This week we are talking about deepening democracy in our communities through participatory budgeting and participatory decision making more broadly. We’re joined by three great guests: Shari Davis of the Participatory Budgeting Project, Lorian Ngarambe of the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative, and Yale University Ph.D. student Alexander Kolokotronis.

Adam Simpson: Welcome to The Next System podcast. I’m your host, Adam Simpson. Today we’re talking about participatory budgeting and, more broadly, broadening the scope of democracy in our communities and movements. We have a great group of guests lined up, starting with Shari Davis, co-executive director of the Participatory Budgeting Project. Shari, welcome to the program.

Shari Davis: Thank you so much.

Adam Simpson: We also have Alexander Kolokotronis, a Ph.D. student at Yale University, and founder and board chair of the Student Organization for Democratic Alternatives. Alex, thanks for joining.

Alexander Kolokotronis: Thanks for having me.

Adam Simpson: And we also have Loriane Ngarambe, a community engagement specialist with the United Way. Loriane, it’s great to have you with us.

Loriane Ngarambe: So excited to be here.

Adam Simpson: Shari, can you start us off with just a brief intro into participatory budgeting. What is it? How does it work? What are some of the benefits and limitations?

Shari Davis: Sure. Participatory budgeting is something that gets me really excited. I’m a person who worked in local government in the City of Boston, Massachusetts for just about 15 years overseeing youth services. While I had seen a lot of really interesting and innovative approaches to community engagement, participatory budgeting was an opportunity to explore that in a way that I hadn’t seen before. My first introduction to this was in my role overseeing youth initiatives. The mayor coming to me saying, “I really want young people to play a leadership role, not just a figurehead role, in how I govern and in how I make the City of Boston better.” When a community, a school, an institution adopts participatory budgeting, it really marks a change in the way that they govern, and a change in a way that they have a relationship with their constituency or broader community.

From that initial introduction, I learned that participatory budgeting is relatively new in the United States, but, globally, it’s been around for several decades. That said, the way that we practice it in the US is also a bit different. The first thing that happens, and my favorite part to ensure transparency, is that community members come together to write the rules that will govern a participatory budgeting process. Then we enter the idea-collection phase, where we collect hundreds, if not thousands, of ideas on how to spend a pot of money to make a community better. We’re not talking about the entire public budget; we’re talking about identifying a space, a line item in the budget, where we can make some decisions together.

After we collect those ideas, we go into the next phase, maybe my most favorite. This is proposal development. This is where community members come together and form a couple of committees to review all of the ideas that have come in based on need, feasibility, and impact. This is an important piece around ensuring equity, not only for the projects that come in but the projects that make it onto the ballot. They work alongside agency or institutional staff to distill and vet those projects so that we have final projects for the ballot. Nothing makes it on a participatory budgeting ballot unless it can really happen if it gets enough votes.

We enter the almost final phase then, the voting phase. Unlike traditional local or national elections, the voting phase is usually a bit longer. It can last a week. And the vote goes out to where people are. That steering committee, and the folks that have been involved in the process, really think about who is typically left out, and how do we really center their engagement in this process, so that their voice is heard. After the vote phase, the projects with the most votes are implemented, truly enacted in the community, until that pot of funds runs out. Then the process begins again the following year, after an evaluation.

When a community, a school, an institution adopts participatory budgeting, it really marks a change in the way that they govern and a change in a way that they have a relationship with their constituency or broader community. That’s the quick-and-dirty overview.

Adam Simpson: Wow, so much to dig into there. Thank you for that, Shari. In particular, you mentioned that participatory budgeting isn’t a new idea. I’ve actually read in some of your work, Alex, that the tradition of participatory democracy having both international indigenous roots. Can you say a bit more about this and how you view participatory budgeting fitting into that historical tradition?

Alexander Kolokotronis: Sure. Traditionally, I think we connect these things to direct democracy, and we think of ancient Athens. But I think a lot of recent work, in the last few decades, has been connecting up this notion around participatory democracy to the Iroquois Confederacy here in the United States. Most recently, in explicit work on participatory democracy, Michael Menser really foregrounds this in his beginning chapters of his book, We Decide. But on through that, into history, we see a lot of other instances of participatory democratic praxis on a wide scale. So, of course, there are the traditions I’ve just mentioned, but then we see larger cases in the 20th century, such as the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s. Then, of course, the coining of the term, participatory democracy, in the ’60s by Students for a Democratic Society in their Port Huron Statement, which itself has a lot of international renown.

Often, if I mention that some of the things I’m looking into with my own research include SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, I’ll hear people from various parts of the world say, “The Port Huron Statement and participatory democracy.” But its practical roots really, really lie in different areas of the world, including right here with the Iroquois Confederacy.

Adam Simpson: Now, there are a variety of ways that participatory budgeting can be deployed. In Loriane in Monroe County, New York, this was part of the antipoverty initiative that you were involved in, which incorporated a participatory budgeting process. What do you think was different about the outcomes, and the initiatives, of that process, as opposed to the outcomes that would have been advanced from a more top-down process, either from city leaders alone, or social impact investors, nonprofits, et cetera? What do you think was different about the fact that this process to alleviate poverty in the Rochester, Monroe County area because of the participatory nature of it? For so long, you’ve always had content experts, people who understand poverty and the issues that people are going through, because it’s the work that they do or it’s what they studied. But context experts are those people who understand poverty because it’s literally their lives.

Loriane Ngarambe: This is the thing I always use whenever I’m talking about communities, or other community engagement efforts over at RMAPI: It’s always that the people closest to the problem are closest to the solution. And for so long, any time people are talking about poverty, and strategies, and solutions you always have this top-down approach. I look at this through a context of content experts, and context experts. And for so long, you’ve always had content experts, people who understand poverty and the issues that people are going through, because it’s the work that they do or, maybe, it’s what they studied. But context experts are those people who understand poverty because it’s literally their lives. They understand it through, and through, because it’s not just a nine-to-five thing for them, right?

Adam Simpson: Right.

Loriane Ngarambe: When they go home, they still have to deal with the poverty. At night, they deal with it when things are good. When things are bad, they understand it at a deeper level. A PB process really allowed an opportunity to see just what happens when you give these context experts an opportunity to really tell you what makes sense for them, right?

Adam Simpson: Right.

Loriane Ngarambe: The PB process allowed for ideas to come up that could be sitting at tables for decades and an idea like 24-hour daycare, that was one idea that came out a couple of times when we’re doing idea collection. It’s just like, “Wait, why isn’t that something that happens more often?” You have A, B, and C-shift jobs, but when you think of daycare, it’s usually for people who are working A-shift. But then there’s all these jobs that are available, and people, especially single mothers, aren’t able to take advantage of them, because they don’t have something like 24-hour daycare, where they can be secure on where they’re leaving their child. It’s things like that, that make the PB process make sense because they’re able to bring ideas and propose solutions that a content expert may not think about, because their understanding to the problem is limited to their experience.

Loriane Ngarambe: So PB just allowed us to really highlight what happens when you co-create solutions with community, rather than come up with an idea, a creative solution, and then present it to the community that has to live with the consequences of whatever decisions are made. So PB just allowed us to highlight that, and it’s really given us a lot of momentum, and energy, and buy-in from the community, as well, too. Now, you have people who then, as part of this process, that say, “We want more. How can we be more involved? What are more opportunities where we can really let our voices shine through?” And it’s just been an incredible experience for us.

Adam Simpson: That’s something I want to ask about directly. I think Shari mentioned a little bit what the process of participatory budgeting looked like, but I’m interested, particularly, in how you get people involved and engaged. I know that a lot of people, they have work, they have, as you mentioned, childcare, they have so many duties going on. Did you find it difficult to get people engaged? What were the strategies you employed there? In your experience, were people really eager to get involved?

Loriane Ngarambe: The main strategy that we used, that was really important, was meeting people where they were at, and not making this be an additional thing that they have to do. For instance, in idea collection, just getting out there and getting people more informed and engaged with what was going on. We would go to places like our Department of Human Services, where people are going to be sitting there for hours anyway to get their benefits or go to their appointments. So, instead of making a meeting, later on in the evening, where they have to find their way there, meet people where they’re at, go to schools, go to libraries, go to rec centers, go to churches, meet people where they’re at. Identify your key communities’ members, people who already have those relationships, people who will be advocates for what’s going on.

It’s a ripple effect, essentially, right? We’ve identified our 20 key people who really understand what PB is and are really for it. So they start going onto their networks and that’s, really, how the engagement bloomed, how the engagement grew. Then you’d have people hitting up our Facebook page, people reaching out to us because their cousin, who goes to their church, told them about this thing that they’ve been taking a part of. That’s really how we were able to get that engagement going. It wasn’t because of what me and my colleague, Graham, are doing. It was more about the people who understood this for what it was and were passionate about it, and so they were looping in their neighbors, their friends, their family. That’s really how the engagement happened.

Then just meeting people where they’re at, mitigating barriers. If we knew that childcare was an issue, then we made sure we had childcare available at a meeting that we had. We made sure we had food. We had giveaways, if people needed it, just to incentivize people to be able to get there, so it’s worth their time, essentially. I don’t want you to have to leave your kids to come participate and be engaged; bring them with you. We’ll have things for them to do, as well, too. Just meeting people where they’re at and being cognizant of the barriers they need to be facing and how you can help mitigate that. That was really important for us.

Adam Simpson: Wow. That sounds like a really amazing process. Shari, could you say a little bit about this and your experience? What do you see as the most successful strategies for getting the community engaged in these participatory processes?

Shari Davis: Well, one thing I want to just underscore is this principle that was mentioned before, and that’s around content and context expertise. I often say, “If I were to build a building, I would get an expert.” I would go get an architect because I don’t want the building to fall down. So, if I’m going to build a healthy community, I need experts to do that. I need people that live, walk, breath, and exist in that space on a regular basis. When we’re infusing their ideas, impact, and, really, voice, we’re able to build communities that are responsive to generations to come. I think that’s a really important piece here.

In terms of what we’ve seen work, and how this really works is, is centering those folks—who now we’re turning to as experts, and have always been experts and leaders in their own right. But if we’re going to center their engagement, we have to design the process with them, and not for them, and that’s why this steering committee component is so important. If we want single parents, or parents period, to participate, then we have to really think through childcare, times that we’re meeting. If we want young people to be in the room, then we probably can’t meet at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. These considerations and the design process are essential. And that’s not me, Shari, or other members of PBP, that make those decisions. It’s the important folks that are on the ground, the folks that work in government, but especially those that are of the community that we’re trying to engage in a participatory budgeting process, really need to be at the helm of that design.

That’s what we’ve seen work in Oakland, where there’s no minimum voting age, anyone of any age, as long as they can interact with the materials, can participate. That’s what we’ve seen work in the City of Boston, where young people reported being more likely to engage in their community or being more likely to vote in a local or national election, as a result of participation. That’s what we saw in Phoenix, Arizona, where the entire school district engaged in a participatory budgeting process. And, last year, nearly a thousand of those young people that engaged in the PB process also registered to vote in local and national elections.

That’s what we’ve seen be a big piece of success is making sure that community, and those that are representative of their community, are really involved in the design process early, and in a way that they can make some decisions.

Loriane Ngarambe: Just to add to that, real quick. Here, in Rochester, we have a community advisory council. This is made up of community members who have decided to take on that extra time to really be involved with what’s going on, and provide input and guidance to the solutions and programs, and conversation, that are being had around what’s going to be happening with our communities. They played a really important role in the education part of introducing PB to the community. We brought it to them. We explained what it was to them, and they helped with the creation of our steering committee, and getting the word out there. Just to back up that statement, that was a huge, huge component of this, as well, too for us.

Shari Davis: I think you were touching on something that’s super important, and I know Alex can attest to this too. Often times we see councils and engagement strategies, and the councils may work, sometimes they’re a bit defunct, so participatory budgeting can be a way to really build robust advisory council level support. And, to your point, really allow them to infuse the beginning stages of planning that lead to the steering committee creation. And, in the City of Boston, we saw that with the Mayor’s Youth Council. They became huge ambassadors and key to the success of participatory budgeting, and really ran this process, and continue to now. I know that’s true, in terms of what Alex has seen, on the university scale, as well. Things like participatory budgeting on a very, very simple level allow people to connect with one another and identify different things in their neighborhood that they didn’t even have any awareness of.

Alexander Kolokotronis: Yeah, to add to that. At the university scale what we’ve seen is—and you’ll find this again; this is another product of the ’60s—so many schools have a series of advisory committees in every aspect of the school structure, in terms of making school policy, or making recommendations for school policy. What we found, when we were doing our participatory budgeting process at Queens College, was that there were all these committees for different things, related to finance, related to buildings and grounds, related to all these things. As we looked through the lists, nearly all the students’ seats were vacant. It really astonished us, because it was clear that in a school with 20,000 students, there was an opportunity there and that no one, nearly no one, was taking up this opportunity to push things forward.

At the same time, we were recognizing that these are advisory structures and, after all, we, ourselves, are pushing for a process where we actually had decision-making power and weren’t simply being shuffled off into advisory seats that we were afraid might not affect change. But the result in having a participatory budgeting process is that people felt anchored, and felt able to try out, maybe, also sitting on some of these advisory seats, and, maybe, also having that feedback into the participatory budgeting process itself at Queens College.

The effect has been, over the last few years, that students have consistently found certain committees are really great to work within and are able to push things that sometimes may spill out of the PB process. For example, we have, at Queens College, a lot of technology projects have been pushed, rather simply having those projects having funds allocated through PB itself, they’ll be brought into the technology feed committee and will be pushed that way. We’ve seen, in that case, a lot of spillover effects in terms of the preexisting advisory structures and how PB not only provides people with the confidence to step up into positions in those councils or committees but also brings in the information and all the different perspectives that are accumulated through PB into those advisory structures themselves, affecting change in a lot of different ways.

And that’s what we’ve seen, where projects have been, ultimately, taken up and have been funded well beyond the PB process itself at Queens College.

Adam Simpson: I’m really interested in what your views are, all of you really, on participatory processes at different layers beyond different governments, including universities, as you mentioned, Alex, or neighborhoods, and workplaces, et cetera. But maybe, in an effort to begin gesturing toward that, I think one of the really resonating things to me about participatory budgeting is that the community—and this is what I’ve heard from Shari and Loriane—is being treated explicitly as the actor rather than something that’s acted upon. Alex, I wanted to ask, in your research, have you seen what effect this level of gesturing toward direct democracy has on broader social participation and building a sense of community and community wellbeing?

Alexander Kolokotronis: Absolutely. I think, actually, this indirectly gets back into one of the earlier questions you asked, in terms of traditions that this all derives from or is related to. A big push in the first half of the 20th century, and is now, of course, creeping back in and is something that is often addressed by The Next System Project is a push towards workers’ control, towards cooperatives, and towards, really, trying to reshape the workplace from something that is seemingly separate, or it feels separate, from us to something that actually can constitute a community in its own right.

Things like participatory budgeting, I think, do the same thing for neighborhoods, and for any institution that’s using participatory, or has a participatory, budgeting process where people might feel quite apart and distinct from their neighborhood. That’s something you’ll experience, for example, in New York City, where I’m from, where people often get caught up in their daily commute, caught up in a lot of the different transformations of New York City, where, maybe, a lot of locally owned businesses have now terminated. A lot of the community and civic life has slowly been drained. And, of course, New York City has been a big battleground for things like this, when we think of, for example, Jane Jacobs in the ’60s and ’70s, and the fights around neighborhoods and maintaining a neighborhood vitality.

Things like participatory budgeting on a very, very simple level allow people to connect with one another and identify different things in their neighborhood that they didn’t even have any awareness of. This is something I’ve seen time and again. But, in terms of my own research, I really look at participatory democracy within public schools. There are a few reasons for that. One, actually, connects to what Shari and Loriane were talking about. I view the adult-child relationship as the first iteration of the expert-layperson relationship. For me, when I think about these issues in terms of expertise, when it comes to architecture, when it comes to medicine, or when it comes to physical infrastructure, and we talk about the very particular distinctions between expertise in all those realms, I try to get at that thinking about, “Well, how is this expert-layperson relationship constructed from the very beginning and, particularly, within schools?”

Alexander Kolokotronis: I think one thing that we see in schools is that kids, and children, and teachers themselves, often experience the school as theirs, like “This is my school,” or “At my school, we’re doing this.” But, at the same time in their daily life, their daily experiences, they don’t necessarily feel the school is really theirs. Something like participatory democratic processes, including PB, really allow for people to not just take ownership of the school, and take ownership in the sense that what is theirs is actually really theirs, but that they are an agent, as you push forward, within that setting and can constitute themselves as a collective agent in the process.

I’ve seen that in my own research in the way in which students and teachers at more traditionally and, dare I say, authoritarian-structured schools have a far different sense of, and range of emotions, when it comes to their setting, than those, even if there are problems and difficulties at participatory democratic schools and trying to build a community around that, as well. I mean, that might be a long-winded way of getting at that, but I think we see that daily in the daily distinctions between different types of schools and how well incorporated people are, in terms of acting within them.

Shari Davis: Alex, you bring up something that’s so important to me and, as you were talking, I was just thinking about one thing. That is, a lot of what we talk about when it comes to democracy—and we haven’t talked about it or defined the problem—there is no secret that a lot of folks are not happy, or feel that government is not designed for the benefit of all. There’s been reasonable research on this, and I think that one part of the long-game strategy to addressing this bigger problem is to change government, and to change who’s in government, so that government looks like the people that we see in communities, so that they’re familiar with the issues, and so that there is more of a conversation, and there’s not this big divide between those individuals.

How do we prepare folks for roles? Not everyone necessarily wants to be, or is interested in being, an elected official. There are so many roles in government that serve community and I ask myself this question: What does lifelong civic engagement look like? What does onboarding look like? I was a young person who started working in government as a teenager and had nearly a 15-year career in local government, and that was unique. How do we not make that a unique story and make that an opportunity that folks can really attain, and lean into, and explore, especially as a young person? I think, to Alex’s point, introducing that in a school context is so important, and then can become foundational. And organizationally, at the Participatory Budget Project, that’s why we’re not only focusing our efforts on the county level, and citywide level, and regional, and larger scale PB, but we’re also really focusing on school, and school-district level PB, because it’s so important to empower our young leaders that are not future leaders but are leaders today, and need tools and support. [Participatory budgeting] is a way to crack that door open, and now we just have to figure out how to keep that door open, because you have people who, when their eyes are open, want to be more involved.

Loriane Ngarambe: For us, we also had our Mayor’s Youth Advisory group that was heavily involved in this whole entire process. And the energy that they brought, and just the innovation that they brought to this process, it wouldn’t have been what it was without them. To just piggy-back off of when you’re trying to say, “How can we get communities that are more centrally engaged?” You’re right, it is foundational. It needs to start early on.

I know when we would go out into the community and tell people about what this PB process is, you have community members who almost feel siloed from the democratic process that’s going on. You have these people in position of power making decisions, but, to them, it’s like, “I got to figure things out for me. I don’t have time to worry about what they’re doing or how they’re doing it.” Because, in their minds, decisions that are being made are not being made with them in mind because, if that was the case, then these decisionmakers would be way more informed about what really matters for people living in poverty. They’d be more aware of what is it that community members are doing that works, that we can build from, what is it that community members are missing that we’re missing on our end, as well.

This process, a lot of it, was just relationship building and education, as well, too, really informing community members of the power that their voices have. The power that they have, as a collective, when they really stand up and say, “Hey, enough is enough,” or “This is what we need. This is what should be happening.” In RMAPI community engagement, it’s a huge cornerstone, a huge part of the work that we’re doing, because we understand poverty is not going to be reduced, eradicated, or any other word, if community is not a part of what’s going on.

Again, I keep saying this, PB is a way to crack that door open, and now we just have to figure out how to keep that door open, because you have people who, when their eyes are open, want to be more involved; they want to know, “How can I, in my sphere of influence, do something that can make a difference? How can I be more involved? How can I be part of this greater democratic process? What does that look like? There just needs to be more education and strategies around making sure people get the information that they need. So, whatever they decide to do with that, at least, they have that information.

Adam Simpson: I want to turn from how we’re thinking about community engagement and broadening this scope of democracy, and think about how racial equity fits into that. Shari, I know I’ve seen you highlight, and you, as well, Loriane, in the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative, a participatory budgeting process as a pathway to creating racial equity, and bring that, really, out of frame and into focus. Shari, could I start with you? Can you tell me about the impacts you’ve seen and how participatory budgeting, and participatory processes, in general, can really begin building pathways toward racial equity?

Shari Davis: Absolutely. Since 2009, the first instance of participatory budgeting in the US, we’ve seen over 400,000 people be empowered to decide how to invest over $300 million on community projects in over 30 cities across the United States and Canada. The participatory budgeting projects have played a lead role in most of these processes in US and Canada at some point. For us, ensuring equity, and racial equity, in particular, is a little bit different in every space. No two PB processes are the same, but, honestly, I can’t find two communities that are the same.

With that said, layering in the important elements of racial equity, it really goes back to design. That means, who is designing the process? What are the considerations that they’re making? And how are we ensuring that this process is really centered around people? People that are, you could say, often left out, but these end up being the folks that are easiest to ignore. With that said, I think a lot of our strategy around racial equity is having honest, open, and transparent conversations, and allowing folks to be on the same side of the table. A key element to that is excellent facilitation and training folks to be able to hold space, so that they can have some group agreements, and really be able to dig into some things.

I’m really interested to hear how this rolled out in Rochester, in practice, and I can give a few other examples.

Loriane Ngarambe: I know, when we were designing the process, there was a lot of time and emphasis around making sure that this made sense for our community. What does that look like? We wanted to be very intentional about reaching to, but also reaching past, the usual suspects, as I like to refer to them. Anytime there’s anything new that comes into Rochester, those engaged community members are always there. But we wanted to make sure that we were making an effort to reach behind them, to the people who are not engaged for whatever reason. When our steering committee first came together, there were a lot of honest, sometimes uncomfortable, conversations that needed to be had to say, “All right, so why is it that anytime something new comes to Rochester, the people who are going to benefit from it the most, are always the last to hear about it.” And when they hear about it, it’s usually when decisions are already made. There’s a plan already being rolled out, and they didn’t know anything about it, but what can we do, this time, that’s different?

Having those intentional conversations was really important. They did so much work in creating the guidebook and making sure that they were taking into consideration things that normally wouldn’t be taken into consideration. So having single mothers at the table, having young people at the table, was really important as well. Then having predominantly context experts and then having people, who I call the hybrids, context experts who also are content experts, so they can live in both of those worlds. They’re almost like culture brokers, so they know how to navigate both of those worlds, and being able to think practically like, “Okay, this is something that’s going to make sense,” or “This is something that’s not going to make sense,” and just encouraging those conversations. As staff persons who are helping facilitate this process, we wanted to make sure this was as community-led as possible.

We wanted to do everything on our end to mitigate barriers, to mitigate influencing what these guidelines or rules that they laid out look like, and just really making sure this was community-led, and community-owned. I think it made a huge difference for this process to be what it was.

Shari Davis: Loriane, I have a question for you. First, let me just commend you, because I think often folks get nervous when we talk about opening up transparent processes that center race and, really, that center tension. I think that there’s a way that tension can be healthy and tension can be toxic. But I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about your experience in moving this through government and getting to a “yes” and dealing with some of the strong hesitation around being so transparent. I think folks are often afraid that it’s going to be counterproductive and not productive. You’re telling a different story. I know a different story. How do we get there?

Loriane Ngarambe: Yeah. At RMAPI, we were lucky enough to be able to roll out this pilot PB process without having to do it through government. Our process wasn’t through a city government. We secured the funding, and we helped roll out the process. So, as a result, we didn’t necessarily have to deal with the red tape of government and the bureaucracy that lies everywhere. We were able to really make the process whatever is the community members who were helping design it be what it was. Then, also, at RMAPI we have our three guiding principles of addressing structural racism, being trauma informed, and community building. This is something that we infuse in everything that we’re doing.

Any project, any solution, any process, conversation that’s being had, these guiding principles are meant to be utilized as lenses in which we’re doing all of this, so that we’re not just sitting around sugarcoating what the real problem is. We’re trying to deal with the root causes of why we’re here, and what we’re going to do, and what’s going to make the most sense. Having these tense conversations goes with the territory of doing RMAPI work. So having the right people in the room, and being able to sit in those moments, was interesting, because it was almost the community members themselves guiding that process. When you were in moments of tension, moments of people not sure of how to receive what was being said, just sitting in that moment and facilitating: Where are people’s heads at? How do we move past? What about this do you not understand? Just allowing the space to really get through that, I think, is and was really important.

Shari Davis: Adam, the reason why I very much tagged Loriane in on this is because I mentioned no two PB processes are the same. But a big piece in addressing racial equity is grassroots leadership, and that usually looks like a strong community-based partner that is very much involved in this, because they have the connections, they’ve done a lot of this work, and they have a really good sense of the landscape. Oftentimes we’re talking about bringing these folks together, making these connections, getting them on the same side of the table. I can’t think of one PB process where this wasn’t the case, where there weren’t really strong relationships with community-based organizations that were centered on things like racial equity, housing inequality, gentrification, and really inviting those folks to be at the forefront who are doing some of this deep engagement.

Shari Davis: We need those community ambassadors, whether it is a youth council, an advisory board, or, really, those groups that have the deep relationships in communities with those folks that are often hard to reach, is a key element to centering this process and really using a lens of equity, racial equity, gender equity, and these other pieces. We have to be clear on the goals at the beginning of the process, otherwise they will not show up in the design.

Adam Simpson: Before moving on, I wanted to follow-up, Shari, on something you mentioned earlier about the first PB project in the United States, or in North America, maybe, you said, beginning in 2009, now, over 400,000 participants across the country. I get a sense that PB is spreading, and I wanted to ask, why do you think that is? Why do you think? Maybe, it’s something to do with this particular moment or maybe it’s something that the idea is just compelling to a lot of people. But why do you think PB is growing in this popularity, in this particular moment?

Shari Davis: Well, I think, to be honest and completely transparent, we’ve seen some slower growth of participatory budgeting in the United States compared to what we’ve seen in some other places. I think there are a few things to think about here. In Paris, France, for example, they do a PB process with over 100 million euros, a school-based process, a district-based process, and a city-wide process. The mayor has committed 5 percent of the budget to be decided on by folks that live in the City of Paris. So it can be that big. We’ve seen countrywide PB in Portugal. We’ve seen really big large scale PB processes in other places across the world. And, I think, we’re starting to see some real growth of participatory budgeting in the US since 2009. And, as I mentioned, the practice of participatory budgeting is different in every process, but it’s also a bit different in the United States, and it should be, because the context in the US is a bit different.

I do think that we are seeing a continued growth, and there is a moment here for us to think about what participatory democracy looks like overall, and really, for us, to think about what civic engagement looks like beyond just voting, and what building pathways to lifelong civic engagement are. And, I think, participatory budgeting is not the silver bullet or the only solution, but is one of some innovative solution that should definitely be considered in addressing this. And I think we’re in a moment where we’re seeing an uptick, and a real desire for things like PB.

Adam Simpson: Absolutely. I just want to follow-up on that. As a tool for building community power, and a sense of community cohesion, I’m hoping to hear from folks about how far they think these processes can go beyond budgeting, really, to local issues like zoning or economic development plans. The recent fiasco with Amazon HQ II in New York City comes to mind immediately. But being conscious that one of the criticisms I’ve heard about PB is sometimes that of the decisions that are put on the table by various local governments, et cetera, the amounts of money involved are relatively small, or the decisions involved are not as consequential as they could be.

Maybe we could start with Alex. Do you think that participatory budgeting, or participatory processes more generally, could be applied to bigger economic decisions whether we’re talking about the state level, or the regional level, or even the federal level, or is there really, truly a scale dilemma and this is much more appropriate for municipal processes? I’m just wanting to get a sense of the scale and what are the limitations or the potentialities.

Alexander Kolokotronis: This is a question I thought about for years. Recently, I started to think about the criticism of PB, and what that criticism says in the more underlying way. I think what the criticism of PB does is that it actually says something about the way we understand money. The way we understand money is really this very orthodox neoclassical economics-based outlook of seeing money as something really separate from us. If you take an Econ 101 class, the way it starts, and the thing that animates it all the way through, is the supply and demand curve, and that’s that.

Somewhere the consumer and the producer are supposed to meet at this optimal space. The whole point there is the service or good being exchanged. Money is external to that. Money is not seen as really a part of that. Money is just this separate thing that, at best, maybe helps facilitate that private meeting or exchange. This is the private money story, where we really start our barter. Now, and I think in recent years, what’s really taken off, especially with modern monetary theory, is another story that is more historically based, that it’s not that we were born as these isolated individuals who come to market and then separate; we’re really born into a community, and when we think of things that way, we understand provisioning far differently.

Let’s say I’m looking for a shoe and someone else is looking for a bottle of water. Instead of understanding it as, “Well, we so happen to have this double coincidence of loss, so I’ll give you want I need, and you’ll give me what I need.” It’s rather more like, “You have this, I owe you one.” Then that person, who I’m exchanging with, owes someone else one. Then we come to the question of, well, what is one? One of what? This is something covered really well in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. We see that this story is not really barter comes first, then money, and then credit. It’s really credit comes first and then money.

The reason why I’m taking this story and bringing it here is that when you think of it this way, money is really a part of, and really emblematic of, the community that we’re building. And money is not really the super-private isolated thing. Actually, money is public. And if we think of it that way, things like participatory budgeting are not simply this add-on thing. Think about participatory processes, like participatory budgeting, as actually really necessary to community control. They’re not simply a tool for someone to maybe pat themselves and look better. And they’re certainly not necessarily this thing that some on the left will criticize as things that are just about crumbs and don’t really get at bigger things.

In fact, I think a really big power of participatory budgeting is it gets at the very question of how we experience money. In our day-to-day lives, we experience money as something completely alien to us, whether it’s our boss who pays us, whether it’s a government that bureaucratically allocates funds, or whether it’s money in terms of the sense in which we don’t have it. What I think you experience with PB is actually really unique and almost a rupture in how we relate to each other through money. We start to see money as not this necessarily disgusting alien thing that’s above us and controls us, or that we lack control in relation to. I mean, you can think of when someone might feel quite ashamed of spending money. I mean, all these dynamics. All of these are reversed or upended, when we do something like PB, where people start to relate to each other through, “Well, how are we going to allocate funds?” Participatory budgeting is an absolutely necessary component to any version of community control at any scale.

I think PB is an absolutely necessary component to any version of community control at any scale. As Shari was referring to, there are some national initiatives, such as in Portugal, with national PB process there, and there have been statewide PB processes, such as in Ontario, Canada, or in Rio de Consul, Brazil. So there have been some initiatives to try and get at this, and it’s really about, I think, getting at the mechanics. But PB is, I think, connecting very much with modern monetary theory, and I don’t think it’s absolutely coincidental that we’re seeing these things dovetail, in terms of their rise in the current political moment, that we’re fundamentally re-understanding what money means, or can mean, to us, and that it neither has to be this thing that is a fetish, as Marxists, might frame it, as the only way money can exist, nor does it have to be a thing where it’s something that we just have to, as a result of being a fetish, feel ashamed of even touching. Rather, it’s something we have to embrace and redesign to have an experience of something far more shared and something that will facilitate the provisioning of community-building, of individual fulfillment, such as you see in the project development phase, where people are individually really cultivating their own projects. These are all things that PB points the way to and, I think, it’s something we have to add more to.

Adam Simpson: We’re getting really close to time, so probably this is my final question. Given what Alex just said, I want to ask you, Loriane, the outcomes of the antipoverty initiative that you were involved in, in the Rochester, Monroe area. The outcomes touched housing, they touch food scarcity, so many different things. And the way Alex was talking about, they do have to do with money, but also these are also very much policy issues. I wanted to know, specifically, what’s your thinking on this? What are the limits of participatory budgeting from just your recent experience of participatory processes? Do you think that it’s possible to engage in the way that you’ve been engaging, in the Rochester community, to make these broader decisions about the local area, and the different bigger economic decisions more broadly?

Loriane Ngarambe: Right. At the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative, our goal here is to bring system change. So, there’s a lot of information gathering that is required. There’s a lot of understanding of what is a problem; what’s been done that wasn’t working, that’s working; What are some new strategies; what are some new solutions. I think, more than anything, what the PB process does, as I keep saying, is brings community into this conversation and, now, we have to figure out a way to keep community as part of these conversations and part of this solution-creation. But then, also, it sheds light on what the real problems are. It sheds light on not just the problems, but what some of the assets are within our communities that are so often overlooked. Because, when you’re talking about poverty, you come at it from such a deficit point of view and often overlook just how people are making ends meet, how people are living day-to-day with the dire circumstances that they’re living in.

When you’re talking about systems-level change, when you’re talking about policy-level change, all those conversations require evidence, and PB, for us at least, I would say has been a great tool, a great process to bring to light what evidence exists. Because it’s really hard to look at over 2,600 people who voted on the projects that won, because these are things that they feel are important and should be highlighted, and should be regarded as conversation builders around how to really support individuals living in poverty. I think it just provides the evidence to be able to change policies and change systems in a way that, if this was just a closed-door process, when just policy makers stand on policy gains, it wouldn’t be as effective, and it wouldn’t be able to get to the core of what it is that people really actually need to live self-sufficient, full, and complete lives.

Adam Simpson: I know I said that was probably my final question, but I’m going to kick this to Shari, if you don’t mind. I just wanted to get your perspective, just a closing comment given what was just said by Alex and Loriane, on your view of participatory budgeting in the context of system change.

Shari Davis: I think Alex and Loriane raised some really wonderful points. One of them that’s sticking with me is, when we’re talking about participatory budgeting, we’re not talking about blowing up or highlighting only problems. We’re talking about thinking through solutions. That includes really doubling down on the assets that exist in place, building them out, understanding what to duplicate and invest in. Participatory budgeting is about understanding community spending priorities, government spending priorities, and having an opportunity to reconcile them. This is about an opportunity to lift up the lid, invite folks in, and do things better. Ultimately, we’re talking about building more sustainable, effective, and responsible communities. This truly is an opportunity for us to maximize the finite resources that we have to serve folks the best way that we can. This is one strategy of many to do exactly that.

In terms of broader systems change, participatory budgeting, when adopted, marks a real change in the way that folks do business, a real change in the way that government operates. For me, and for many folks, this is a beginning of a larger participatory democratic wave that, I hope, really is fueled and ignited, so that we can see things like participatory budgeting really take hold and become the way that we do business.

Adam Simpson: I can’t thank you all enough for joining me today to talk about participatory budgeting, and all of your work around it. Just a final thank you to Shari Davis, Alexander Kolokotronis, and Loriane Ngarambe. Thank you all for joining me today on the podcast. It’s been a pleasure.

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The two-day conference brought together a range of scholars and activists to map some of the different ways the search for just and rapid post-carbon transitions is animating a broad range of interventions—by labor and climate justice activists, designers, architects, academics and artists—and is opening up intersectional spaces across movements fighting for racial and gender justice.

During her presentation at Day Two of the conference (starting at 4:21:15), Bozuwa explained a proposal to take the nation’s energy system into public ownership—from nationalizing the fossil fuel industry to returning energy utilities into community hands. The goal is a rapid transition from a paradigm of fossil fuel extraction to an energy future based on democratic, equitable, community control of the energy system.

Conference organizers and moderators included Damian White, Dean of Liberal Arts at the Rhode Island School of Design; Thea Riofrancos, professor of political science at Providence College, and Timmons Roberts, professor of sociology at Brown University and an associate with the university’s Climate and Development Lab.

Day 1

Day 2

Visit our site: The Next System

The post “Public Ownership and Building the Next Energy System” At The Climate Futures Conference appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Over several sunny days in June 2018, a diverse group of 60 activists and researchers from 30 countries convened for a multi-day meeting to discuss the collective building of post-capitalist futures. The meeting provided the opportunity for a rich exchange of perspectives and experiences, as well as deep discussion and debate. The goal of the meeting was not to achieve consensus both an impossible and unnecessary endeavour but rather to stimulate mutual learning, challenge one another and advance analyses.

One session of the meeting – Transformative Cities – was held not as a closed discussion but as a public event attended by 300 people at which prominent activists and academics engaged with municipal leaders and politicians on the role cities can play in building post-capitalist futures.

In line with the meeting, this report does not intend to advance one line of analysis, but rather summarise some of the key ideas and issues discussed and debated (not necessarily in the order they were articulated). To summarise necessarily means to leave things out. It would be impossible to fully capture the incredible richness of the discussion that took place, but hopefully this report provides a valuable sketch.

The Age of Monsters Our Capitalist Authoritarian Present

Capitalism in chronic crisis

Any discussion of the post-capitalist future must begin with an analysis of the current economic, social and ecological context and the ‘monsters’ we now face. Most of the world is experiencing the brutal realities of extreme forms of capitalism. Inequality has surged to new heights, with an estimated $32 trillion stowed away in tax havens by wealthy corporations. Multinationals are taking over government and societal functions, aided by a trade and investment regime whose goal is to secure corporate power over judicial and legislative arenas and to increase profit thwarting the best plans of governments with the threat of expensive lawsuits. The goal is to privatise everything. Trump both disrupts but also reinforces this model putting in place the most extreme deregulation agenda while also advancing a nationalist agenda that seeks to replace the ideology of ‘free trade’ with ‘bullying trade.’ In this and other things, he may not be unique, but simply part of a new norm.

This year (2018) marks the tenth anniversary of the financial crisis, but we must recognise that the ‘financial crisis’ is not time-bound: capitalism is in a constant state of crisis. Of the most interconnected companies in the world, nearly all are financial. They are at once large and extremely vulnerable: when one collapses (as Lehman Brothers did), they could all collapse. Given that another financial crash is inevitable sooner or later, it’s critical that we are ready to explain it and show that crisis is a permanent part of the logic of capitalism. The dominant economic model continues to externalise environmental impacts. Climate change is now irreversible. We are in a new stage of capitalism and a new geological time, the Anthropocene characterised by repeated environmental crises. Capitalism is now undermining the earth’s natural systems, creating a scenario of chronic crisis. Yet the drive for profit is leading to ever more expropriation and environmental degradation, with the financialisation of nature representing the peak in the processes of enclosure. The ecological dimensions of capitalism may raise the question as to whether we have reached the limits of capital expansion.

The issue of population and mass migration has also risen in the political agenda within Western countries. In the 1970s, population was discussed largely in terms of hunger and changes in agricultural production. Now population is framed by populist right politicians in terms of the threat of mass migration from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, or from Central America to North America. Instead of blaming the capitalist system, and in the context of prevalent austerity policies, many politicians in Europe are blaming refugees for people’s precarious living conditions. Authoritarianism is on the rise in places like Italy, Hungary and Turkey with proto-fascist forces surging everywhere.

The ‘fourth industrial revolution’

Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forums argues we are in the midst of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ with rapid technological developments transforming the economy and society. Whether it is third or fourth revolution, rapid technological change has certainly created a new theatre of struggle: technology’s potential and its dangers depend on how it is used and who has access. Five giant companies have emerged (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook) that are now the most powerful corporations in terms of market capitalisation. Their US $3 trillion is equal to all the co-operatives in the world.

Tech companies have inserted themselves between the state and people by controlling technological infrastructure, the roads of the twenty-first century. For example, Facebook sought, albeit unsuccessfully, to provide free internet in India under the condition that the company become the internet platform for the country. Tech giants can be seen as a cartel that has seized the means of production, in which people and their communications are the product. The falsely labelled ‘sharing economy’ consists of companies like Airbnb and Uber which have created a new form of subordination and seized control not just of people’s labour, but also their capital people’s homes and cars.

This corporate model requires unprecedented knowledge of people’s behaviour and communications and therefore has helped constructed a new system of surveillance capitalism. It has also turned the neoliberal idea that information-based price signals make for an efficient economy on its head. The accumulation of huge amounts of micro-data about people is changing the nature of how the capitalist system works. Airlines charge people a different price based on information accumulated about them. Non-human agents are now buyers and sellers in markets, and algorithms are replacing humans.

Technology is increasingly touted as a means to ending poverty. Missing from this narrative are the structural causes of poverty and inequality and any critique of the market. For the Gates Foundation and U.S. tech firms in Africa, lack of access to the markets is the problem and technology development is the solution. They ignore the potential loss of jobs to new waves of automation the replacement of workers by robots and machines in sectors like logistics and banking. Or the ways that automation can exclude people, for example with the drive for a ‘cashless’ society providing major benefits to financial firms but making daily living ever more difficult for people on the economic margins. They also obscure some of the environmental costs of technology. For example, the expansion of blockchain technologies such as bitcoins that rely heavily on servers powered by coal.

Similarly, some corporations continue to push for large-scale technological manipulation of the Earth’s systems as a solution to climate change. There is a risk of an attempt at the UNFCCC in 2020 to end the geo-engineering1 moratorium established in 2010 by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity.

Inequality and war as the fundamental long-term reality in people’s lives

It is important to note that while certain trends have accelerated, the reality of dispossession and violence has long been a reality for much of the world. There is a danger of a western leftist nostalgia for a post-war European past that ignores that the social democracies of the West were made possible by imperial looting. The sale of neoliberal individualism as a solution was also only made possible by ongoing economic exploitation of labour in former colonies, post-Soviet countries and now in the West too. The story of Kenya in the last 40 years, for example, is not one of increased unemployment, but of a population that has never been employed millions of people who are excluded from the economy. Today’s neoliberalism has its roots in the liberalism of the Enlightenment, in which participation in the ‘sacred’ space was limited to white male slave- owners. In today’s context, that sacred space is reserved for the global elite – largely male and largely white. Any post-capitalist order dedicated to restorative justice will need to address and provide the reparations and restitution of this exploitative past and present.

Inequality is the fundamental reality for people’s lives across the globe. The Occupy movement succeeded in popularising the notion of the 99% and 1%. Even in the U.S., the wealthiest country in the world, 41 million people are living in poverty and another 140 million are just one pay check away from catastrophe. There is a significant population mostly people of colour who are permanently unemployed. For the 99% in America, as elsewhere, it is not possible to speak of a financial crisis that is ‘over’. As capitalist crises expand, War is emerging as the norm. In the United States, more than half of the discretionary budget goes to an increasingly automated military that makes use of robots and drones. As a consequence, fewer Americans are dying in combat, but there is no decrease in the number of people being killed by the U.S. military. Gaza serves as the new model for pacification and control. It is being used as a site to experiment with new military technology. The population has been deemed surplus: what happens to them doesn’t matter. Direct political resistance is met with violence. Anti-war mobilisation has tended to be separate from struggles for economic and environmental justice, but this is a false dichotomy. Social and ecological injustice is created by wars and fuels wars, with dispossession and exclusion facilitated by arms and security firms in the West and paramilitaries in the South.

Failures of the Left

As we think about post-capitalist alternatives, we have the imperative to analyse and learn from our own actions of social movements and political parties we have supported and allied with. Over the past century, there have been multiple examples of the left assuming political power Russia, China, South Africa, Latin America and failing to deliver or replicating systems of oppression. In Latin America, the ‘pink tide’ governments made important steps to reducing poverty but largely failed to structurally transform their economies and left office with social movements weaker rather than stronger. In Europe, the radical left is growing, but is divided and without clear answers on European integration or immigration. In Germany, for example, a huge internal debate is taking place inside Die Linke (the Left Party) over whether the party should focus more on the ‘German’ working class and less on the rights of refugees and LGBTs. Similar divisions were seen in the UK in the opposing positions on Brexit by the left. Meanwhile in Greece, the anti-austerity stance of the party Syriza was defeated by the Troika despite the overwhelming ‘No’ vote by its population in the referendum in 2015.

The Next System

Power and principles in a post-capitalist future

Around the world, people are creating models of a post-capitalist future and engaging in prefigurative experiments to hegemonic shifts. What principles, values and drivers need to be at the core of the ‘next system’? How do these diverse next system proposals redistribute and transform (or not) power among different types of actors: capital, the state, a ‘partner’ state, labour, citizens, communities, the market, the commons?

As part of its New Systems project, the U.S.-based Democracy Collaborative has developed a framework to look at this question based on an analysis of a wide variety of ‘new systems’ possibilities and proposals, mainly focused on the global North. (They draw on their own on-the- ground experimentation in Cleveland, where three locally-owned cooperatives, the Evergreen Cooperatives of Cleveland, have been incubated and supported by procurement from large, local ‘anchor’ institutions (hospitals and universities).

The framework identifies three theories of change that underpin the variety of new systems proposals. At the one end are social democracy and radical localism, which can be described as countervailing strategies of containment and regulation of the current system. In these proposals, power lies with capital and the corporatist state. Similarly, in proposals like Sweden Plus and Steady State Ecological Economics, power continues to lie with capital and the state, but substantial shifts are envisioned. This can be described as combining strategies of containment and regulation with some systemic elements.

At the other end of the spectrum is evolutionary reconstruction: new institutions can be built, scaled up and can ultimately displace the current system. This theory of change drives a variety of the new models emerging today, including worker-owned, localised economic democracy; commoning; and public and socialised economic democracy. For example, the UK city of Preston is now working to relocalise procurement based on the Cleveland model, which has been embraced as a positive model by the national Labour Party, inspiring it to set up a Community Wealth Building Unit to learn from and expand similar initiatives across the UK.

Cooperation Jackson in the US city Jackson, Mississippi focuses in particular on organising under- and unemployed members of Black and Latino communities and helping build worker-organised and worker-owned cooperatives. The group presents its vision of a new society in concrete, practical ways and works to share these with other municipalities.

However, it is important to note that not all solidarity economies are progressive in nature. There is already a strong tradition among the right in Hungary and other parts of Eastern Europe of organising solidarity economies of a distinctly fascist flavour. Hungary’s right-wing populist government is currently starting pension cooperatives to help ‘good Hungarians’. Solidarity economies certainly mutualise resources and values, but the question is for whom and at what scale.

Self-organisation and counterpower

A systemic crisis needs systemic alternatives. The goal of a new system must be broader than just replacing the capitalist system; it must also replace the anthropocentric system, the extractivist system, the racist system, and the patriarchal system. So what is a systemic alternative? The shift from dirty to clean energy, for example, is not in and of itself systemic. There must also be a shift in who controls and produces the energy. One measure of a systemic alternative is whether it empowers social movements and facilitates communities’ self-organisation. Another is whether it replaces extractive, exploitative means of production with regenerative ones that promote wellbeing globally.

The recent experiences and failures of the ‘pink tide’ in Latin America provide important lessons. Bolivia’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) government is one of the few to have survived the electoral backlash (and without the violence and chaos now afflicting Venezuela and Nicaragua), but even so, it is notable that indigenous communities and social movements were much stronger in Bolivia before Evo Morales and MAS were elected to power.

In Bolivia, as in other pink tide countries, the left reduced poverty but did not move to systemic alternatives. Economic power largely remains with the same elites as before. People from the movements thought they had taken control of the state, but instead were captured by it. Their goal became re-election, and with that came an increasing reliance on clientelism.

This trajectory can be seen in relation to energy. To its credit, the Bolivian government semi- nationalised the energy industry increasing the taxes paid by transnational corporations and giving the state-owned energy company a much larger role. But the goal became creation of the largest state-owned energy company. Small communities were prohibited from producing solar energy to sell to the grid, and thereby denied their own source of income. Giving real power to the community would have meant accepting less profit. The Bolivian case shows that state power has its own logic. In other words, if we assume engagement with the state is necessary, it must be radically transformed. When social movements put people in government, it is crucial to maintain and build autonomous counterpower outside the state.

The recent experience in Catalonia raises different but also important questions. There, the government went beyond the law to do what nationalist movements were asking of it. Although the movement was extremely powerful, capable of organising general strikes and powerful actions, it did not have the police or the army. It could not match the naked force of the Spanish state. Many of Catalonia’s elected officials including its vice president and several ministers are now in prison. These two different cases Catalonia and Bolivia remind us, á la Foucault, about power and the differences between force and coercion: the first eliminates the agent, while the second eliminates agency.

Democratisation of money

Democratisation of money must be a key element in the next system. ‘Economic man’ – the classic economic conceptualisation of people as rational, self-interested agents – is disembodied from biological time and ecological time. The body and the environment are both externalised in its formal accounting, although they bear the costs of unsustainable economic activity. It is also a debt-based system that invariably ends in crisis.

The reality of money production is that banks are not lending money, they are creating new money, which means there will always be a shortage between how much they put in and how much they want out. States, too have created money – as we have witnessed through the vast influx of capital provided by quantitative easing programmes in which trillions of dollars have been injected into the financial sector, chiefly supporting banks rather than investing in public services, essential infrastructure and a just energy transition. Overall, public money has been hijacked by commercial banking and speculative investors.

The question of the state’s role in post-capitalist monetary systems is key. There are many models and much discussion and debate about the best target the state or the commercial banking system for transforming monetary systems. One possibility is the democratisation of public budgets in which democratised, public control would replace the state system. Budgets would be built based on public need and would include a longer cycle of budgeting and public consultation. Democratisation would go further than ‘participatory monitoring/budgeting’: communities would both set the amount of the budget and decide how it is allocated. A monetary policy committee would decide how much the private sector can absorb and help determine tax (retrieval) rates.

Public ownership and transition

The demand for democratic control is also at the heart of a growing wave of local initiatives globally looking to de-privatise and regain public control of energy, water and other public services. TNI’s research in Reclaiming Public Services showed that there have been at least 835 (re)municipalisations of public services around the world since 2000.

This does not mean a return to the former models of bureaucratic state (national or local) control. Rather in many cases communities are seeking to develop new models that engage and involve workers and citizens. The shape of this varies though based on the political and economic context. In Croatia, demands for democratisation of public services have been a strategic way of preventing privatisation and asserting better democratic control over public companies. Activists are therefore calling for better monitoring of spending, more regular meetings with citizens and an independent supervisory committee. In Greece, the context of austerity though has meant local authorities have become eviscerated in their capacity to renovate public services. Citizens have therefore focused on developing community-based systems of solidarity to provide education and healthcare for all that often bypass state structures.

Energy has been a particularly important focus for developing post-capitalist alternatives, given the central role energy plays in the capitalist economy and the urgent need to transform our energy systems to prevent worsening climate change. Energy democracy provides a framework to democratise part of the economy and shift power with a big “P” – transforming society by means of shifting power in the power sector. Activists from Mauritius, South-Africa, Bolivia and the US shared how they have used demands for energy democracy and sovereignty to challenge private energy oligopolies and pollution affecting low-income communities, to demand a rapid just transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy and to explain the necessity for a democratisation of the economy.

Campaigners in a coalition called Power Shift in Mauritius managed to stop a coal plant by means of a hunger strike and by uniting middle class citizens, social movements and unions. They have advanced in its place energy proposals that would be based on solar generation in the countryside, helping to build connections between urban activists and rural sugar-growers. This is leading to new resistances in other arenas, for example against private grabbing of public beaches.

In South Africa, engaging unions has been key. Renewable energy was reframed as a threat to coal and steel workers, but movements have been active supporting union calls for a socially-owned renewable system. This notion of a just transition is critical to not only fight climate change, but also ensuring that workers and the most affected people are at the heart of the next energy system, in order for it to be just and democratic.

An aggregation of next systems?

To what extent will the next system be an aggregation of next systems? In the U.S., the context of decentralised government and an advanced stage of capitalism means that there are places ripe for new strategies and alternatives and others that are not. Local, small-scale initiatives can provide a means to get past the immense power of adversaries. In some contexts, the state can play a positive role alongside of local ‘next systems’, if they understand their role as facilitating and supporting such endeavours. While in other contexts the state – and national legal frameworks – are one of the key obstacles to transformative local practices.

Can we re-imagine the role of the state in a way that facilitates community self-organisation? In a non-hierarchic peer to peer (P2P) state, for example, the act of commoning could become the defining principle of the state. The nation (civil society) is a collection of commoners. P2P can create the conditions to optimise the specific what (resource), who (community) and how (rules) of commoning. Linux and Wikipedia are good examples: they provide the infrastructure, but they do not control the community. The potential is an economy that can be generative towards people and nature, by for example, enabling local manufacturing based on global design, which makes production not only more ecologically viable, but also better suited to community needs.

Emancipatory Futures

What must be done to embed emancipation at the core of the Next System? The experiences of the feminist movement and feminist organising, thinking and theory, offer important guidance here. The left has often asked the feminist movement to postpone its emancipatory agenda to wait until socialism or communism is in place. But new structures often simply replicate systems of domination. The MAS movement in Bolivia, for example, was very patriarchal before it came to power. It should come as no surprise that it replicated this in the government. Movements are also adversely influenced by the systems in which they function, even when they seek to change them. This can be seen, for example, in the external – often donor – pressure to professionalise organisations, which can create a separation between employed staff and the people and communities they work with. In order to transform society, social movements themselves must be transformed.

A promising example is emerging in the U.S. right now. The Poor People’s Campaign is resurrecting the intersectional movement built by Martin Luther King a half century ago, linking systemic racism, poverty, militarism and climate change. The campaign, which targets state governments, started with local community meetings involving a wide range of impoverished communities from indigenous people to war veterans. Significantly, the movement did not emerge from left, but from the faith-based movement. Led by two preachers, it uses the language of morality, rather than electoral politics.

The goal need not and perhaps cannot be to ‘unify’ movements around a single issue. The feminist movement speaks in terms of cross-movement organising, an approach that acknowledges that tensions can exist within and across movements. Transformative cross-movement organising focuses on the creation of emancipatory spaces and then joining other spaces in solidarity and humanity. An example is the ‘feminisms’ social movement in Spain, which features a diversity of women with different approaches, shared leadership and the exploration of new ideas. On March 8th 2018 feminists succeeded in organising a massive general strike focused not only on highlighting gender inequalities, but also the need to curb consumerism. ‘We strike to change everything’ as the slogan went.

Breaking the boundaries of imagination

A key step is to recognise and break through systems that limit the imagination. The feminist movement has shown that there are other ways of imagining human relationships. A new vocabulary can be used and different types of knowledge black feminist thought or migrant women’s experiences, for example can be valorised, prioritised and transmitted in creative ways, such as art and storytelling. In the Association for Women’s Rights in Development’s (AWID) methodology used to imagine feminist futures, imagination is the reality. A fantastical feminist village is created to articulate emotional, social and systemic alternatives. A similar transformative, emancipatory process plays out in real eco-villages, where the act of commoning forces people to reconfigure and critique relationships with themselves, nature, and ‘economic man’. It is often difficult, sometimes psychologically traumatic work, even for those with radical politics and particularly for those who have been socialised in capitalist systems.

Liberating our imagination enables us to challenge the limiting notion that capitalism and the nation-state are the only logical, possible systems. This is relevant to the question of the state’s role in emancipation. People’s experiences and ideas about the state diverge widely. Class, locality, race, gender, history all shape these perspectives. For some, the state is always present and must therefore be engaged, albeit carefully and with recognition that it is contradictory territory. Yet for others, this does not resonate. The Soviet state, for example, doesn’t even exist anymore. In Georgia, there is no functioning state to speak of. Survival is entirely dependent on the family, but people would prefer a progressive state to have a role. Taking the nation-state for granted or assuming that it is natural is to limit the imagination.

And what of the state’s role in emancipation? In his history of Black Reconstruction in America, African-American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois saw the state as a means, albeit limited, to open up space. He recognised that the state could not provide freedom, but that not being in chains was better than being in chains. Aside from post-1804 independent Haiti, in which former enslaved people took power, advanced a universalist vision, and inspired movements across the Southern hemisphere, there are precious few examples of the state being emancipatory. Insights from the women’s movement are useful in thinking about the state, power and emancipation. There is an important distinction to be made between power as domination (power over) and power to transform (power to). The former can be used to describe the state, with its power over resources and capital, which may provide distinctive levers of power. The latter expresses people’s own transformative capacity, the fact that the system depends on their contributions. In London, for example, social movements organised against proposed property development along the Thames in the mid-1980s. When the Labour Party gained control of the municipality, it used its power to stop the development and support movements to build an alternative. But the party didn’t create transformation; the social movements did. The distinction between power over and power to may provide a way to understand the ability of the state or political parties to facilitate (or not) transformation.

Radical movements of resistance and transformation

Agency, resistance and collective structures

Around the world, new forms of agency are emerging. Numerous intersectional political struggles are merging resistance with transformative processes. In Greece, for example, a grassroots, anti- racist solidarity movement emerged to both resist the Troika regime and to create new, collective, autonomous, solidarity structures to respond to people’s immediate needs. The movement goes well beyond a response to austerity in that it recognises crisis as a permanent new condition. People in the movement are reflecting on new institutions and new forms of politics. Self-organisation is a critical component of this as it connects the personal and the political. The movement is creating its own material structures of power and spaces where power is redefined. It is defending local spaces and promoting new practices of health, education and economy.

Some of these new structures, which pre-date the refugee crisis, were formed by the anti-racist movement to put migrant communities and Greek people on the same level to fight isolation, self-blame and embarrassment. The movement aims to create new and different social fabrics in communities, and involves diverse groups of people, including those without work, precarious workers, women, pensioners and migrants. It has revitalised living memories of Greek family networks, communal structures and solidarity structures that once existed. It is engaging and empowering people to create their collective solutions. The movement insists on a democratic approach, which means that the people in the community, not the activists, decide what issues they want to address.

Restoring political agency

Restoring agency is similarly critical to the movements in Croatia. After severe impoverishment and de-industrialisation in the 1990s, followed by the recent process of EU integration, people lost their sense of agency. EU elites treated Croatia as backward, in need of help and with neoliberal economics as its only salvation. But the left is now being re-born: a new generation of leftists have come of age who cannot be associated with the discredited former regime and are no longer constrained by the anti-communist discourse of Post-Socialist Europe. Diverse social movements ecological, cultural, student occupation, right to the city, refugee solidarity are engaged in joint efforts. A lot of work has been done to build the transactional capacity of civil society; the next step is building mobilisation capacity. In the Croatian context, people are very distrustful of politics. Despite scepticism about engaging in electoral politics, the movements recently organised a municipal platform to run the Zagreb local election, which succeeded in putting four people on Zagreb’s city council. The aim is not to become an electoral actor, but to use electoral politics alongside other strategies and to develop political involvement.

Occupying territory while demanding rights

In Brazil, the urban Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST) involves 72,000 families in 32 occupations around the country. MTST emerged out of the agrarian landless movement (MST) and, like MST, considers itself a territorial movement. MTST is demanding that land serve its social function in accordance with the Brazilian Constitution, drawing attention to the fact that many human rights like decent living conditions, access to health care, and education are dependent on having a place to live. The movement is resisting real estate speculation in a context in which 1% of the population owns 30% of the land. In addition to occupation tactics, MTST engages in demonstrations and strikes, and targets the government. In the run-up to the World Cup in 2013, for example, MTST united with other movements and had some important successes, including a decrease in the price of public transportation.

But as with social movements in other ‘pink tide’ countries, the political context including the 2017 parliamentary coup against Roussef and the imprisonment of the former leftist Workers’ Party president Lula da Silva has been difficult and complex. (MTST in early 2018 protested Lula’s imprisonment by occupying his apartment, the purported reason for his imprisonment as it was falsely claimed he had won the apartment through a corrupt kickback).

The lesson from Brazil is that voting is not enough. As with the Bolivian experience, counterpower must be maintained. Since the coup, rights have been dismantled, impunity is rampant and a new anti-terror law deems social movements terrorists. MTST responded by thinking about new forms of participatory governance and uniting leftist movements in a platform called Vamos! (let’s go). The focus is on ideological education and political empowerment. Vamos! insists that everyone should participate in democracy, starting with meetings to set goals for the next president and the government on various issues, including gender, health, education, diversity. More than 500,000 people contributed to the online platform.

Power or counterpower, force or process?

The differences between these movements in Greece, Croatia and Brazil begs the question: what do we mean by counterpower? Of course, one possibility is to see it as a way to accumulate force to resist adversaries or remove them from power. But it is also important to consider the kind of power constructed in the process. Counterpower can be seen as a process in which pre- formative structures and ways of relating to each other are created. The struggle is not to take power but to build it. It may be preferable to speak about power rather than counterpower: building power goes beyond countering something, but about defining the political society we want a new hegemonic model.

At the same time, the full, complex story of these cases also begs the question: which power are we dealing with and at what level? In Greece, the ECB and the finance ministers of the eurozone simply refused to negotiate with Yanis Varoufakis, the democratically elected finance minister. In Croatia, the EU, with Germany in the driver’s seat, provides the social and economic blueprint to be followed. In Brazil, a democratically elected parliament supported by real estate speculators waged a coup against a democratically elected president. International financial power may be eclipsing that of the nation-state. And nation-state power may eclipse local power. For example, in Europe and the U.S., urban movements have welcomed refugees creating ‘sanctuary cities’ and the like but immigration rights are not a local-level competence. The challenge is that compartmentalised counterpower can be easily crushed. Even if they are not crushed, anti-systemic initiatives can end up inadvertently reinforcing rather than undermining capitalism. In Jackson, Mississippi, for example, its efforts to create community land trusts may have contributed towards trends of increasing land prices that force people to relocate.

For some, the answer lies in being aware and active at all levels local, national and international. For others, the emphasis is on preparing the ground, so institutions are in place when top-down power structures ultimately implode.

Preparing the ground: the transformative city

A key question is how can we scale up grassroots struggles to confront global forces like corporate and financial power? Cities will certainly be a core arena of struggle, as cities are not just local arenas but global too given they emerged as a result of globalisation, privatisation, and, most importantly, the rise of global finance. They both encapsulate global processes such as the ‘grabbing’ of cities by corporate and financial firms and the concomitant rise in expulsion, poverty and inequality. Yet throughout history, they have also been unique spaces where people without power can build cultures, economies and make their own histories. Cities have always endured and outlived more formal, closed systems. Today’s urban activism is therefore critical: people need to be organised and ready when the current ‘grab’ comes to an end.

Cities have a special role to play in ‘preparing the ground’ for transformation. Cities like New York and Oakland, California and Cadiz, Spain are forging ahead in tackling climate change. Local governments in some countries have been able to push back against neo-liberal plundering in their territories and develop alternative economies such as communal gardens. Municipal and ‘fearless city’ movements are growing worldwide and are using networked and horizontal structures to scale up their power, assert solidarity and exchange lessons. For urban activists, local transformation, when done right, has the potential to provide solutions to systemic, global problems. Local, grassroots activists can prefiguratively fight for their issues, meaning they can already do what they want the world to look like. This is the approach of Code Rood, a grassroots collective in the Netherlands that is using civil disobedience and other strategies to fight for climate justice while experimenting with resilient forms of sustainable living. The key is that local efforts are connected around the world; that practices of social innovation can be shared and replicated.

As discussed above, the question of institutional political power and its risks is relevant to these municipal movements. As with state power, so too with city power: for example, the new city government in Amsterdam led for the first time by the Green Left party intends to join other ‘fearless’ cities movement, fight for a just energy transition, tackle polarisation and re-define the relationship between government and citizens. But its ability to deliver on its good intentions depends on its ability to overcome entrenched power, its courage to oppose false market- led solutions, and its openness to constant dialogue with social movements and civil society organisations. Strong activism is vital for giving politicians both the leverage and motivation (i.e. sustained political pressure) to realise transformative change.

What can’t be left out of the discussions around cities, however – nor states for that matter – are the politics of natural resource exploitation on which they depend. Even progressive cities are often thriving from processes of extraction and dispossession in rural areas – whether it is food systems dependent on land dispossession, poorly paid migrant labour, soil erosion and toxic pesticides or dams providing energy and water to cities yet built on appropriated indigenous lands. Similarly states can develop progressive policies on the back of exploitation. This has clearly been the case in Latin America. Venezuela, for example is currently opening up 10% of the country to transnational mining in the name of funding social services.

Constructing a post-capitalist hegemony

Public policy to facilitate transformation

Tame it, smash it, escape it or erode it? Diverse thinkers from Marx to today’s John Holloway, Hilary Wainwright and Erik Olin Wright theorise a range of necessary, possible or impossible routes to ending capitalism. How can we build a post-capitalist hegemony in support of radical transformation and at what level? Concrete experiences inform a diversity of perspectives on the question. Reciprocally, the severity of the situation for many people their immediate struggle to survive reminds us that ideas must translate into concrete action.

In Uruguay, for example, the leftist government has sought to democratise institutions and to develop initiatives focused on the country’s large population of poor people. Industrial tripartite councils were created that gave workers a seat at the table with multinationals and bureaucrats. Workers were involved in defining the plans for key sectors and actively involved in how the government negotiated foreign direct investment. Alongside this, a national development fund was created to support development of worker-owned cooperatives, while the Plan Juntos (the Together Plan) aimed to address extreme poverty and vulnerability. Families in irregular settlements (on unsecure land) were supported to build their own houses, with support from technical staff who were required to live in proximity to the communities. But the houses were not the goal: the purpose of people’s participation was to support a process of transformation, and not to legitimate the policy. The goal was to move from a focus on symptoms to causes and to shift from individual experiences to structural and collective responses.

Or the need for autonomy?

Experiences in Bolivia, where communities have developed hundreds of autonomous community- managed water systems, provide a different perspective. Bolivian communities have long self- organised to address their needs and problems, including not only water but also security and garbage. They did not wait for the state to provide such services. Contrast this to the appealing narrative by President Evo Morales, which held that everything was bad before he came to power and that his ‘government of the people’ would solve the country’s problems. The consequence has been the demobilisation and fragmentation of what was a very strong movement. Behind the narrative lurked a new form of domination. From this vantage point, it seems that the focus should be on solutions that come from the people, with emancipation being not a goal, but a way of life. In Bolivia, people are not thinking in terms of ‘post-capitalism’ but in terms of autonomy and self-determination. They are not asking the state to solve problems, rather for it to respect the organising that is already happening.

Seizing the means of narrative production

As the Bolivia example shows, narrative power is critical. Corporations and elites are currently exerting enormous control over the news. Algorithms and social media are spreading misinformation, narrowing people’s perspectives and polarising society. Behind the myth of ‘free’ news is the exercise of power. But a media that serves the public can play a crucial role in bringing about post-capitalist transformation. Similarly, other cultural actors opinion-makers, the creative sector, designers and makers can be valuable and strategic allies as fellow commoners. They can help forge and strengthen cultural norms, ethics and values that support post-capitalist efforts.

A media that serves the public would be transparent about sources of funding and information. It would be participatory and engage in dialogue with citizens. And it would tell inspiring stories, connect to ideas, and motivate people into action. It would facilitate a process of transformation by challenging people’s biases and assumptions, bringing them different perspectives, and showing that another world is not only possible but already here.

NOTES

1. Geoengineering refers to a set of proposed techniques that would intervene in and alter earth systems on a large scale recently, these proposals have been gaining traction as a “technofix” solution to climate change. http://www.etcgroup.org/content/un-convention-still-says-no- manipulating-climate

The analysis in this report is written by Paige Shipman and Nick Buxton, but is the collective work of Achin Vanaik, Agnes Gagyi, Ana Mendez de Andes, Ashok Subron, Brid Brennan, Ben Hayes, Brett Scott, Brian Ashley, Christophe Aguiton, Christos Giovanopoulos, Daniel Chavez, Danjela Dolenec, Dany Marie, David Fig, David Sogge, Edgardo Lander, Erick Gonzalo Palomares, Fiona Dove, Firoze Manji, Gisela Dutting, Hakima Abbas, Hilary Wainwright, Inna Michaeli, Irene Escorihuela, Joachim Jachnow, Joel Rocamora, Kali Akuno, Laura Flanders, Lavinia Steinfort, Lyda Forero, Mabel Thwaites Rey, Marcela Olivera, Mary Mellor, Mary Fitzgerald, Myriam van der Stichele, Nuria del Viso, Pablo Solón, Phyllis Bennis, Renata Boulos, Sacajawea Hall, Saskia Sassen, Satoko Kishimoto, Sebastián Torres, Selcuk Balamir, Sol Trumbo Vila, Stacco Troncoso, Susan George, Tamás Gerocs, Thomas Hanna, Tom Henfrey, Vedran Horvat, Yuliya Yurchenko, Sopiko Japaridze. It does not mean that everyone agrees with everything written here, but it is an agreed summary of the discussions.

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An estimated 18 million people who earn less than $28,000 a year (less than half the national household median income) live in manufactured housing. That makes it one of the leading sources of affordable housing in the U.S. Approximately 1,000 manufactured housing communities are resident-owned around the country (especially throughout New England). This includes the 10,000 manufactured homes that are part of network of ROCs organized by ROC USA, a nonprofit enterprise that works to scale ROCs in the United States.

Potential Impact

Converting manufactured housing communities into ROCs offers individuals and families who are often marginalized or underserved in the conventional housing economy opportunities for ownership and control. With this comes the ability to address some of the most pressing issues of our time, including access to affordable housing, climate change mitigation, and residential displacement, since ROC households can manage their community’s affairs in a manner that meets their most pressing short- and long-term needs. In boosting homeownership among marginalized populations, ROCs can ensure that stability and resiliency in the housing economy are not wealth-driven.

Transformative Characteristics

When residents in a manufactured housing community own the land themselves, they have the power to avoid the hazards of traditional, commercially-oriented manufactured housing neighborhoods, where residents own (or rent) their individual homes but the land itself is owned by a company that charges rent, sets rules, and oversees conditions in the neighborhood. In those communities, residents face displacement pressures when the landowners decide to raise rents, sell to another company, or neglect maintenance and upkeep. In a ROC, residents cooperatively own the land and manage the neighborhood through elected representatives to a board. This allows the residents to live without fear of being displaced and it gives them direct control over the material conditions of the neighborhood. Some ROCs are market-rate and share costs are out of reach of low-income families. However, many other ROCs are limited equity cooperatives, which keeps the cost of shares low and preserves affordability.

Examples

Pasadena Trails, Houston, Texas

The Pasadena Trails ROC was formed in 2009 when residents of the community purchased the land in their neighborhood from an Arizona-based company. The community received help with financing and other technical assistance from ROC USA and Community Resource Group. Residents leveraged newfound ownership and control over the community to finance and redesign the community’s drainage system, an investment that ultimately protected the community from the widespread flooding caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

Takesa Village, Mead, Washington

This ROC was established in May 2016 by a community of 149 residents. They saw the ROC as a step toward tackling a culture of crime, drug abuse, and abandonment surrounding the community, issues that were neglected while the community was under private management. Residents bought their community with financing support from Capital Impact Partners and the Washington Housing Finance Commission. Since the ROC was formed, the newly organized and better-engaged residents saw significant physical and quality-of-live improvements in their community.

Challenges

ROCs can be handicapped by difficulties in building an engaged community and plagued by an inability to secure financing. They may confront unfamiliarity with ROCs and negative perceptions of manufactured housing communities. Supportive local policies can help, such as “right of first refusal” rules that require that manufactured housing residents have a chance to buy their community before it is placed on the private market. So can technical support from one of the many local, regional, and national cooperative assistance organizations, such as the Cooperative Development Institute.

More Resources

ROC USA is a nonprofit organization that works to scale resident ownership of manufactured homes. The organization provides technical assistance and fundraising support to communities hoping to convert from private ownership to resident ownership.

Download PDF here

Originally published on The Next System

Photo: Pasadena Trails Co-op

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Isaiah J. Poole: Communities can do more than just put a Band-Aid on the problem of gentrification and displacement, and a panel of researchers who held a forum at the Democracy Collaborative’s offices in Washington discussed the best thinking and work happening on both sides of the Atlantic to keep housing affordable for everyone.

In a panel entitled “The Politics of Land and Housing,” The Democracy Collaborative’s Jarrid Green and Peter Gowan were joined by Laurie Macfarlane, who is based in Edinburgh, Scotland and is co-author of The Economics of Land and Housing and editor of openDemocracy. (Watch the full panel discussion below.) Together, they discussed the financial-sector-driven processes that keep housing costs spiraling upward and how we can move toward a world in which housing is a social good for all rather than a profit center for a few.

“The place that we’ve landed in is suboptimal for a whole range of reasons, and inequality is growing between those who own property and those who don’t; those who are facing higher rents and higher costs versus those who are riding the wave of increasing asset prices,” Macfarlane said.

Macfarlane stressed that “there is no single-bullet solution to what we do about this,” but the two speakers that followed laid out a set of strategies that are beginning to bear fruit either inside or outside the United States.

Gowan drew a contrast between the housing market in Ireland, which mirrors the United States in that it is driven largely by borrowing and rent-seeking, and Austria, where 40 percent of the residents live in “social housing” that is publicly owned and regulated. While in Ireland housing prices soared in the early 2000s before entering a crash that paralleled the U.S. financial crash in 2008, Austrian housing prices have remained stable throughout the past 20 years. One reason, Gowan said, is the attraction of good-quality affordable social housing to middle-class as well as lower-income households, who therefore don’t feel compelled go to into 15-to-30-year-debt to buy a home.

To Gowan, Austria’s example suggests that the US should overcome the negative stereotype of “public housing.” He concedes “there were legitimate issues” with the low-income housing built in decades past, but “that’s not to say that we can’t do better in the future. It’s not to say we can’t have a democratic community- or publicly controlled housing sector that is racially integrated, socially just and fit for the future.”

Green discussed work he did with the Alliance for Housing Solutions to help community leaders in Alexandria, Va., just outside Washington, to grapple with a market that has become increasingly inhospitable for low-income people.

The set of solutions that are being discussed around community control of land and housing, through such strategies as community land trusts, limited equity co-ops, land banks, resident ownership communities and community benefit agreements – together make up less than one percent of the housing economy in the United States, Green said. “It’s a mix of things that are approved by voters at the ballot box as well as some things that agencies can do on their own” with state or local funding. The challenge is to scale-up these solutions in the midst of what is increasingly acknowledged as an affordable housing crisis.

The strategies to address gentrification and displacement discussed in this panel will be explored more deeply in a report by Green that the Democracy Collaborative plans to release in August.

Originally published on The Next System

Photo by Ted’s photos – For Me & You

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A historical legacy of displacement and exclusion, firmly rooted in racism and discriminatory public policy, has fundamentally restricted access to land and housing and shaped ownership dynamics, particularly for people of color and low-income communities. Today, many communities across the country are facing new threats of instability, unaffordability, disempowerment, and displacement due to various economic, demographic, and cultural changes that are putting increased pressure on land and housing resources.

As communities and policymakers alike consider ways to confront these threats—especially within the context of the urgent need for community and economic development—there is an emerging opportunity to develop strategies related to land and housing that can help create inclusive, participatory, and sustainable economies built on locally-rooted, broad-based ownership of place-based assets. This report provides an overview of strategies and tools that, as a group, represent an innovative and potentially powerful new approach—one that establishes, in various ways, community control of land and housing.

These strategies and tools can 1) begin to institutionalize democratic control of land and housing, 2) support racially and economically inclusive ownership and access, and 3) catalyze the deployment of public resources to support new norms of land and housing activity. Importantly, “anchor institutions”—large not-for-profit entities, such as hospitals and universities, that are rooted in local communities—can play a key role alongside community organizations and local governments in catalyzing and supporting such strategies.

Download and read the full report now.

We are making printed copies of this new report available to policy advocates, community organizers, and anchor institution stakeholders interested in advancing on the ground work to shift control of land and housing to communities through democratic ownership. Request copies now.

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Overview

The country of one’s dreams must be a country one can imagine being constructed, over the course of time, by human hands.”
-Richard Rorty

Among capitalism’s many critics, it is standard procedure to state that neoliberalism has failed and that unless our societies construct a new paradigm for how economies work, human societies will collapse under the weight of an unsustainable and environmentally catastrophic capitalist system.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the most powerful purveyor of neoliberal ideas over the last forty years, has now admitted that perhaps its signature ideology has been oversold, and that the costs of free market ideology may have outweighed the touted benefits. When this happens, we may be sure something has reached a breaking point. Whether this signals a fundamental shift in thinking, or a tactical maneuver to preserve the status quo, is a matter of political perspective. (My money is on the latter.)

In fact, neoliberalism has not failed. From the vantage point of its ultimate purpose—maximizing wealth to the owners of capital—it is succeeding admirably.  As a doctrine, it is true to its principles. The problem is that these principles are not just unsustainable—they are pathological. The deification and normalization of greed and the hoarding of wealth by an ever-shrinking and increasingly predatory minority has brought us to the brink of economic and social collapse.¹ What is more, the dominance of neoliberal ideas in our culture has literally deprived people of the capacity to imagine any alternative. This is the ultimate triumph of ideology. If ever there was a time when alternative visions of how economies might work were urgently needed, it is now. The absence of alternatives from public debate is one clear symptom of the crisis we are in.

If ever there was a time when alternative visions of how economies might work were urgently needed, it is now.

The election of Donald Trump in the US, the success of Brexit in the UK, and the rise of neo-fascist parties across the face of Europe only highlight the continuing failure of leftist movements to present such a vision and to address the massive discontent that is now driving political developments. But it is also true that the direction this discontent can take is still up for grabs. Despite recent disheartening events, the election of Syriza in Greece, the popularity of the Sanders campaign in the US, the rise of Podemos and Barcelona en Comú in Spain, and the success of the Pirate Party in Iceland show that the triumph of right wing reaction is not guaranteed. But the failure of Syriza to challenge the status quo in Europe and the rise of Trump in the US also indicate that a change of political direction is not tenable within the parameters of our present institutions. We have entered an age where it is entirely likely that change—in whatever form—will come not as a result of conscious political effort on the part of social movements, but rather from the collapse of the current system.

What is entirely unknown is what form this change will take. Already, the absence of an alternative to capitalism has given rise to forms of reaction not witnessed since the fascist era of the 1930s. Even more frightening is that the pathology of fascist ideas has taken hold in what were once the strongholds of liberal democracy. In the US, the first weeks of a Trump administration has revealed the face of an Orwellian dystopia in the making. It seems clear that the urgency of our present moment is now primarily political. The consequences of global warming, growing inequality, disappearing civil liberties, and the consolidation of the surveillance state all point to the necessity of political mobilization on a scale not seen since the uprisings of the mid 1800s. It is also clear that any such mobilization must be propelled by a vision and a plan that concretely and radically challenge and transform the underpinnings of our current system.

It means the recovery of economic and political sovereignty by nations, the radical curtailment and redistribution of wealth, the social control of capital, the democratization of technology, the protection of social, cultural, and environmental values, and the use of state and civil institutions to promote economic democracy in all its forms. Above all, it means the evolution of new forms of governance that deliver decision-making power to citizens in an era of global power dynamics. A tall order. But if the grievances that are polarizing societies across the globe are not channeled in ways that offer people constructive pathways to reform, positive visions of society that they can believe in, ways of life that have meaning beyond self-aggrandizement and the worship of money, what comes next will be a nightmare, fueled by rage and resentment. In the US, we are seeing this unfolding before our eyes.

Thankfully, the elements of a new imaginary are all around us.

Thankfully, the elements of a new imaginary are all around us. The outlines of a new political economy that is both humane and in which the fulfillment of the person is conjoined to the well-being of one’s community are already visible in the innumerable examples of cooperative and social enterprises that are showing daily that social values can be the basis for a form of economics in which the common good prevails. Ethics can be a basis for a new economic order. In this essay, I will not dwell on what has gone wrong with late stage capitalism. The seemingly permanent state of economic, social, and environmental crisis that it has engendered is evidence that our economic system is both unjust and unsustainable. Nor can I address all aspects of what a Next System entails. What I will do is describe elements of political economy that I think are indispensable for paradigm change; including, the forms by which such an economy might function; the roles of citizens and the state; the role of technology; and, examples of how these ideas may be realized in strategic areas. These include the provision of social care, the creation of money and social investment, the creation of social markets, and the containment of corporate power. It is true that the rapid regressions that we are now witnessing daily clearly require urgent and immediate action to resist very specific threats that affect real lives and cannot wait for what may come next. These range from the erasure of civil liberties, to the rollback of environmental protections, to the racist discrimination against minorities that is now public policy. But if these regressions are in fact symptomatic of a political order in crisis, as I argue in this paper, thinking about what comes next can ensure that the urgency of our actions in the here and now reflect a vision for the long term that gives meaning and coherence to what we do today.

George Monbiot, “Neoliberalism – The Ideology at the Root of all Our Problems,” The Guardian,
April 15, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot.

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

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Demagogues thrive amid fear and insecurity, which is why they paint the world in such dark terms. It’s a strategy that has put right-wing populist leaders in power in an Axis of Egos: from Brazil to Turkey, the Philippines to Russia, authoritarian strongmen like Trump are on the rise. Meanwhile, many centrist liberals, like the Democratic Party in the US, have been so intent on rejecting left-wing populist solutions, and so sure of their ability to beat anyone running on a white supremacy platform with its misogyny and homophobia, that they opened the door for Mr. Trump to walk straight through. Their preference is always to maintain the status quo that has served them so well.

As dangerous as the election of Trump is for the world, we can also see in this moment the truth that we simply cannot rely on the electoral political system to save us, because it is designed to prevent the fundamental change we need. Its own survival is at stake and it will marshal all its champions and resources to defend itself and stop the emergence of a new system. But when we work, or continue working for change from the ground up; when we build or keep on building new ways of living and being with each other where we live; when we construct or keep constructing the future we know is possible with our own hands, rather than hoping distant leaders will build it for us, we find our true power. Finally, when we combine that with the unbending hope that has powered change through the ages, we know our power has meaning.

A 400-year-old economic system is dying and another is struggling to be born. Change on this scale is not going to be smooth or easy. We should not be surprised, then, that moments like this?—?where the establishment is dealt a body blow?—?become more and more common. We can despair when that blow comes in the form of right-wing extremists, or we can step-up. We are the ones we are looking for, who can and must grasp the opportunities in these crises that are undoubtedly there.

So it’s time to come together, taking time to remember the earth. Remember all the successful struggles for justice that came before us, and imagine all those to come. Find each other and help midwife the inevitable transition that brings forth from the ashes of neoliberal capitalism a system that works for the good of all life on Mother Earth. This is not just activism; this is our responsibility as human beings alive as this all unfolds.

This is why we are here.

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