any claim of monopoly over violence. They overcome the artificial dis­tinction between a private and a public sphere of their lives. Inter­pretation of law is here a nonprofessional exercise in the sharing of collective meaning. Law, when it is separated from depending on power and violence, is like language, culture, or the arts: it becomes a way through which a collectivity communicates and decides about itself.

The post Highly Recommended Book of the Day:: Capra & Mattei’s “The Ecology of Law” appeared first on P2P Foundation.