Photo by Christopher Lane Photography

The post Is it time for a post-growth economy? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Martin Kirk: When Donald Trump says “Make America Great Again,” he’s alluding, at least in part, to the promise of economic growth. Just as when Bill Clinton said, “it’s the economy, stupid,” he was really saying that “it’s about economic growth, stupid.” This is the Golden Promise of politics: more economic growth. Golden, because it is effortlessly translated in voters’ minds to mean more jobs, more money in the economy, and therefore more income in everyone’s pockets. Because economic growth is, obviously, a thing greatly to be desired.

Equally obvious is the knowledge that no economic growth is a bad thing. When economies and companies don’t grow, they stagnate and falter. Which means fewer jobs, lower wages, less money to invest, more business shut downs, and bankruptcies. In short, more misery for all.

It’s all so obvious, right? It’s one of the precious few things we can all agree on in this fractious age.

But there are some new strains of thought that take a more nuanced and sophisticated view of growth. That say, yes, all other things being equal, economic growth is a positive thing. But all other things are not equal. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and, for all its positives, economic growth has a dark side; its ecological impact. The impacts of our ever-growing economy have become so stark and so widespread that they are by any sane measure portents to catastrophe. Whether it’s the fact that Antarctic ice is now melting three times faster than we thought, or the unfolding “biological annihilation” that has already wiped out 50% of all animals and up to 75% of all insects, or the fact that, in spite of all this, we are pumping out CO2 at record levels, it takes willful ignorance or a blinding ideology to deny the severity of the crisis.

This creates a terrible paradox: Economic growth keeps economies stable today, but threatens not just future growth but medium-term social and civilizational cohesion, and ultimately the very capacity of this biosphere to sustain life. A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year suggested that “the window for effective action is very short, probably two or three decades at most.” And that even this dire prediction is considered “conservative” by the authors, “given the increasing trajectories of the drivers of extinction.” In terms of practical politics, that means acting immediately, preferably yesterday.

Most politicians deal with this paradox by ignoring it. It’s by far the easiest option; one afforded every incentive and reward by this political economy and the beliefs that underpin it. This belief system has been dominant for a long time now. We are, as a society, deeply comfortable with it, which means many of its core assumptions are considered unassailable–too obvious to question. The most profound being this idea that growth is always good. Questioning this amounts to political suicide for any politician.

Or, at least, it used to. We are starting to see some movement in interesting corners of the global political landscape that suggest that some leaders are showing the sort of political courage needed to shift established norms. It may well be starting to become something of a bonafide political movement. It’s young and small, still, but so were all movements at one time.

A little thought experiment shows how growth can be a problem: Insert the word “a” before it. “A growth.” That feels very different from just “growth,” right? Growth is a big part of what we all understand happens in a healthy life. Children grow, knowledge grows, love grows. But “a growth” is what happens when life gets corrupted. “A growth” is when the growth is unchecked, and thus a symptom not of health but disease; when it takes on the character of an invader, attacking its host. The word for growth that gets out of control in this way, such that it becomes “a growth,” is, of course, cancer.

But wait, I hear you cry, technological progress will save us! We can just grow meat in test tubes rather than needing so much land and clean air space for cows and their methane-laden farts, or we can all switch to renewable energy, or recycle more and better, and then we can get back to the promise of infinite growth. Unfortunately, the evidence is clear that this is simply not possible. Yes, we can make dents in our impact with such measures, and we should with all possible speed, but the way the global economy is currently programmed means such things are important–but also entirely insufficient.

So, once we discard the vain hope of being able to grow the economy infinitely and indefinitely, what are we looking at? This is where the innovation and bravery come in.

A new alliance was formed in 2017, called the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. What they are shooting for is one–or many different–economic model(s) that have, “the fundamental goal of achieving sustainable well-being with dignity and fairness for humans and the rest of Nature.” Which means they cannot just reach for socialism or any other historical model–socialism, like capitalism, relies on growth, as does communism. They have recognized that we can’t rely on past thinking; we must genuinely put our best brains forward and innovate.

We’re not talking about a bunch of random, dreamy utopians here, but real politicians who have won real elections and are exercising real power. So far, the roster of governments signing up to the Alliance includes Scotland, Costa Rica, Slovenia, and New Zealand. Other governments that are actively looking at the issue include Italy, and there are political parties emerging, like the Alternative Party in Denmark, which is also embracing the innovation challenge. These are not what are often referred to as Tier 1 countries in the international order, but neither are they so small they are irrelevant.

Scotland, for example, provides a direct line into both the U.K. and (at least for the time being) the EU. Costa Rica has long been a pioneer of innovative economic and social thinking, with impressive results: It is routinely in the top three countries in the world when measured for the well-being and happiness of their people. New Zealand is, perhaps, the most newly bold. Its prime minster has not only called growth-at-all-costs capitalism “a “blatant failure” but also has said her government would no longer accept GDP as the sole, supreme measure of progress. “The measures for us have to change,” she said in October last year. “We need to make sure we are looking at people’s ability to actually have a meaningful life, an enjoyable life, where their work is enough to survive and support their families.”

And this is where social and economic forces start to align in very interesting and potentially powerful ways. And open the door for seeing electoral strategies in an agenda based on innovations to take us beyond traditional growth-at-all-costs economics.

Consider a few facts: More than 50% of millennials say they would take a pay cut to find work that matches their values, while 90% want to use their skills for good. And these trends are on the up. Deloitte’s 7th Annual Millennial Survey of 12,000 young people, for example–both millennials and gen Z–reports record low opinions of businesses. Fewer than half now believe that businesses behave ethically, and this directly affects how loyal they feel to their employers; 43% of millennials and a whopping 61% of gen-Zers expect to stay in a job no more than two years. And all this against a backdrop of general public opinion that is also looking increasingly unkindly on the economic paradigm we have.

These are conditions that can be worked with. They show that there is a large and growing instinct out there that thinks that we need fundamental change to the way we do economics. Not tweaking around the edges, but fundamental change at the very roots of the global economy. There is no neat or reliable evidence to suggest that challenging infinite growth is at the top of peoples’ minds, or likely to be a particularly easy sell. But there is significant doubt in growth-at-all-costs capitalism, and that is an opportunity for innovation. Combine that with the new thinking coming out of places like the Wellbeing Alliance, and you can start to sense the causes and conditions may well be aligning in favor of the emergence of wholly new, post-growth economies. It cannot come soon enough.

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

Cross-posted from Fast Company

The post What if economic growth isn’t as positive as you think? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We are told everyday that unfettered economic growth and the accumulation of personal wealth is desirable, yet, though we may not always have the words to challenge it, we know the mantra ‘greed is good’ cannot be true: we see everyday and everywhere the toll it is taking on our lives, our communities and our environment.

Thanks predominantly to the overconsumption of natural resources by rich countries, the entire planet faces ecological collapse. We are overshooting the Earth’s biocapacity by 62% each year, and, as a result, species are dying off between 1,000 and 10,000 times the normal rate.

Corporations and states continue to treat people as commodities, our suffering and deaths are considered “negative externalities”; sacrifices at the altar of GDP growth. Inequality continues to rise, leading to social breakdown and vast waves of migration. Just 5 men have the same amount of wealth as the poorest 3 billion people.

If human imagination and potential are boundless, why must we believe, when it comes to our economic model, that ‘there is no alternative’? Is this really the best we can do – continue to wait for wealth to trickle down?

At The Rules we believe that we are living within a system that by its very design values profit over people and planet. Capitalism stems from the same logic that saw it fit to sell people as slaves across the Atlantic; a logic that has given us sweatshops, and conflict minerals; farmers’ suicides and oil spills;.

The Rules is here to help midwife the transition to a post-capitalist world. As a time-bound project, we will exist until 2023, working to expose the core logic of our global system.

We are here to connect the dots between various local struggles, and between the millions of us who are feeling the pain of this failing system.

Stories are powerful. The status quo is set by the stories we have been told for decades, and so to challenge it, we must tell stories of beautiful alternatives and amplify those told by others.

Together, we have the power to change the stories, change our cultures and change the rules.

The post Postcapitalism & Beautiful Alternatives: A brief introduction to The Rules appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Could you say for somebody who hasn’t come cross the concept of a universal basic income, could you give them it in a nutshell?  What is UBI?

UBI is basically an idea that says everybody, simply by virtue of being alive, gets an income that gives them enough to survive, if not thrive, and that’s one of the debates.  There are lots of different people talking about it right now from across the political spectrum.  This is one of the things that makes it an interesting idea, or an idea that’s worth engaging with right now, because it’s an idea that’s emerging.  It’s formulating, so it’s not settled.

Martin Kirk. On a Skype with someone else…

There are lots of different ideas around lots of different conceptions.  There’s not a clear single narrative about it yet, although it’s rapidly forming.  It’s being talked about in terms of everything from reducing the size of government and the welfare state, in the way of just getting rid of all the social services and replacing them with a basic income, right through to people talking about it as a way to redesign the money system and effect fundamental transformational change to the root drivers of many of our problems, like infinite GDP growth.

So it can take you from that very simple ‘reduce government’ right through to ‘change the economic system’.  I think this is one of the reasons it’s getting a lot of people excited.  There are pilots going on all over the place. Just this last week or two the Scottish government announced its plans to run some pilots.  But they’ve been running global north, global south, for a while.  It’s actually an idea that’s got a very long history.

Thomas Paine talked about it as a negative income tax when he was writing in the 18^th century.  Hayek and the neoliberals were actually talking about it as an idea when they started formulating their ideas in the 1940s and 1950s.  So it’s got a long history.  But it’s in the last 3, 4 years it’s really started to break into the mainstream, have a bit of a resurgence, and one of the reasons that’s being driven is this conversation about automation.

This is what’s getting a lot of the Silicon valley types, the Mark Zuckerberg’s and Bill Gates’, that’s drawing them into it.  I don’t know if you saw just this last week, Hilary Clinton in ‘What Happened’, her just released book said that she was a hairs breadth away from running on a basic income platform in the 2016 election.

But in her words they just couldn’t make the numbers add up.  Jeremy Corbyn has said that the Labour party in the UK is studying it as a policy option.  Richard Branson has come out and said this is almost probably inevitable at some point.  So it’s being practiced, it’s being trialled, there are endless debates happening, it’s picking up political media, social support.

Interestingly, the one group that hasn’t latched on to this, as much as I think they should do, is environmentalists.  There is a lot that could be done with a UBI that could really address the key issues that we’re concerned about. From the way money draws its value from natural resources and the natural capital base of the planet, and that can be addressed.  You can also address the concept of growth, if you take interest bearing out of the money system.  So it opens up all these sorts of interesting ideas.

The problem right now, as I said earlier, is it’s stuck in the welfare frame.  It’s a reductive thing.  If you’re interested in transformative ideas, this is one that’s worth getting engaged with right now as the narrative is forming.

How would it be financed?

Again, this is one of the big debates that’s happening.  It’s one of the big questions that automatically comes up, “how is it paid for?”  There is a range of options.  Right through from the Conservatives who would just pay for it by scrapping so many other services.  Conservatives in the US are talking about a basic income of $10,000 a year, which is way below the poverty threshold, and below the minimum wage threshold, but could easily be paid for out of existing tax revenue if you chopped off a lot of the health services, welfare programmes that already exist.  So you’ve got that on one side.

Then, somewhere in the middle, you’ve got people talking about it from a sort of dividend.  A lot of people refer to the ‘Alaska model’ here.  Alaska’s had a basic dividend, they call it a permanent dividend fund, for quite a long time now.  That’s paid for by fossil fuel receipts from Canada South oil, or Alberta actually, then there are profits that are ploughed back into a dividend that goes to every citizen.  So people are talking about whether it could be funded from a carbon tax, or some other form of commons based revenue.  That’s another middle ground way of paying for it.

On the far end, and this is the one that we’re interested in, particularly at The Rules, go away from the current money system completely and we say there’s a really interesting conversation to be had here about a cryptocurrency based UBI.  The technology for that is not quite mature but it’s coming and it’s coming much faster than people expect.  We will very soon have the option of using a cryptocurrency either as an alternative or a complementary currency to the fiat currencies we all use.

But if you get into that space, then the question of where does the money come from doesn’t apply there, because the money is automatically generated by a system.  It’s just deposited into people’s accounts.  There’s no central authority who’s governing that.  It’s just an automated system.  So you don’t have to ask the question of where will the money come from.

You’ve got that spread, right through from the small government, Conservative and libertarians, all the way through to the more radical, I’ll say ‘Left’, just as shorthand but it’s a little bit disingenuous to use just the Left-Right spectrum here because it’s more complicated than that.  But just as a reference point, the radical left.

The battle is being had right now.  The battle for the narrative.  Right now it’s being won, or it’s being dominated by, the centre and the right.  One of the reasons for that is the language that’s used.

Just think of the term, ‘Universal Basic Income’, every single one of those words, militates against a more transformative conception.  People don’t respond well to the idea of universal things, on the whole.  They immediately start thinking about, “Well, why is my neighbour getting stuff?  Why am I having to work and they’re gutting stuff for free?”  It triggers a competitive mind set in people, and outgroup thinking. So people automatically start to think about who is the outgroup and will they get more than I?  The fairness logic kicks in very quickly.  That’s not particularly helpful.

The word ‘basic’ drags your brain down right down to the floor, and it leads you into questions like, “What’s the least possible we should be able to give people?  What’s the basic?  What’s the minimum?”  That’s a classic welfare type thinking, and it’s linked to all the concepts of the undeserving poor.  These people who don’t deserve what they get.  Their position is all of their own making.  So it opens up all those avenues of thought and logic.

‘Income’ is almost the worst, because income is widely understood to be something you receive in return for work.  That’s the definition of the word.  So actually we’re trying to talk about a system that separates work from income.  You’re using the word that means income for work.  So none of these on their own are prohibitive, but they are framing points.  They do lead you into a certain type of logic and they’ll push the conversation in a certain direction.  It’s a direction that is far more in line with the conservative thinking than the progressive thinking.  So we’re already hampered, we’re already ham-strung by the language.

So we have an uphill battle, but then when don’t we?!  Everything we do is an uphill battle against the system on some level or other…

So what would you rather call it?

We were going to test trial stuff.  We don’t have a specific name in mind but we know the conceptual domains that will be much more useful for us.  So community domains are much better than individual domains, and ‘universal’ gets you into more individualist thinking.

You could think about some sort of language around community.  Also people have a much stronger logic for the health of communities in some respects.  People understand that income coming into a community will strengthen it.  There’s a much more communitarian logic when you start talking in terms of communities.  It triggers that sort of logic much better.  So we should be looking at that sort of area.  We were going to do a process of trying to test a few different memes and framings and see which ones resonate.

The problem is, we spoke to a lot of the people who are big players in this field at the moment, and we made the judgement that the language is too embedded now.  We could be fighting that fight forever and make no progress.  If you’re looking for the efficient entry point into this narrative, trying to change that basic language probably isn’t going to serve you very well.  You’ve just got to suck it up and think about how else we can get in there.  Because it’s so widespread now, it’s used in so many different places, that horse has bolted already.  But if you wanted to take a clear eyed view of the challenge ahead of us, it’s worth thinking about these linguistic points.

So how could a UBI best be designed to most enable a renaissance of the imagination?  Why is it a useful tool for that?

Several reasons.  One, it’s a challenging idea, and you want challenging ideas.  You want ideas that take people one step beyond where they already are.  It’s very difficult to teach people an entirely new logic with one set of ideas, or one policy prescription.  But this one, just the very idea of everybody getting an income by virtue of being alive, is quite shocking.  Quite arresting for people.

On the face of it, it’s an engaging idea.  Even if the engagement is people going, “Well, how would you pay for it?”, it’s a negative response, but its still a response.  You’ve got an awful lot in your favour from a campaign perspective just there.  The struggle to get people’s eyeballs on your things is permanent with campaigners, so this one has got a built in advantage for that.  That’s the surface level.

Once you get into the deeper level with it, it gets even better though, because depending on how you frame it, and the framing is all important – as with everything, he who frames, wins. But if you can get the framing right, it invites people to rethink money.  It invites people to rethink power structures.  If I get a cryptocurrency that doesn’t come from a bank, that isn’t issued by my government or my local authority, suddenly I’m into questions of what are those authorities for?  I’m rethinking their role on quite a fundamental level.  So it gets you into questions of money.

It gets you into questions of power.  It gets you into questions of growth.  It gets you into all these rich fundamental areas of logic that capitalism relies on for its life force.  That’s one of the reasons that we really like it.  It’s got all the dimensions to it.

I think of it, you walk into a room and this room’s got 20 doors off it, and some of them are more fruitful than others to go down.  UBI offers you a lot of doors to go through in terms of where you can take people’s thinking and the narrative, or trigger people’s thinking and logics.  It’s not the only idea around of its kind around, but I don’t know many others that have this pure potential in them to get people thinking differently.

If it were introduced tomorrow, in what way might it catalyse a whole flourishing of imagination do you think?  There’s not many spaces left in modern life where imagination is really encouraged or really flourishes.  How would the introduction of a UBI address that?

There’s no such thing as a quick silver bullet solution that’s going to take people from bad logics to good logics, to ecological logics overnight.  One of those reasons is because our entire language locks us into a financial producer/consumer logic.  So accept the basis that our environment is anything but neutral right now.  It’s dis-incentivising our spending time on the imagination, on community, on following passions.  We all have to work for our income, so we have to do what’s required of us, not what is necessarily our passion.

Just think of the idea – what would you do with your life if you had the freedom to live, not a rich, but a materially safe and comfortable life, without working?  What would you do?  Without having to go to an office?  You might choose to, and that’s great, because some people love work of that sort.  But you wouldn’t necessarily need to.

So now you’re moving beyond a situation where our lives are focused around work and income and provision for ourselves, and focused much more on the idea of living.  A lot of people go straight to, “Well, people will just be lazy.”  But that’s not true.  All the evidence suggests, of course some people, a small number of people will choose not to work, not to do anything and sit around watching TV all day, but those people do a lot of that anyway.  They are not the majority of us in society.  The majority of us get a lot of value from our work, from being productive, from engaging with our communities, from engaging our minds and learning.

Those are the stuff of life for a lot of us.  So once you even take one step away from the absolute imperative into work, into wage work I should say rather, all manner of things can change.  But I don’t think we can predict exactly what will happen if that’s the case.  We’re going to become almost like a leisure society over the next 50-100 years, particularly as automation kicks in.

We’ve got plenty enough wealth, and even when automation kicks in, there will be plenty enough generating capacity for everybody without needing to grow the capital supply infinitely.  So the whole paradigm we’re going to be living in is going to change over the next decades.  The concept of work is going to change even if we don’t implement something like universal basic income.  But if we do, if we get ahead of the curve of automation, if we start to release people from the imperative of wage labour, I think we’ll find a number of magic things happen.

What happens if we move to automation without a UBI?  We end up with lots of people who have no work – the implications are really quite alarming, am I right?

They’re quite dystopian.  But I can’t imagine any government will allow that.  If you want to stoke social unrest, no better way to do it than have millions of people unemployed wandering around being desperate.  So as lay-offs happen from automation, governments are going to respond in one way or another.  They’re not going to want masses of unemployed people wandering around feeling disenfranchised.

I’m not sure we’re going to be facing that sort of future, because it does not serve the interests of the current power structures.  If you look at the way a lot of the Silicon valley people talk about UBI, what they’re actually talking about is a different business model for themselves.  They’re not thinking about it in terms of different economic systems.  They’re not thinking about it as a social justice move towards an environmentally sustainable future.  They’re thinking, “How can we make sure people still have money to buy our services when they don’t have jobs to go to because of the automation that we’ve triggered?  How can we keep our consumer base, a consumer base?”

This is the minefield of this conversation. And obviously, Mark Zuckerberg writes a manifesto and makes one speech at a Harvard commencement session and suddenly he’s the poster child for UBI.  That’s why this is such a fraught area right now, as these people weigh on into it and are dominating the environment, forming the narrative, setting the frame.  So the rest of us have to step up a bit, and make sure their conception doesn’t win.

You mentioned that UBI is potentially a very powerful tool environmentally.  Would it not, just giving people more money, would they not just be buying more iPads, going on more holidays?

Consume more?  Yeah, absolutely.  That is a risk, but it’s not a guaranteed outcome.  There are ways you can mitigate it.  If we go down the cryptocurrency route, you can easily, as easily as walking, build in certain rules into that system, that strongly incentivise local trading.  Dis-incentivise global supply chains, dis-incentivise buying from distant, therefore abstract, people in environments.  So that’s one thing you can do if you take a cryptocurrency route to not kick off lots of negative consumption.  There are a range of things you can do, but this is something to keep an eye on.

Cross-posted from Rob Hopkins’ blog. Click here for more stories  and perspectives on Universal Basic Income.

The post How a Universal Basic Income could Fire the imagination appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Originally published on localfutures.org. Chat transcript available for download as PDF here.

A 500-year-old economic and political system is dying. ‘Trump trauma’ is affecting people around the world, but the current climate (in every sense of the word) is not the result of one man alone. While we come to grips with that bigger picture, it’s worth asking: What gives us hope? What keeps our hearts beating, and gives us the spirit to keep the struggle for justice alive?

Moving from the personal, to the communal, to the political, this webinar explores the concept of ‘sacred activism’. Combining resistance with renewal, and structural critique with a celebration of life, sacred activism rejects the corporate message that we are greedy and aggressive by nature. It integrates politics, spirituality, and a deep-rooted sense of place into a holistic practice capable of bringing together indigenous peoples, traditional environmentalists, union organizers, New Age spiritualists, and ordinary citizens alike – as it did at Standing Rock, and as it continues to do in people’s movements around the world.

Delve into this exciting field with our speakers, Alnoor Ladha from The Rules and Helena Norberg-Hodge from Local Futures.

Resources to complement the webinar

Memory, Fire and Hope: Five Lessons from Standing Rock, by Alnoor Ladha. March 8th, 2017
Big Picture Activism, by Helena Norberg-Hodge. October 26th, 2014

PRESENTERS

Alnoor Ladha’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking, storytelling, technology and the decentralization of power. He is a founding member and the Executive Director of The Rules (/TR), a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and poverty around the world. Alnoor is a writer and speaker on new forms of activism, the structural causes of inequality, the link between climate change and capitalism, and the rise of the Global South as a powerful organizing force in the transition to a post-capitalist world. He is also writing a book about the intersection of mysticism and anarchism.

Helena Norberg-Hodge is a pioneer of the new economy movement and recipient of the Right Livelihood Award and the Goi Peace Prize. She is author of Ancient Futures, co-author of Bringing the Food Economy Home and From the Ground Up, and producer of the award-winning documentary The Economics of Happiness. She is the director of Local Futures and the International Alliance for Localization, and a founding member of the International Forum on Globalization and the Global Ecovillage Network.

The post Sacred Activism in a Post-Trump World appeared first on P2P Foundation.

San José de Apartadó, Colombia — This is a significant feat, given that it is the leading peace community in Colombia, born in the heart of a civil war between the Colombian government, right-wing paramilitaries and the guerrilla army of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-Ep). Dignitaries from around the country and the globe have gathered in San José de Apartadó, including high-level officials from the United Nations, European ambassadors and heads of international non-governmental organizations like Peace Brigades International. Despite the international awareness of this community among certain circles in the human rights movement, most notably Noam Chomsky’s deep admiration for the community’s work, most people have never heard of San José de Apartadó. A little history might help us better understand why this is the case.

A Peace Community in the Heart of a Civil War

Founded by 1,350 displaced farmers in March 1997, after paramilitaries roamed the region pillaging and massacring, the community came together to protect themselves and their land, declaring themselves neutral in the war. The armed groups made them pay a huge price for this decision, killing more than 200 of their members, including most of their leaders. Almost all victims died by the hands of paramilitary and national armed forces, largely trained by the US government, working in the service of local landowners and multinational corporations.

Despite the horrors they have faced, the members of this community have stood their ground and continue working together bound by a commitment to nonviolence and reconciliation. Eduar Lanchero, one of their late leaders, once said, “The power of the community consists of its ability to transform pain into hope …” With their community, the people of San José have shown other communities in the region and country how to break the vicious victim-perpetrator cycle and to create a self-sufficient community outside the dominant resource extraction economic model that surrounds them. This level of economic autonomy and independence from state influence has been seen as a grave threat to the interests of multinational corporations looking for development opportunities in the region.

Conscious of the larger systemic effects of their resistance, Lanchero further elucidated,

The armed groups aren’t the only ones who kill. It’s the logic behind the whole system. The way people live generates this kind of death. This is why we decided to live in a way that our life generates life. One basic condition, which kept us alive was to not play the game of fear, which was imposed upon us by the murders of the armed forces. We have made our choice. We chose life. Life corrects us and guides us.”

Peace vs. “Development”

Despite international accompaniment through various non-governmental organizations, the persecution of the community has actually increased since the peace deal was signed. According to the February 24, 2017, newsletter of the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, the community has faced paramilitary invasion, with their remote hamlets continually occupied, threats that the community remain silent about the atrocities they have been afflicted by or face further retaliation.

As Todd Howland, Colombia representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights told Truthout, “Many claim that now there’s peace, there’s no longer any need for a peace community” and according to sources who wish to remain anonymous for their safety, the state has offered community members money to lure them out of the community. Gloria Cuartas, the former mayor of Apartadó, the municipality governing the region, says, “Parts of the government and multinationals use the cover of apparent peace to manage what they so far haven’t — ending the peace community.”

Why is the Colombian state so worried about a community of peaceful farmers? And is the answer to this question the same reason the story of San José de Apartadó has been so hidden from international media? The Colombian army has been clear on this answer, often stating that the community is in the way of”development.” What do they mean by development? Clearly, they are not referring to peace and human well-being, but rather the standard narrow definition of extractive-based GDP growth.

Edward Goldsmith, one of the fathers of the British environmental movement, reminds us, “Development is just a new word for what Marxists called imperialism and what we can loosely refer to as colonialism — a more familiar and less loaded term.”

For 20 years, the community of San José de Apartadó has been living a working alternative of nonviolent resistance to the brutal agenda of displacement and oppression. It seems to be the imperative of the state to dismantle it so it won’t be replicated or emulated by other communities living through the same struggles across the country.

Ati Quigua, leader of the Arhuaco people, who served as a spokesperson for Colombia’s Indigenous nations in the Havana peace negotiations, mirrors those worries. “They are making ‘peace’ in order to get rid of the guerrillas, so that paramilitaries can take over the countryside, drive out farmers and Indigenous Peoples and carry on with what they call ‘economic development’,” Quigua told Truthout. “This isn’t our peace. We want peace with the Earth. If things don’t change, Colombia is going to face a cultural and ecological genocide.”

The Possibility of Genuine Peace in Colombia

Colombia is a country at the tipping point, at a fragile moment of uncertainty, pregnant with both the prospect of a genuine humane transformation and the imminent danger of a violent backlash that could be even more brutal than the violence of its recent past.

One thing is clear: Peace will only be possible by addressing the root causes of the war. In other words, peace cannot be achieved without changing the rules of the global system that require perpetual exploitation of natural resources for maximum private profit, and therefore, necessitates the displacement of people from their lands.

Communities like San José de Apartadó can serve as living laboratories for the necessary next phase in the Colombian peace process: initiating a process of reconciliation and social peace-building in the country. They can also provide an alternative to traditional Western-led economic development. This is why knowing about this community and its peace work is an important part of creating a post-capitalist future. What better place to start than communities that have fostered reconciliation and resilience in the heart of violence and oppression?

Photo by Fellowship of Reconciliation

The post Peace vs. Development: The Untold Story of the Colombian Civil War appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this interview presented by the Upstream podcast, Martin Kirk – founder of The Rules – explains how this ancient concept of Wetiko is currently playing out in our modern capitalist era. In everything from our individualistic, profit-seeking impulses to the phenomenon of Donald Trump, we see how Wetiko has permeated our society. It’s about time that we recognize this dangerous characteristic and begin to transition towards a more authentic, life-affirming existence on this planet.

For more information on the Seeing Wetiko campaign, visit seeingwetiko.com

And for more interviews and documentaries from Upstream, visit ustreampodcast.org

The post Seeing Wetiko appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Image by Larry Pollack

Those were my thoughts when I saw “Seeing Wetiko,” an “online gallery” of artworks, music and videos just released by the global arts collective The Rules.  “Artists and activists from around the world have come together in a burst of creative energy to popularize the Algonquin concept of wetiko, a cannibalistic mind virus they claim is causing the destruction of the planet,” the group announced.

Wetiko is an indigenous term used to describe “a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul which deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others is logical and moral.”  The dozens of artworks on the website convey this idea in vivid, compelling ways.  The term wetiko was chosen for the project as a framework for understanding our global crisis, from ecological destruction and homelessness, to poverty and inequality.  To illustrate the scope of wetiko today, the website features a wonderful four-minute video, graffiti murals from Nairobi, carved marks from the US, a film about plastic bottle waste in Trinidad and Tobago, and a theater performance about patriarchy in India.

The Rules is a global network of “activists, artists, writers, farmers, peasants, students, workers, designers, hackers and dreamers” who focus on five key areas needing radical change – money, power, secrecy, ideas and the commons.

In an essay in Kosmos Journal describing the wetiko project, Martin Kirk and Alnoor Ladha, co-founders of The Rules, write:  “What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism we see all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if we went on to say that this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating, according to the laws of cultural evolution, and that it remains so clandestine in our psyches that most hosts will, as a condition of their infected state, vehemently deny that they are infected?”

The project organizers cite Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, who explains that “according to strands of Native American philosophy, wetiko is only possible when you commit the fundamental mistake of seeing yourself as an individual separate from the whole, separate from other humans and other non-human forms of being, not just animals and plants but also rivers and forests. It’s only once you presuppose this way of being of separation and disunity, when it’s written into the DNA of your culture, that it becomes possible to instrumentalize other forms of being for your own gain – to consume them for your own enrichment.”

The Rules goes on:  “All over the world, there is a feeling that something is deeply wrong.  It is often felt more than seen, an unnamed darkness that keeps millions (even billions) of people disconnected from the reality of authentic life-affirming experience.  Too many of our so-called leaders are asleep at the wheel — they talk about economic growth-at-all-costs as the only viable solution to mass poverty, wealth inequality, the climate crisis and other planetary-crises humanity must confront in the 21st Century.

“Those with a spiritual bent might say that a shadowy presence has shrouded much of the Earth. People are sleeping through the same nightmare, unable to awaken within the dream.”

By giving a fresh adaptation to the word wetiko, The Rules clearly hope to foster deeper reflection on the pathologies of neoliberal capitalism as a system based on wetiko.  “A key lesson from meme theory and the healing arts,” the curators write, “is that when we are conscious of the beliefs that shape our lives we are less likely to replicate them blindly. Conscious awareness is the beginning of an antidote, like green shoots through concrete.”

Lead image by Sara & Vicki Garrett

The post Seeing Wetiko appeared first on P2P Foundation.

With the growing awareness of the vulnerability of the planet and its people in the face of the systemic crises created by late-stage capitalism, we need to ready the alternatives and begin creating the next system now. To do so, we need a full understanding of the current context and its characteristics. In our view, the dominant political economy has three fatal flaws.

Pseudo-Abundance

The first is the characteristic need for the capitalist system to engage in continuous capital accumulation and growth. We could call this pseudo-abundance, i.e. the fundamental article of faith, or unconscious assumption, that the natural world’s resources are infinite. Capitalism creates a systemic ecological crisis marked by the overuse and depletion of natural resources, endangering the balance of the environment (biodiversity extinction, climate change, etc).

Scarcity Engineering

The second characteristic of capitalism is that it requires scarce commodities that are subject to a tension between supply and demand. Scarcity engineering is what we call this continuous attempt to undo natural abundance where it occurs. Capitalism creates markets by the systemic re-engineering of potentially or naturally abundant resources into scarce resources. We see this happening with natural resources in the development of “terminator seeds” that undo the seeds’ natural regeneration process. Crucially, we also see this in the creation of artificial scarcity mechanisms for human culture and knowledge. “Intellectual property” is imposed in more and more areas, privatizing common knowledge in order to create artificial commodities and rents that create profits for a privileged “creator class.”

These first two characteristics are related and reinforce each other, as the problems created by pseudo-abundance are made quite difficult to solve due to the privatization of the very knowledge required to solve them. This makes solving major ecological problems dependent on the ability of this privatized knowledge to create profits. It has been shown that the patenting of technologies results in a systemic slowdown of technical and scientific innovation, while un-patenting technologies accelerates innovation. A good recent example of this “patent lag” effect is the extraordinary growth of 3D printing, once the technology lost its patents.

Perpetually Increasing Social Injustice

The third major characteristic is the increased inequality in the distribution of value, i.e. perpetually increasing social injustice.

As Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows us, the logic of capital is to concentrate more and more wealth into fewer hands through compound interest, rent seeking, purchasing legislation, etc. Our current set of rules are hardwired to increase inequality and injustice.

Enter the Commons

To what degree does the Commons and peer-to-peer production function as a potential solution for these three interrelated structural crises of capitalism?

Commons are resources that are owned and managed neither by private corporations nor by the state. Instead, they are governed by their user communities. As the late Elinor Ostrom has shown, Commons have managed and maintained a healthy resource base for extremely long periods. Both private capitalism and state-centric development have been detrimental for the environment and the maintenance and regeneration of natural resources.

Digital networks (such as the internet) have recently enabled a new type of Commons where the knowledge required for human action and value creation has been mutualized. This has led to global open design communities, which jointly create open knowledge pools (e.g. Wikipedia), free software (e.g. the Linux Operating System) or open designs to enable physical production (e.g. Arduino motherboards, WikiSpeed cars, WikiHouse housing projects, etc.).

Commons-based peer production emerges when technology enables the creation of open, contributory systems that create Commons. Unlike physical resources (which need to be managed tightly), these digital Commons can be open for use by all of humanity (on the condition of having network access of course).

In what way do the Commons and peer-to-peer dynamics represent a potential response to the three systemic crises we’ve described?

As a first approach, we offer the following theses:

1. Under capitalism, the design of products and services is led by the desire to retain market scarcity, and therefore, to create commodities. In this context, corporate-driven innovation is always characterized by planned obsolescence. The global open design communities engaging in peer production and mutualization of productive knowledge have no such perverse incentives. These communities design to ensure participation and are “naturally” inclined to design sustainable products and services. Of course, this is not to say that relying on peer production is entirely sufficient to obtain full sustainability. The point is that peer production does not structurally create the need for unsustainable production.

2. Innovation under our current system actually depends on artificial scarcity and the intellectual property regime. The privatization and patenting of knowledge and technical solutions hampers the widespread distribution of necessary innovations. No such impediments exist in the open contributory systems of peer production communities, where innovation anywhere in the network is instantly available to the whole.

3. Peer production, independent of the profit motive, invites and facilitates the creation of solidarity-based forms of economic entities. Being generative towards human communities, these entities are more likely based on socially just forms of value sharing. This condition, though, requires that the value generated by peer production communities is not captured by extractive economic entities. In fact, this is the central locus of political and social struggle when peer production emerges in the context of the dominance of an economic system based on value extraction from human communities and the environment. The self-organizing characteristics of peer production, however, also enables the creation of new economic forms that are generative, and which can therefore produce more justice in the economic system.

The Revolution Is Already Happening

All over the planet, citizens are organizing to solve these three systemic crises. Their responses take three forms:

1. The sustainability and ecological/environmental movements, attempting to find solutions for the planet’s survival;

2. The “Open,” “Commons” and “Sharing” movements, stressing the need for shareable knowledge and mutualized physical resources;

3. The cooperative and solidarity economy, focusing on fairness.

All three of these movements are vital, yet alone they are not sufficient for a global, systemic response to these crises.To be effective, they must combine elements from the “free” (open/shareable), “fair”(socially just) and “sustainable” movements.

The good news is that Commons-based peer production is the best way to bring these three necessary aspects together into one coherent system. However, for this to happen, the various movements need enabling tools and capacities. An example is the open source circular economy (encompassing open and sustainable approaches). Here, open and participatory logistical and accounting systems allow citizens, entrepreneurs and public officials to scale up their circular economy cooperation in otherwise impossible ways.

Similarly, open and platform cooperativism — the convergence of socially just forms of production with shareable knowledge — allows all contributing citizens to create fair, generative livelihoods around the shared resources they need and co-create.

The task may seem daunting, but history shows that value regimes do change; in fact, they’ve changed at least twice in the last thousand years in the European sphere.

Richard Moore, in his wonderful book The First European Revolution, describes how Europe moved from the post-Roman plunder economy to a feudal regime based on land ownership. Rapid development of a new economy came in the 15th century (after the crisis of feudalism), based on making and selling commodities. This would eventually become capitalism.

We’ve seen post-capitalist practices emerging since the late 20th century — for example, the 1983 invention of the universally available browser. Citizens have been empowered to create value through open contributory systems; these create universally available knowledge, which in turn can be used for material production. This new value regime is now emerging globally, and can be paired with an ethical, generative economy to create sustainable livelihoods for those who contribute to the common good. These are the dots that we must connect in order to help usher in the post-capitalist world.

• Originally published in Truthout as part of the Connecting the Dots Series, a campaign by our colleagues at TheRules.org
  All images by Aotaro. CC BY 2.0.

The post Connecting the Dots 8: The Commons as the Response to the Structural Crises of the Global System appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this light, the editorial below illustrates some of the many and diverse ways in which a call for sharing is being expressed, whether it’s by politicians, economists, activists, academics, campaign groups, or anyone else. To learn more about STWR’s campaign, please visit: www.sharing.org/global-call

The people’s voice has taken centre stage once again in recent months, in which a call for sharing is palpable in the many agendas for social justice and true democracy. To recall just some examples, mass demonstrations in Iceland forced the Prime Minister to resign following the Panama leaks; thousands marched for an end to austerity policies in the UK and other European countries; public sector workers in Costa Rica called national strikes for such demands as tax justice and the defense of public healthcare; and ordinary citizens joined migrants and asylum-seekers in the streets of Athens to march in protest against closed borders and the EU-Turkey deal.

Many are asking if we are in the midst of a new cycle of popular uprisings that are reminiscent of the movements that began in 2011, especially in light of the ongoing ‘Nuit Debout’ meetings across over 30 cities in France. Although these vast nightly assemblies arose out of opposition to labour reforms proposed by President Hollande, they have soon expanded to include major sharing-related themes on everything from tax evasion and unjust trade treaties to housing inequality. The call has now rung out for an international day of action on May 15th, a so-called #GlobalDebout, that will invoke the spirit of the Occupy and 15M movements through a worldwide ‘convergence of struggles’.

Last month also saw an unprecedented mobilisation of campaign groups and activists across the U.S. in a concerted call for getting big money out of politics. The ‘Democracy Spring’ began with a walk of 140 miles from the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia to the nation’s capital, where hundreds of people participated in six-straight days of non-violent civil disobedience, leading to over 1,400 arrests. Despite a distinct lack of coverage in the mainstream media, the week of rallies and teach-ins may have been the largest democracy-focused protest actions in a generation, and they signalled the beginning of a renewed push for nationwide reforms to campaign financing and voting rights, including a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. As the campaign materials emphasise, there cannot be a fairer sharing of wealth and power in American society – nor a just solution to the most pressing crises of our times – as long as many ordinary citizens are shut out of the political process, and while the campaign finance landscape allows big money to increasingly shape elections and the policymaking process.

For an altogether different take on the next stage for global activism, a book by STWR’s founder Mohammed Mesbahi will be published this month that proposes a far-reaching vision of peaceful protest that can unite the populations of all countries through enormous and continuous demonstrations. In a unique and provocative analysis, Mesbahi proposes that men and women of goodwill adopt Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as an overriding cause in the immediate time ahead, which he argues has profound implications for the future direction of international politics and global development. Yet such a simple cause is still far from the thinking of most activists who remain preoccupied with national issues of inequality and injustice, while there is scant public attention paid to the millions of needless deaths that occur due to hunger and poverty each year.

Part of the problem is a paucity of reliable global data about the true extent of the crisis of poverty, which has been addressed in some important work by Dr Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics. We’ve previously highlighted some of Hickel’s research that contradicts the “good news narrative” touted by the mainstream media that poverty levels have been dramatically reduced in recent decades, and that we are on course to end poverty altogether by 2030. On the contrary, Hickel shows that there are more people living in poverty today than ever before in history – more than 60% of humanity, and the situation is getting worse rather than improving.

In his latest research, Hickel extends his analysis to the question of whether or not the world is becoming more equal over time, which is the received wisdom from most economists, governments and United Nations agencies. By again citing some incisive data on this issue, he reveals that “inequality between countries has been increasing by orders of magnitude over the past two hundred years, and shows no signs of abating”. This assessment further underlines how unfairly the world’s resources are distributed, and the need for dramatic changes in the balance of political power in the global economy. Hickel writes: “As long as a few rich countries have the power to set the rules to their own advantage, inequality will continue to worsen. The debt system, structural adjustment, free trade agreements, tax evasion, and power asymmetries in the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO are all major reasons that inequality is getting worse instead of better.”

Over recent months there has been plenty of other analysis of the growing inequalities in our societies, including a new campaign by Caritas Europa that advocates for an end to austerity policies and a major upscaling of social protection systems across the European Union. As a short animation accompanying the campaign narrates:

“Dear Europe, what is happening to you? People are losing their jobs, their homes. Losing control of their lives. Your Europe 2020 Strategy was supposed to help them, since things have only gotten worse. Now, around 123 million people live in poverty. And yet luxury goods consumption has never been so high. In all your history, the gap between rich and poor has never been so dramatic. So why do you keep undermining your protection systems? When did you become so focused with finance, with growth? Excluding people, leaving them behind? Isn’t it time to make people your priority again? Please, abandon your obsession with austerity, and focus on what really matters…”

In the U.S., leading analysts from the Institute of Policy Studies have also published a series of articles with the Nation magazine that propose eight bold solutions that can rewrite the rules that protect the richest Americans, thereby closing the wealth gap and ensuring a future of shared prosperity. Recognising that the unprecedented focus on inequality among politicians has not yet translated into any significant policy changes, the authors propose concrete measures that can “challenge entrenched wealth and power with policies that reduce the share of treasure at the top.”

Most of these proposals focus on reforms to the U.S. financial and tax systems, such as ending preferential tax treatment for capital-gains income; steep taxes on luxury consumption to help underwrite a just transition to a clean-energy economy; funding tuition-free public higher education through a modest wealth tax; and a serious crack-down on tax havens through a new worldwide register of financial wealth, among other reforms. But the authors recognise that we can’t address structural and cultural unfairness through redistributive tax policy alone; we also need to challenge the powerful narratives that justify extreme inequality, and forge campaigns that empower large constituencies to fight for game-changing solutions.

Excellent article on #inequality and how to address it: https://t.co/iGqxHIG4W7 @IPS_DC Ultimately, it's about creating a #sharingsociety

— sharing.org (@global_sharing) February 19, 2016

Another valuable contribution to the inequality debate comes from a newly released report by ActionAid called The Price of Privilege, which provides an accessible overview of current civil society thinking on the various forms of inequality that mar the global community. As the report emphasises, we already know what it takes to reduce inequality within countries, as history shows how a combination of strong social protections, industrial policy and progressive taxation lead to economically more equal societies.

However, considering the alarming scale of inequality within most nations – particularly inequality in the distribution of wealth, which underlies many other injustices – the report recommends a number of measures to “rebalance power” in our political systems and “change the mindset” that sees no alternative to the status quo. See in this regard the second chapter on how to challenge the dominant economic narrative by exposing its 7 key lies, such as “Inequality is necessary to generate economic growth”, or “If people can’t get as rich as they like, economies will grind to a halt as wealth creators ‘go elsewhere’.” Citing the hopeful signs from the past that a shift towards greater equality is ever viable despite current trends, the report concludes on an optimistic note that a fairer sharing of the world’s resources is not only possible, but on its way. To paraphrase from an article by one of the report’s contributors, it’s not enough to ask global leaders to agree that inequality is a problem; we need to build people’s power from below to pressure leaders to act, which is the only path to achieving transformative social change.

In this brief and very selective round-up of recent highlights on the inequality debate from within the progressive community, we should also mention the much-anticipated documentary, The Divide, that was recently released across the UK (in the same week that the revelations from the Panama Papers were being pored over internationally). Based on the bestselling book The Spirit Level, the film does an estimable job of bringing to life the basic arguments made by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett – that income inequality is the underlying cause of most modern social ills, from violence and depression to drug abuse and ill health. Although the narrative of the documentary (like the book) is not positively framed around the need for a renewed culture of genuine economic sharing and cooperation within our societies, the message is implicit throughout its sweeping portrayal of how the past 35 years of divisive economic policies have led to greater unhappiness, disaffection and hardship for the majority.

Amidst these many discussions on inequality that are inherently related to the case for sharing, there’s one subject that has seemed almost impossible to avoid so far this year, which is the enormously popular idea of a universal basic income (UBI). Long supported by all manner of thinkers from both the left and right of the political spectrum, this previously fringe policy idea is now being seriously considered by some governments as a solution to precarious employment models, inadequate social protection systems, and a future low-work society due to technological unemployment. Switzerland will be the first country in the world to vote on a launch of the idea in June, while Finland, Holland, Canada, New Zealand, Namibia and other countries are discussing or testing out the policy.

So could state-administered UBI schemes help or hinder the creation of truly sharing societies, and can such policies benefit citizens in developing countries and ultimately help to end poverty or protect the global commons? While there isn’t space here to go into these questions (although see here for a big picture vision from STWR on funding basic income schemes by sharing the value from common pool resources), a number of public events this month are debating the implementation of a UBI with various prominent speakers. For example, the Future of Work conference in Zurich this week was attended by Yanis Varoufakis, Robert Reich and other well-known progressive academics; Caroline Lucas in the UK, who tabled an early-day motion in the House of Commons about UBI, is headlining an event in Westminster later this month to discuss the prospect of implementing a scheme within Britain; and a UBI conference in Hamburg, Germany on 21st May aims to create a dialogue between the movements for degrowth and basic income within Europe. There is even a proposal from Scott Santens that May 1st, known as International Workers Day in celebration of the historic achievements of labour unions, should also be championed worldwide as Basic Income Day.

The Panama Papers may have underlined how there is no justification for the argument that governments cannot afford a basic income scheme, considering the huge amount of untaxed assets that are hidden by the global elite in overseas jurisdictions. However, there is another area of the debate on a UBI that is less prominent in most discussions, yet of critical relevance to the growing call for sharing – which is the question of the unsustainability of an employment and taxation system that is predicated on endless economic growth. To quote from a recent article by Ralph Callebert in The Conversation;

“Furthermore, as the Club of Rome already realized in 1972, the productivist bias of our usual answers to inequality – grow more, produce more and grow the economy so that people can consume more – is ultimately unsustainable. Surely, in a world already characterized by overproduction and overconsumption, producing and consuming more cannot be the answer. Yet, these seem to be the answers with which we are stuck: grow, grow, grow.

“…The problem of global inequality is not that we do not produce enough to provide for the world’s population. It is about the distribution of resources. This is why the idea of a basic income is so important: it discards the assumption that in order to get the income you need to survive, you should be employed or at least engaged in productive labor. Assumptions of this kind are untenable when for so many there are no realistic prospects for employment.”

This leads on to a final issue that is worthwhile to mention in this short roundup of sharing-related news and developments, which is the limits to growth debate that has recently been given a high profile in both policy and campaigning circles. In the UK, an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) was launched in the House of Commons in April to review the scientific merits of the controversial report by the Club of Rome that was published over 40 years ago. The aim of the APPG is to stimulate a cross-party dialogue on “prosperity within limits”, exploring the economic risks associated with resource constraints and planetary boundaries. A short review of the limits debate was compiled by Tim Jackson and Robin Webster, two academic specialists on the issue, who found unsettling evidence that society is still following the “standard run” of the original study, in which overshoot leads to an eventual collapse of production and living standards.

In other words, the limits to growth arguments are more relevant today than ever, and present a stark challenge to the prevailing assumption that the only way to bring about widespread affluence, as well as greater equality, is through the perpetual growth of GDP. The APPG report’s analysis makes clear that new impetus must be given to efforts to redefine prosperity in a way that is more in tune with human nature, the natural environment, and their interrelationships. And the relevance of sharing in all its forms could not be more pertinent to these new visions of a better world that “provide the capabilities for everyone to flourish, while society as a whole remains within the safe operating space of the planet”.

There are plenty of resources available that give an inspiring insight into what it means to embrace this new ethic of sharing and sufficiency, among which is a recent paper by Samuel Alexander of the Simplicity Institute that explores the government policies that could facilitate a planned transition beyond growth. The latest campaign from The Rules team also makes a compelling case to “connect the dots” between the great converging crises of our time, beginning with a realisation that the logic of “growth at all costs” is at the root of our problems, the “one sacred rule” that we will eventually have to break.

As always, the summary above is merely an overview of some of the debates, events, campaigns and activism that relate to the growing call for sharing, and there are invariably many other issues that could be highlighted. This would include progress on trade justice campaigns in light of the TTIP leaks from Greenpeace; the shameful politics of the refugee crisis within the European Union; the state of play with overseas aid as we approach the World Humanitarian Summit (tweeting under the hashtag #ShareHumanity); or the fading vision of ‘fair shares’ in tackling climate change now that nations have signed the COP21 agreement. We’ll continue to highlight and frame some of these issues in terms of sharing in future blogs and editorials, and you can keep abreast of what we’re reading at STWR by following our Twitter and Facebook feeds, as well our Scoop.It! page that is regularly updated.

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