Group items tagged

new types of investors, operating along principles of ethics or sustainability, or working on moving properties off the market.

inventing new ways to enable, finance and govern community-run spaces.

European municipalities responded to this challenge in a variety of ways.

The question if community capital can really cure the voids left behind by the welfare state has generated fierce debates in the past years.

crowdfunded urban infrastructures.

in the course of the economic crisis, many European cities witnessed the emergence of a parallel welfare infrastructure:

This collection brings together protagonists from various cities to help shaping a new European culture of urban development based on community-driven initiatives, civic economic models and cooperative ownership

community organisations

crowdfunding

participatory budgeting,

invest

pre-financed

some cities chose to support local economy and create more resilient neighbourhoods with self-sustaining social services through grant systems

priority neighbourhoods

The granted projects, chosen through an open call, have to prove their economic sustainability and have to spend the full amount in one year.

the public sector plays an important role in strengthening civil society in some European cities, many others witnessed the emergence of new welfare services provided by the civic economy completely outside or without any help by the public sector

n some occasions, community contribution appears in the form of philanthropist donation to support the construction, renovation or acquisition of playgrounds, parks, stores, pubs or community spaces. In others, community members act as creditors or investors in an initiative that needs capital, in exchange for interest, shares or the community ownership of local assets

Besides aggregating resources from individuals to support particular cases, community infrastructure projects are also helped by ethical investors.

Creating community ownership over local assets and keeping profits benefit local residents and services is a crucial component of resilient neighbourhoods.

complementary currencies

The fact that many of the hundreds of projects supported by civic crowdfunding platforms are community spaces, underlines two phenomena: the void left behind by a state that gradually withdrew from certain community services, and the urban impact of community capital created through the aggregation of individual resources.

VAWC recently launched an inter­cooperative loan fund. Through the fund, members tithe 5% of profits to help one another and to invest in new co­op ventures.

Even though only 1% of the cooperatives in the United States are worker owned, their organizing success has recently made them a focal point in the struggle for economic justice. Indeed, Occupy Wall Street participants launched a worker-run co-op print shop in Brooklyn called OccuCopy.

Guided by cooperative principle number six, which promotes cooperation amongst cooperatives, partnerships between co­ops were easily realized. They multiplied and soon turned to regional alliances, which snowballed into national networks.

Inspired by the Mondragon cooperative network, the Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives (VAWC) came together in Western Massachusetts in 2005. The group first met at the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives Eastern Conference on Workplace Democracy, and they are a direct result of national networks crystallizing at the regional level. What sets VAWC apart is a strategy of co­op-led development. The organization helps start­up or transitioning co­ops get their footing; they provide technical assistance to their membership in the form of skill­sharing and professional guidance.

The organization is structured as a worker co­op, and operates by consensus with a membership comprised of representatives from other worker co­ops.

information and resources according to the membership’s needs, such as meeting facilitation, or research into health plans

VAWC enjoys an exceptionally cooperative cultural context in the Pioneer Valley, where there is a strong desire for economic democracy, and a history of collective management.

A similarly rich cooperative culture exists across the country, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives, or NoBAWC (pronounced "no boss"), is a hub for the region, literally centralized within 30 minutes of each member organization.

A stunningly large network—nearly one out of every five U.S. worker co­ops are part of NoBAWC —most member co­ops are in Oakland, San Francisco, and Berkeley. Like other membership organizations, NoBAWC grew out of a need to collaborate and share best practices amongst like­-minded organizations.

The members now share resources and incentivize collaboration by offering each other reduced rates on their goods and services.

As the first and primary national hub, the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC) brings together the full array of players within this movement. After many years of organizing, they were incorporated in 2004 to provide support to their membership, as well as educational outreach to the public. A small organization with a two­-person staff, USFWC’s extensive work to promote cooperation puts them in the center of a dynamic movement.

regular conferences and events

As many look for ways out of the capitalist morass of boom­-bust cycles, worker cooperatives have taken center stage. Cooperatives are democratic enterprises where both ownership and decision­-making power are democratically shared. As a result, they keep money and power in the hands of the community.

USFWC capably handles a membership representing over 1,300 workers

the Democracy At Work Network (DAWN), a peer adviser system

The co­op movement is gaining steam, drawing from new energies and a renewed interest in the model. All movements have these periods of acceleration, times when opportunity comes knocking at every turn. Typically, such are the times when reflection is most needed, because new dynamics can dramatically change the situation.

David Morgan is a worker-owner at the Toolbox for Education and Social Action, a worker-owned cooperative created to democratize education and the economy while furthering the cooperative movement. The Toolbox designs curriculum and next-generation resources for learning, such as Co-opoly: The Game of Cooperatives."

These crises are sharpening our awareness of the existence and importance of the commons. Natural commons are necessary for our survival, while social commons ensure social cohesion, and cultural commons enable us to evolve as individuals.

A reduction in the GDP does not necessarily signal a reduction in the real wealth of a society. Recognizing this fact widens our perspective and opens doors for new types of solutions.

The commons can help us overcome the crisis, but it requires systematic advocacy.

What are the commons and why are they are significant?

Commons

include knowledge and water, seeds and software, cultural works and the atmosphere. Commons are not just „things,” however. They are living, dynamic systems of life. They form the social fabric of a free society.

Commons do not belong to anyone individually nor do they belong to no one. Different communities, from the family to global society, always create, maintain, cultivate, and redefine commons

We have to constantly revitalize our commons, because everything we produce relies upon the knowledge we inherit, the natural resources that the Earth gives us, and cooperation with our fellow citizens. The activity known as „the economy” is embedded in our social fabric.

There‘s something new afoot – a movement to reclaim the commons!

Commons are being rediscovered and defended.

Commons are newly created and built upon. Countless people are creating new things for all and meaningful social and physical spaces for themselves.

Taken together, scientists and activists, citizens and politicians are developing a robust and innovative commons sphere – everywhere.

The usage rights of fellow commoners are the stop signs for individual usage rights.

Neither no man‘s land nor boundless Property

The commons is not only about the legal forms of ownership. What matters most is whether and how community-based rights to the commons are enforced and secured.

Commons are based on communities that set their own rules and cultivate their skills and values. Based on these always-evolving, conflict-ridden processes, communities integrate themselves into the bigger picture. In a culture of commons, inclusion is more important than exclusion, cooperation more important than competition, autonomy more important than control.

Absolute and exclusive private property rights in the commons therefore cannot be allowed.

Each use must ensure that the common pool resources are not destroyed or over-consumed.

No one may be excluded who is entitled to access and use the shared resource or who depends on it for basic needs.

What is public or publicly funded must remain publicly accessible.

The commons helps us re-conceptualize the prevailing concept of property rights.

Our shared quality of life is also limited by knowledge that is excessively commercialized and made artificially scarce. In this manner, our cultural heritage becomes an inventory of lifeless commodities and advertising dominates our public spaces.

We all need commons to survive and thrive. This is a key principle, and it establishes why commoners‘ usage rights should always be given a higher priority than corporations‘ property rights. Here the state has a duty to protect the commons, a duty which it cannot abandon. However, this does not mean that the state is necessarily the best steward for the commoners‘ interests. The challenge is for the commoners themselves to develop complementary institutions and organizational forms, as well as innovative access and usage rules, to protect the commons. The commoners must create their own commons sector, beyond the realm of market and state, to serve the public good in their own distinctive manner.

For a society in which the commons may thrive

The rules and ethics of each commons arise from the needs and processes of the commoners directly involved. Whoever is directly connected to a commons must participate in the debate and implementation of its rules.

Commons are driven by a specific ethos, as well as by the desire to acquire and transfer a myriad of skills. Our society therefore needs to honor the special skills and values that enable the commons to work well. A culture of the commons publicly recognizes any initiative or project that enhances the commons, and it provides active financial and institutional support to enhance the commons sector.

This challenge requires a lot of work, but it is also a great source of personal satisfaction and enrichment.

Our society needs a great debate and a worldwide movement for the commons.

The reaction of Stuttgart workers to the destruction of public services and the perversion of co-determination indicates that austerity measures are coming slap-bang up against the legacy of two periods of democratic and egalitarian reform. The first is post-war reconstruction, including the welfare state. The second is the system of co-determination, which was strengthened in response to rebellions in the 60s and 70s. However, the resistance now, in Stuttgart as elsewhere in Europe, is not simply over the erosion of the institutions created in these periods of reform – after all, that erosion has been taking place for at least a decade. It is a profound and uncertain clash of cultures, expectations and increasingly activities, shaped by these periods of reform and rebellion, across generations. People’s expectations, or at least sense of legitimate claims, are for cultural equality as well as moves toward economic equality, and for meaningful and dignified work to match the decades of expansion of higher education.

There are also the spreading networks of autonomous hackers and geeks creating open, non-proprietorial, software and therefore effectively creating a key part of the infrastructure of today’s society as a digital commons

They all involve forms of labour which cannot be understood in the same terms as the conventional wage contract

nd the list also includes trade unionists who are taking on the role of organising for the common good in defence, or for the improvement of public services, or to push their company towards climate jobs.

All kinds of co-ops, cultural and social centres have emerged or been strengthened by these combinations of refusal and creation.

What this variety of activity has in common is that it is based on collaborative forms of creativity

and more recently ‘The coming of the commons’

can the public sector be transformed in a democratic, open and egalitarian direction against the forces of marketisation? If so, it can be a major economic player, especially in urban centres, with considerable bargaining power as contractor, as employer, and as trend-setter and creator of new communicative infrastructure.

The spread of information, knowledge and communication technologies not only enables theoretical expertise and practical knowledge to be shared on a previously unimaginable scale, but also creates tools for co-operation and self-managed co‐ordination of the most complex, multi-actor, transnational processes.

All these developments also illustrate the significance of democracy – transparency, participatory decision- making, the recognition of and means of sharing plural sources of knowledge – as a source of productivity, a base for a new economics.

What would it mean to think about industrial policies not so much in terms of the goal of nudging the private sector to invest, but more in terms of how to release, develop and extend the creativity of labour in its broadest sense?

How to expand and strengthen ‘productive democracy’? How to enhance the capacities of those whose ‘only’ means of production is their creative potential – and the social co-operation through which they can develop and realise this potential?

First, it’s come from the kinds of challenges that the trade union movement is facing in defending jobs in manufacturing as well as public services.

The second sphere for the rethinking of labour has been through the renewal of the co-operative movement. And a third development is the powerful and ambiguous trend opened up by the new technology towards new kinds of collaboration is the peer to peer, distributed productions and the digital commons, as referred to earlier. This ‘sphere’ is not separate: it could expand both the transformative power of workers already rethinking labour in conventional employment, and the scale and reach of co-operatives.

One increasingly significant context of convergence is over ‘climate jobs’. We’ve noted already the growth of co‐operatives creating and distributing renewable energy. The ravages of climate change are leading some trade unionists to demand that workers, whether currently unemployed or employed in high-carbon industries, be allowed to deploy their know-how to manufacture wind turbines, solar water heaters and other parts of the infrastructure of a low-carbon economy.

Another potential focal point for the mutual reinforcement of different forms of productive democracy is cities.

They illustrate ways in which labour could be self-organised, on the basis of social values underlying its purpose, use or context.

The implication of my argument here is that policymakers now need to work on how to support the economic creativity of millions of people, whether in existing workplaces or working precariously outside the formal labour market. At present these capacities are being wasted.

They need specific forms of support, some of it from the state, and some of it from organisations that share or could be persuaded to share their goals. These could include the trade unions, the co-operative movement, some parts of the church, foundations, and the growing experiments in crowdfunding, democratically controlled loan funds and so on.

As far as existing workplaces are concerned, we need states to not only restore and extend rights that protect trade unions in their struggles over wages and conditions, but also to give workers rights to control the purpose of their labour: for example, a legal prohibition on closures or redundancies without alternatives being publicly explored, and in the case of large companies, public inquiries at which alternatives would be presented. Labour is a commons – it should not be wasted. We need a new kind of ‘industrial strategy’ – one designed to support the creation of value that is not only monetary and requires autonomy from the pressures of the labour market. These should include a basic ‘citizen’s income’ (see page 34). Shorter working hours would be another measure that would serve a similar end.

We also need a regional policy that gives real support to cities as hubs of economic development, through direct public employment, and through support for co-ops involving regional banks. These could learn from the operations of the Mondragon bank and become a source of support and co‐ordination to networks of co-ops and other collaborative means of nurturing and realising the creativity of labour, rather than operating as banks of the traditional kind.

These are mere illustrations of industrial policies which recognise the capacities of generations shaped by expectations of cultural as well as political and economic equality. To realise these capacities as a resource for a new model of economic development requires rebuilding the distributional gains of the welfare state – but it also requires going further than that. We need to create not simply full employment, but the conditions by which people can creatively collaborate to meet the needs of a changing society and a precarious planet.

the state and institutions must take an active role in supporting commoning and to support the creation of new Commons.

But the sphere of Commons is broader still, sometimes even tied to specific projects, as normally occurs in the case of digital or non-material Commons.

Commons must be defended by the legal system and safeguarded through particularly stringent protective norms which can ensure the collective enjoyment and use of them, also for the future. Commons also need a specific form of self-governing by the commoners themselves, which must also be strenuously defended

This active role must translate into forms of public-common partnership, where the institutions enable and empower the collective/social peer-creation of common value.

Governments could also provide seed funding

, incentives and grants for Commons and commoning, just as it currently provides research and development support and assistance to businesses and corporations (6).

The legal recognition of the sphere of Commons must lead to a delegation of authority and power by the state to commons-based institutions.

Current debates (and experiments) focus on Trusts, Foundations, for-benefit institutions etc.

Such trusts can be located either inside the boundaries of one state or be trans-border, according to the size and range of the resource and/or of its relative community of interest.

Just as it is true that commoning normally produces use value which cannot be accounted for in monetary terms (values which are part of the range of positive social or environmental externalities) one should construct a special legal form which could recognise and protect a similar type of enterprise or “project” (a common social enterprise) and protect a similar form of production of use value of collective use, which will help build another type of economy.

The extent of the tools we can offer comes down to the success of this crowdfunding campaign.If we get the money to develop the technology, then projects going through incubation can offer supporters black chain agreements and in turn offer payment contingent of future events.  This is a big deal.