Charts the strategic thinking behind the movements challenging neoliberal globalization.

A Movement of Movements charts the strategic thinking behind the mosaic of movements currently challenging neoliberal globalization. Leading theorists and activists—the Zapatistas’ Subcomandante Marcos, Chittaroopa Palit from the Indian Narmada Valley dam protests, Soweto anti-privatization campaigner Trevor Ngwane, Brazilian Sem Terra leader João Pedro Stedile, and many more—discuss their personal formation as radicals, the history of their movements, their analyses of globalization, and the nuts and bolts of mobilizing against a US-dominated world system.

Explaining how the Global South and the experience of indigenous peoples have provided such a dynamic and practical inspiration, the contributors describe the roles anarchism and direct democracy have played, the contributions and limitations of the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre as a coordinating focus, and the effects of and responses to the economic downturn, September 11, and Washington’s war on terror. Their statements, at once personal and visionary, offer a dazzling new insight into the political imagination of the global resistance movements.

Available here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/170-a-movement-of-movements

The post Book of the Day: A Movement of Movements appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A big thanks to Remix the Commons and Commons Spaces – two groups in Montreal, and to Alain Ambrosi, Frédéric Sultan and Stépanie Lessard-Bérubé — for pulling together this wonderful snapshot of the commons world.  The overview video is no introduction to the commons, but a wonderfully insightful set of advanced commentaries about the political and strategic promise of the commons paradigm today.

The overview video (“Les communs dans l’espace politique,” with English subtitles as needed) is striking in its focus on frontier developments: the emerging political alliances of commoners with conventional movements, ideas about how commons should interact with state power, and ways in which commons thinking is entering policy debate and the general culture.

The video features commentary by people like Frédéric Sultan, Gaelle Krikorian, Alain Ambrosi, Ianik Marcil, Matthew Rhéaume, Silke Helfrich, Chantal Delmas, Pablo Solon, Christian Iaione, and Jason Nardi, among others.

The individual interviews with each of these people are quite absorbing. (See the full listing of videos here.) Six of these interviews are in English, nine are in French, and three are in Spanish.  They range in length from ten minutes to twenty-seven minutes.

To give you a sense of the interviews, here is a sampling:

Christian Iaione, an Italian law scholar and commoner, heads the Laboratory for the Governance of the Commons in Italy. The project, established five years ago, is attempting to change the governance of commons in Italian cities such as Rome, Bologna, Milan and Messina. More recently, it began a collaboration with Fordham University headed by Professor Sheila Foster, and  experiments in Amsterdam and New York City.

In his interview, “Urban Commons Charters in Italy,” Iaione warns that the Bologna Charter for the Care and Regeneration of Urban commons is not a cut-and-paste tool for bringing about commons; it requires diverse and localized experimentation. “There must be a project architecture working to change city governance and commons-enabling institutions,” said Iaione. “Regulation can’t be simply copied in south of Italy, such as Naples, because they don’t have the same civic institutions and public ethics as other parts of Italy….. You need different tools,” which must be co-designed by people in those cities, he said.

Jason Nardi, in his interview, “The Rise of the Commons in Italy” (27 minutes), credits the commons paradigm with providing “a renewed paradigm useful to unite and aggregate many different movements emerging today,” such as degrowth, cooperatives, the solidarity economy, ecologists, NGOs, development movements, and various rights movements. He credited the World Social Forum for helping to unite diverse factions to fight the privatization of everything by the big financial powers.

Charles Lenchner of Democrats.com spoke about “The Commons in the USA” (11 minutes), citing the important movement in NYC to converted community gardens into urban commons.  He also cited the rise of participatory budgeting movement in New York City today, in which a majority of city council districts use that process.  The City of New York is also encouraging greater investment in co-operatives, in part as a way to deal with precarity and income disparities.

Silke Helfrich, a German commons activist, discussed “Commons as a new political subject” (27 minutes).  She said that “it’s impossible today to know what’s going on about the commons because so many things are popping up or converging that it’s hard to keep up with them all.”  She said that there are three distinct ways of approaching the commons:  the commons as pools of shared resources to be managed collectively; the commons as social processes that bring commoning into being; and the commons as an attitude and way of thinking about a broader paradigm shift going on.

Kevin Flanagan gave an interview, “Transition according to P2P” (19 minutes), in which he speaks of the “growing political maturity within the commons world, particularly within digital commons, peer production and collaborative economy.”  Flanagan said that there has always been a politics to the commons, but that politics is moving from being a cultural politics towards a broader politics that is engaging hacker culture, maker spaces, and open design and hardware movements.   Commoners are also beginning to work with more traditional political movements such as the cooperative and the Social and Solidarity Economy movements.

Lots of nutritious food for thought in this well-produced collection of videos!

The post New Videos Explore the Political Potential of the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Matthieu Rhéaume, a commoner and game designer who lives Montreal, decided that a card game could be a great vehicle for introducing people to the commons.  The result of his efforts is “C@rds in Common:  A Game of Political Collaboration.”  “I see playfulness as a sense-making tool,” Matthieu told me.  “People can play casually and be surprised by the meta-learning [about the commons] that results.”

It all began at the World Social Forum (WSF) conference in Montreal in August 2016. Rhéaume decided to use the opportunity to synthesize viewpoints about the commons from a group of 50 participants and use the results to develop the card game.  He persuaded the Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation and Gazibo, both based in France, to support development of the game. Fifty commoners more or less co-created the game with the help of several colleagues.  (The process is described here.)

As a game designer, Rhéaume realized that successful, fun games must embody a certain “procedural rhetoric” and reward storytelling. He had enjoyed playing “Magic: The Gathering,” a popular multiplayer card game, and wondered what that game would feel like if it were collaborative.

At the WSF, Rhéaume asked participants to share their own insights about the commons by submitting suggested cards in six categories. The first four categories consist of “commoners cards” featuring  “resources,” “action cards,” “project cards” and “attitude cards.”  Two other types of cards — “Oppressive Forces” cards with black backs – give the game its kick by applying  “negative effects” to the “Political Arena” of play.  The two negative effects are “enclosures” and “crises,” to which commoners must collectively organize and respond in time.

Intended for two to five players, the game usually lasts between 60 and 90 minutes.  It has enough of a basic storyline to be easily understood, but enough complexity and sophisticated twists to be unpredictable and interesting.  The key objective of the game is to “create a Political Arena resilient enough to defend the commons against encroaching enclosures.”  The players win when there are no more enclosure cards in the Political Arena.  They lose if there are more than five enclosures present at any one time.

The backs of the Oppressive Forces cards feature a conquistador with a spear and text reading, “I am here to take the commons.”  One of the Oppressive Force card is “Trump Elected!” which demobilizes every commons campaign underway.  Another OF card, “Old Inner Culture,” prohibits the discarding of “attitudes” cards (which might otherwise hasten commoning).  A “Fear of the Unknown” card prohibits players from drawing new cards for one cycle.

By contrast, the commoner cards feature such things as urban gardens, First Nations, degrowth and independent media.  A series of “Attitude” cards affect a player’s capacity to cooperate.

WSF participants submitted a wild diversity of 240 cards to Rhéaume giving many perspectives on commoning and enclosure.  Rheaume used 120 of cards and his own knowledge of game design to produce the game, printing at a local printer.  He tested C@rds in Common through 25 games and four design iterations, attempting to achieve a 50% failure rate (the forces of enclosure win).  Players discovered that the complexities of cooperation grow as new enclosures introduce new variables.  A game booklet describes how players can make winning more difficult (by accelerating the rate of enclosure threats and reducing the time allowed to build civil society).

Rhéaume concedes that the first play of C@rds in Common can be challenging, but there are YouTube videos to help new players learn the game. (See this video introduction to the game as a project, and this “how to play” video tutorial.)

Rhéaume would like to refine the game further – it still has elements of the WSF event, including some French-only cards – but he is pleased that the game helps introduce players into the commons worldview and start deeper conversations about it.  Following most games, players reflect on what happened and tell stories about the successful collaborations that emerged and enclosures that prevailed.

The game was released in February, first with a European launch overseen by Fréderic Sultan of Gazibo.  There are now more than 70 decks of C@rds in Common (in French, C@rtes en Communs) circulating there.

The Canadian launch of the game will take place in Montreal on May 11 at 17:30 to 20:30 at 5248 Boulevard Saint-Laurent in Montreal.  To register for the (free) event, here is a link on Brown Paper Tickets.

A deck of the game can be bought directly, at cost, via a commercial distributor, Game Crafters, at https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/c-rds-in-common, for $22.40.  Until May 31, Canadians can acquire the game more cheaply by signing up for a bulk order at this webpage; Rhéaume et al. will then distribute the games to individual buyers.

Let me add a charming historical footnote that Rhéaume sahred with me. On the back of each commoner card, there is a drawing of a farmer with the text, “Give me my leather coat and my purse in a groat. That’s some habit for a husbandman.”

Those lines are from a song in a medieval mummers play, “The Seven Champions of Christendom.” The lyrics are a heated discussion between a servingman to the king and a free and independent husbandman (commoner) about the merits and liabilities of their respective stations in life. (The song originated from Symondsbury, near Bridport, Dorset, in England — so a shout-out to STIR magazine, which is based there!).

A sample exchange between the servingman and the husbandman:

[Servingman] But then we do wear the finest of grandeur,
My coat is trimmed with fur all around;
Our shirts as white as milk and our stockings made of silk:
That’s clothing for a servingman.

[Husbandman] As to thy grandeur give I the coat I wear
Some bushes to ramble among;
Give to me a good greatcoat and in my purse a grout [coarse meal],
That’s clothing for an husbandman.

The full lyrics of the song can be found here.

The post C@rds in Common: Learning about the Commons Through Play appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The first featured session is –

THE COMMONS, STATE POWER AND NEW POLITICAL MOVEMENTS

https://commonsspace.hackpad.com/THE-COMMONS-STATE-POWER-AND-NEW-POLITICAL-MOVEMENTS-tznP7zj0hTd

The Market/State is in crisis and representative democracy seems to be broken. Many argue that both problems need to be addressed for the sake of social coherence and security. We think, that adressing them properly implies rethinking the core ideas that state power and representative democracy are based upon.

The commons provides a framework that allows to protect traditional ways of living wherever people wish them to be protected, while at the same time enabling voluntary forms for creating new ones. It allows for thinking a fair, free and sustainable future. Hence, there is nothing in the current institutional arrangement or in the system of representation that truly recognizes and defends the commons. There are no emancipatory world-views nor special types of institutions — which helps explain why the commons are usually ignored.

It is often claimed that the Commons points to a way beyond both Market and State. We claim that the also provides a way to deepen democracy – if a multitude of people and political agents stand up for it. That is: if we want to strengthen the Commons and deepen democracy, we need to challenge how economic and political power are being shaped, channeled and reproduced – through market forces and through (the territorialization of) economic and political power via the State and the political apparatus. That is what commoners are doing! They take power and production into their own hands. Political parties and state institutions should support such efforts. Instead, their often-corrupt ways of „doing politics“ and their economic policies — neoliberal, developmentalist and/or extractivist — ignore or even criminalize the commons and commoning.

During the last decade, several new political movements have challenged the forces that solidify power relationships in society: Occupy, M15, social movements in several Latin American countries, DIEM25 in Europe, the climate justice movement, digital activists including Wikileaks, the people who supported the Bernie Sanders campaign in the US, and others.  Each  of these movements has shown that change comes from the edges and from below, from common people doing uncommon things, while using new technologies and ways of relating to each other.

How transformative and “commonistic” are these movements? How do they frame their work, strategies and slogans?  What role do they play in the fight for the commons and what role does the commons as a discourse and political paradigm play for them? This is a fairly unexplored topic!

In a moderated fishbowl discussion at Commons Space of the World Social Forum 2016 in Montreal/Canadá, we want to assess and openly discuss some of the achievements and aspirations of these political transformations from a commons perspective.

Some questions might trigger the conversation (the focus will finally be determined by participants):

On the notion of the commons:

• (How) Does the commons provide a strong and positive narrative to empower progressive political movements?
• Is the notion of the commons and is the practice of millions of commoners present in the discourse of these movements?
• Is there an understanding of the commons as a political framework and paradigm shift in values, rather than (only) a policy for managing resources?
• … [YOUR QUESTION]

On commons principles and political movements:

• What is the relationship of these movements to the commons (movement), if any?
• Does commoning exist within social/political movements and if so, how does it transform them?
• Are these movements acting according to commons principles?
• … [YOUR QUESTION]

On strategies:

• Do new political movements rethink and reshape democracy toward a more radical democracy?
• Are progressive political movements (and commoners) up to re-imagining state power as a strategy for shifting legality, resources and support for the commons?
• Do these new political movements represent a window of opportunity to widen the space for commoning — or will their protests simply accelerate enclosures, hyper-nationalism and repression?
• … [YOUR QUESTION]

Organizers:

Silke Helfrich, Commons Strategies Group (concept, methodology, moderation) Elizabetta Cangelosi, Transform (coordinator, logistics)

contacts: [email protected] ; [email protected]

Participants:

Everybody(!) is invited to participate in this fishbowl discussion especially if belonging to one of the new political movements or active for the commons (the methodology will be explained at the beginning), starting with 4-5 inputs, 5 minutes each.

There will be a sequence of thesis being discussed to structure the debate.

Invited guests:

• Juliano Medeiros, Fundação Lauro Campos/ Member of RAIZ, tbc
• Elizabeth Peredo, Trenzando Ilusiones (Bolivia), tbc
• Lisa Fithian, (USA) (http://organizingforpower.org/about/about-lisa/)or
• John Restakis, Synergia, Cooperative Movement (Canadá, tbc)
• sbd. from Occupy or the Bernie Sanders campaign, tbc
• sbd from Climate Justice Movement

? please SUGGEST AND INVITE OTHERS as you see fit. Remember, it’s a FISHBOWL discussion! (drop me a note to [email protected]

When?

August 11, 2016 (Thursday):    lunch and discussion

12:00 to 2:00pm:         lunch, mingling & 1 on 1 interviews

with Remix the Commons broadcast team

2:00 to 4:00pm:         fishbowl discussion

Where?

Radio Auditoire; Montréal, 5212 Boulevard St. Laurent

Related events at WSF (Commons Space)

Commons and Public Power: Wednesday,  August 10, 9 – 11 am , Radio Auditoire

Commons as a new Political Subject: (Transform! Global Social Justice), Thursday, August 11, 9 – 11 am, UQAM Pavillon A, Local A-2580, 400 rue Sainte-Catherine Est

You can also join the mailing list here – http://lists.p2pfoundation.net/wws/review/wsf2016

The post THE COMMONS, STATE POWER AND NEW POLITICAL MOVEMENTS appeared first on P2P Foundation.