Group items tagged

it is the way food is produced and sold for profit, in a process controlled by agri-industrial giants and supermarkets – rather than food consumption or human population growth as such – that pushes at the earth’s natural limits.

In rich countries, farming practices are more efficient, transport and storage facilities are better, and much less food is lost between farm and shop. But then “modern consumer culture” takes over: supermarkets often “reject entire crops of perfectly edible fruit and vegetables at the farm” – e.g. 30% of the vegetable crop in the UK – because of its size or appearance.

food losses at one-third of what is produced, or 1.3 billion tonnes/year

30% of what is harvested from the field never actually reaches the marketplace (primarily the supermarket) due to trimming, quality selection and failure to conform to purely cosmetic criteria”

the estimated average cost to households in the UK is £480/year per household.

The report suggests that it is not food production per se that is unsustainable, but production of food for the distorted market, i.e. the commodification of food. It is “market mechanisms” that deprive poor country farmers of the means to invest in basic infrastructure and “market mechanisms” according to which supermarkets trash millions of tonnes of good food.

■ Average crop yields increased by 20% between 1985 and 2005, “substantially less than the often-cited 47% production increase for selected crop groups”; ■ Globally, only 62% of crop production by mass is for human food; 35% is for animal feed and 3% for biofuels. ■ The land devoted to raising animals – including pasture, grazing and animal feed production – is an “astonishing” three-quarters of the total, and “the amount of land (and other resources) devoted to animal-based agriculture merits critical evaluation”. ■ Most agricultural expansion is in the tropics, where “about 80% of new croplands are replacing forests”. “Slowing (and ultimately, ceasing) the expansion”, particularly in the tropics, is “an important first step” to sustainability. ■ Irrigation accounts for 70% of global freshwater withdrawals, which is “of particular concern”. ■ Fertiliser use, manure application and leguminous crops (which fix nitrogen in the soil) have “dramatically disrupted” the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles.

wasteful overuse is a tragedy of the unmanaged commons

creating private property

If cooperation fails, nobody can use the resource.

Each one can block the others’ use

a hidden tragedy of the anti­commons.

a brief overview of the anticommons lexicon

three basic types: private, commons, and state property

private property

private property is about an individual decision maker who directs resource use.

Commons property refers to shared resources, resources for which there is no single decision maker.

open access

open access

group access

State propert

process that is, in principle, responsive to the needs of the public

Privatizing a commons may cure the tragedy of wasteful overuse, but it may inadvertently spark the opposite.

too many people can block each other from creating or using a valuable resource. Rightly understood, the opposite of overuse in a commons is underuse in an anticommons.

clear rights and ordinary markets are not enough

Wasteful underuse can arise when ownership rights and regulatory controls are too fragmented.

The anticommons parallel to open access is full exclusion in which an unlimited number of people may block each other.

With full exclusion, states must expropriate fragmented rights or create hybrid property regimes so people can bundle their ownership

differs from open access: an anticommons is often invisible

group exclusion in which a limited number of owners can block each other. For both group access and group exclusion, the full array of market-based, cooperative, and regulatory solutions is available.

For group exclusion resources, the regulatory focus should be support for markets to assemble ownership and removal of roadblocks to cooperation.

Much of the modern economy – corporations, partnerships, trusts, condominiums, even marriages – can be understood as legally structured group property forms for resolving access and exclusion dilemmas

drug patents

“if commons leads to ‘tragedy,’ anticommons may well lead to ‘disaster’”

underuse caused by multiple owners is unfamiliar

we need to name the phenomenon: the tragedy of the anticommons should join our lexicon.

Heller, M. 1998. “The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets.” Harvard Law Review. 111:621.

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.

As the small crowd marched to Meusa and Wheeler’s new home, for instance, people chanted, “Empty houses and houseless people — match them up!” This was a refrain that echoes the rallying cry commonly used by J.R. Fleming, chairman of Chicago’s Anti-Eviction Campaign. (His wording is to match “homeless people with peopleless houses.”)

Similarly, in Woodland, activists covered Alma Ponce’s lawn with tents — an allusion to the fall 2011 occupations that has also been used in eviction blockades in Alabama and Georgia over the last year.

One important shift evident on the anniversary is that Occupy Homes groups have started rallying more and more behind a rights-based framework to explain why they are pursuing direct action.

“Housing is a human right, not for the banks to hold hostage,” Michelene Meusa said a few days after the action, when, at M&T Bank’s request, the Atlanta Police Department arrested her and three others for criminal trespassing. When she refused to leave, she made an explicit comparison between her civil disobedience and the actions of the civil rights movement.

The shift towards a human-rights framing of the housing movement and away from following the Occupy movement’s focus on economic unfairness — i.e., “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out” — is significant. The human rights framework is often more powerful in movements led by people of color, drawing strength, as Meusa did, from the civil rights era and cutting through the class divisions that plague housing in a way that movements focused only on mortgage loan modifications cannot.

With the continued onslaught of foreclosures across the United States, the question remains: How much will these movements have to scale up to make structural changes, rather than just individual changes?

Housing organizing during the Great Depression provides some instructive parallels. The economic devastation since 2008 has been quite similar to what the nation experienced throughout that period. In 1933, for example, banks foreclosed on an average of 1,000 homes every day. In 2010, the rate of displacement was comparable: The average number of foreclosures was more than 2,500 homes a day, and the population has increased two-and-a-half fold.

The scale of housing organizing during the early 1930s, however, dwarfs what we have seen so far today. Crowds of hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of people, mobilized to stop evictions in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Gary, Youngstown, Toledo and other urban centers, mostly under the direction of the Communist Party. As in much of current housing organizing, women were often on the front lines. Masses of these women filled the streets as others climbed to the roofs and poured buckets of water on the police below. Women beat back the police officers’ horses by sticking them with long hat pins or pouring marbles into the streets. If the police were successful in moving the family’s furniture out to the curb, the crowd simply broke down the door and moved the family’s belongings back inside after the police had left.

Rural communities also formed anti-foreclosure organizations, combining the fight for housing with the fight for fair wages, especially in the sharecropping South. Hundreds of thousands of farmers came together to form anti-eviction and tenants-rights groups

This movement achieved substantial legislative gains. Housing policy became a major part of the New Deal, culminating in the National Housing Act of 1934, which established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to provide affordable loans to spur homeownership, and the Housing Act of 1937, which established public housing authorities across the country.

the establishment of public housing systemically changed the landscape and ideology around housing in the United States and was “one of the most successful federal programs in the 20th century,” according to Damaris Reyes, the executive director of the public housing advocacy group Good Old Lower East Side.

By this measure, the Occupy Homes network and aligned housing movements still have light-years to go — a reality that many organizers acknowledge. Yet the conditions have changed since 1930s, suggesting that what we need are not massive federal construction and lending programs, but rather a shift in the way housing rights are perceived and enacted in the U.S. Rather than coping with the scarcity of the 1930s, the United States now confronts vast, unprecedented wealth and gaping economic inequality — a condition that is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that there are upwards of a dozen empty and unused houses for every homeless person in the nation.

With more than enough wealth and roofs to provide safe and dignified homes for the country’s population, the challenge today is to demonstrate that this situation of desperate need coexisting with wasted excess is not one we need to accept.

The software was met with enormous interest

With free software, there is no strict boundary between users and developers. Many participants simply use the software, but some help to improve it, either occasionally or even regularly and intensely. The participants themselves decide whether and how to contribute. Participation is not obligatory, but quite easy if you want to get involved.

Another crucial factor is the community that coordinates the development of the operating system. The open, decentralized, and seemingly chaotic way of working together pioneered by Torvalds and his collaborators became known as the “bazaar” model of software development (Raymond 2001)

Linux and Wikipedia are important examples of two communities – the free software movement (also called open source movement) and the free culture movement

The GNU/Linux story reveals the essential characteristics of peer production. Peer production is based on commons: resources and goods that are jointly developed and maintained by a community and shared according to community-defined rules.

If I modify and distribute a GPL’ed software, I must publish my own version under the GPL. This principle is called “copyleft” since it turns copyright on its head. Instead of granting exclusive rights of control and exploitation to the authors, it ensures that all versions of the software will remain in the commons forever.

While production for the market aims to produce something that can be sold, the usual goal of peer production is to produce something useful.

The success of GNU/Linux is based on the fact that – like all free software – it is a commons that everybody can use, improve and share. The freedoms that make free software a commons were first defined by Richard Stallman in the 1980s. He designed the GNU General Public License (GPL) as an exemplary license to legally protect these freedoms.

In contrast to companies and entities in planned economies, peer projects don’t have command structures. That does not mean that they are unstructured; on the contrary, most projects have “maintainers” or “admins” who keep the project on course and decide which contributions to integrate and which to reject.

Digital, Internet-based peer production has produced astonishing amounts of software and contents – a digital plenty that benefits us all. In the physical world, a similar plenty for everyone must seem impossible if one equates plenty with lavishness and wastefulness. But plenty also has another meaning: “getting what I need, when I need it.

No production is possible without means of production. The RepRap 3D printer has received a lot of attention because it can “print” many of its own parts. Other free 3D printers are the Fab@Home and the MakerBot, around which a large community has formed. Thingiverse is a platform for sharing 3D designs for such printers. Projects such as FurnLab and CubeSpawn design CNC (computer-controlled) machines for processing wood and metals; their aim is to facilitate “personal fabrication.

You cannot create things from designs and blueprints alone – physical resources and means of production are needed as well. Technological advancements have made various production processes less expensive and more accessible.

It makes more sense for productive infrastructures to be community-based, i.e., jointly organized by the inhabitants of a village or neighborhood. There are already examples of this.

Community-organized production places are emerging as well.

Fab Labs are modern open workshops whose goal is to produce “almost anything.” That’s not yet realistic, but they can already produce furniture, clothing, computer equipment (including circuit boards), and other useful things.

Their goal is the creation of an entirely commons-based production infrastructure, a network of free and open facilities that utilize only free software and open hardware.

But can peer production really get that far in the physical world? Won’t it be stopped by the fact that natural resources and the Earth’s carrying capacity are limited?

Open hardware projects design physical products by freely sharing blueprints, design documents, and bills of materials.

Commons-based peer production brings such a needs-driven conception of plenty for everyone into reach.

Physical production is impossible without natural resources. Therefore, peer production won’t be able to realize its full potential unless access to resources is managed according to its principles. Digital peer production treats knowledge and software as a commons. Likewise, physical peer production needs to manage resources and means of production as commons, utilizing them in a fair and sustainable way and preserving or improving their current state.

The challenge is huge

For the future of commons-based peer production it will be very important to bring together the perspectives and experiences of commoners from all areas – whether “digital,” “ecological,” or “traditional.”

the long term replacement of capitalism--an economy which socializes costs and privatizes benefits--with an economy of democratic cooperation

link these interventions together--at every point of the economic cycle

The worker coop movement must work to build broader alliances, holistic economic and social visions, and contribute to the creation of not only more worker coops, but a transformative social movement capable of changing the culture and economy--the "social ecosystem"--in which worker coops struggle to exist.

Operating successfully in a capitalist market, worker coops can support movements for social and economic transformation

a cooperative solidarity economy

Worker cooperatives are a particular--and effective--structure for democratically organizing the production of goods and the provision of services.

n economy is an ecosystem, a cyclical whole that includes processes of creation (the "original production" of natural resources by geological, biological, and energetic forces), production (human transformation of resources into goods and services), exchange, consumption (perhaps more appropriately called "use"), the processing of waste, and the recycling of surplus (sometimes called "investment").

But even a solidarity economy movement cannot succeed without being intimately linked to broader social change work. It is our connections with the work of anti-racism, feminism, queer liberation, environmental justice, ecological sustainablility, immigrant's rights, counter-recruitment and peace advocacy, labor organizing, grassroots community development, and other movements for cultural and insitutional change that will generate the collective power and momentum needed to effect long-term transformation and generate widespread, committed support for worker cooperatives as economic and social-change insitutions.

Indeed, to create conditions under which their success is increasingly possible, worker cooperatives must work to generate, sustain and support institutions at all other points of the economic cycle.

constructing reliable markets

for goods and services produced by worker cooperatives.

We must, instead, work to transform the very terms of the economic game.

What does this "movement building" look like?

the creation of a shared story and through this, the development of long-term solidarity between worker cooperatives and other groups working for democratic, community-based economies such as local currencies, consumer cooperatives, housing coops and intentional communities, economic justice advocacy groups, neighborhood associations, local food system projects and more

solidarity economy

Further examples from the solidarity economy movement outside of the U.S. abound. I delve into some of these more deeply in GEO's recent collaborative issue with Dollars and Sense (see Ethan Miller, "Other Economies Are Possible".)

from a passive place of "entering markets" to an active place of constructing them

Green Worker Cooperatives

Red Emma's

Wooden Shoe Books

Electric Embers

Riseup

Gaiahost Collective

Brattleboro Tech Collective

pioneers of cross-sector movement-building

it is the work that we as cooperators must embrace if we choose to believe that another economy, and another world, is possible