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in Brazil today. CoopHab is a major housing federation of co-operative savings societies.

During the industrial revolution English working people were excluded from bank lending though pawnbroking was rife. Mutual aid savings clubs developed interest-free lending systems for housing. The most successful were the Terminating Building Societies for buying land and building houses.

Sweden

Operationally, JAK is very similar to a credit union, except that members do not earn any interest on their savings or dividends on their shares.

The total cost of a JAK loan covers four things:(12)loan appraisal and set-up cost at a fee that is 2-3% of the approved loan value.an annual administration fee equal to 1% of the loan.an annual fee of approximately $30 to support the JAK educational system and volunteer services.(13)an equity deposit equal to a 6% of loan value to cover risk on any loan in the portfolio.

Members are strongly encouraged to pre-save in order to qualify for a loan.(15) Members also contract to continue saving while they are repaying their loans.

The Greenbacks would not be backed by gold, but by the farmers’ crops, which would be stored in sub-Treasury warehouses paid for by the government.

Swiss WiR

President Lincoln

free Greenback dollars

Lincoln

he had led the introduction of a paper money not backed by gold or silver, and had shown that the government could create, issue, and circulate by fiat the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers.

the privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity.

National Farmers Alliance and Co-operative Union, led by Charles Macune, developed the Sub-Treasury Plan.

JAK banking, CoopHab and Community Land Trusts work well but are below national policy radar. This is not entirely the case for co-operative commonwealth systems.

So this was not simply a co-operative currency. It was a new national currency under a co-operative and state partnership to expunge the debt peonage imposed by merchants and bankers.

Infuriated, farmers and workers created their own party in 1891 to carry forwardmonetary reform and a co-operative economy. The new Populist party won some local, state and Congressional elections before falling into decline after 1895.

A.C. Townley launched the Non-partisan League (NPL)

Bank of North Dakota

Henry Ford and Thomas Edison suggested a novel solution.

proposed that new money be created by issuing interest-free government bonds

Frederick Soddy

made the first case for an ecological economics free of debt

“100% money.”

100% reserve requirement.

Clifford H Douglas

He argued that a clear-cut and labour-saving solution would be for Government to create new money, interest-free as “Social Credit.”

First all citizens would receive a National Dividend.

Second, Douglas proposed that publicly-owned producer banks be set up in each region of the UK to provide finance debt-free to industry and enterprises.

From 1929 monetary reform attracted a wide audience In the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Canada with growing grassroots calls ranging from public banking to universal basic income.(34) The New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt took inspiration from John Maynard Keynes.

the housing rights activist and feminist Ada Colau – took control of the Catalan capital

citizens started to wonder what would happen if the movement tried to occupy the institutions too

From the beginning, this was not a simple return to electoral politics but an experiment in transforming local institutions. It was to use municipal institutions not instead of movement organising but to support, expand and generalise the movement.

it’s about the blossoming of examples around the world where citizens are successfully winning their cities.

internationalist

the list of radical civic platforms standing up to entrenched political interests continues to grow.

there are a number of principles and practices that the new municipalist movements share

The political theorist Margaret Kohn once defined municipalism as ‘a politics of everyday life concerned with the issues that immediately affect citizens, including education, policing, jobs, culture and services. Municipalism is a political approach to community.’

The role of the municipality was to foster associations that challenge concentrations of power in the hands of a small elite. Capturing the city hall was never an end in itself but rather one method in expanding the scope of experiments in popular participation.

the continued erosion of basic living standards and increasing inequality driven by the myth that there is ‘no alternative’ has increased awareness that revolutionary change extends beyond ‘economics’ to every aspect of our lived experiences.

the new municipal citizens’ movements have arisen out of the failure of national political parties or street-based organising to deliver transformative change

This new municipalism may be picking-up where the alter-globalisation movement left off, retaining and reinvigorating the concepts of prefiguration, experimenting with ‘diagonal’ methods for dispersing power, and fuelling the expansion of non‑state, non-market ways of organising our societies.

This provides fertile ground for the development of a progressive post-capitalist politics that can win.

Women are at the forefront of many of these citizens’ movements

The feminisation of politics means encouraging a political style that openly expresses doubts and contradictions – backed by a values-based politics that emphasizes the role of community and ‘the commons’.

open spirit is at the centre of the new political culture

The commons is much broader than an economic strategy for resource management; it’s about building forms of autonomy and social solidarity as the substance of our day-to-day lives.

the Commons Lab

Department of the Commons

These are not occupied but liberated spaces.

social centres

‘citizen patrimony’, which would formalise and expand a network of spaces across the city where the municipality provides greater resources and public infrastructure for self-managed common use.

The collaboration between citizens’ groups, cooperatives and municipalities is also at the heart of many of the attempts to return public services to public ownership.

There are many reasons why cities and regions want to take services back under public ownership, but reducing cost (especially for poor people), improving the quality of services, and increasing financial transparency are recurrent themes. Efforts to create better conditions for workers are another key driver. In the energy sector, which accounts for around a third of the cases where services have been returned to public ownership, the shift is often driven by efforts to tackle climate change.

Taking control of the energy supply also means that the council can better coordinate efforts to reduce energy use.

A number of French municipalities have taken back control of school meals from corporations to protect local agriculture and improve the quality of meals.

Increasing citizens’ control is not just about taking over existing institutions, but building new democratic processes that involve citizens in the day-to-day decision making of their cities.

it involves changing how citizens interact with the city government.

participatory budgeting

These municipalist projects are beginning to define new ways for progressive movements to organise, challenging and moving beyond dichotomies that have traditionally haunted the left.

The objective is to use municipal institutions as part of a project of autonomy – to expand the commons, to build non-state institutions and to empower citizens (not their representatives) to control the collective conditions in which they live their lives.

The new municipalism isn’t about winning elections; it’s about building, transforming and distributing power.

We must do it ourselves. It’s time to win back our cities.