Commons.fi

Monotheism arose

Merry Mount became a refuge for Indians, the discontented, gay people, runaway servants, and what the governor called "all the scume of the countrie."

it was always a celebration of all that is free and life-giving in the world. That is the Green side of the story. Whatever else it was, it was not a time to work.

Therefore, it was attacked by the authorities. The repression had begun with the burning of women and it continued in the 16th century when America was "discovered," the slave trade was begun, and nation-states and capitalism were formed.

The people resisted the repressions. Thenceforth, they called their May sports, the "Robin Hood Games." Capering about with sprigs of hawthorn in their hair and bells jangling from their knees, the ancient charaders of May were transformed into an outlaw community, Maid Marions and Little Johns.

Thus began in earnest the Red side of the story of May Day. The struggle was brought to Massachusetts in 1626.

Thomas Morton settled in Passonaggessit which he named Merry Mount. The land seemed a "Paradise"

With the proclamation that the first of May At Merry Mount shall be kept holly day

The Puritans

the Puritans were the imperialist, not Morton, who worked with slaves, servants, and native Americans

May Day became a day to honor the saints, Philip and James, who were unwilling slaves to Empire.

The Maypole was cut down. The settlement was burned.

On 4 May 1886

In England the attacks on May Day were a necessary part of the wearisome, unending attempt to establish industrial work discipline. The attempt was led by the Puritans with their belief that toil was godly and less toil wicked. Absolute surplus value could be increased only by increasing the hours of labor and abolishing holydays.

Two bands of that rainbow came from English and Irish islands. One was Green. Robert Owen, union leader, socialist, and founder of utopian communities in America, announced the beginning of the millennium after May Day 1833. The other was Red. On May Day 1830, a founder of the Knights of Labor, the United Mine Workers of America, and the Wobblies was born in Ireland, Mary Harris Jones, a.k.a., "Mother Jones." She was a Maia of the American working class.

The history of the modern May Day originates in the center of the North American plains, at Haymarket, in Chicago

in May 1886.

Virgin soil, dark, brown, crumbling, shot with fine black sand

a green perspective

The land was mechanized. Relative surplus value could only be obtained by reducing the price of food.

It became "Hello" to the hobo. "Move on" to the harvest stiffs. "Line up" the proletarians. Such were the new commands of civilization.

Thousands of immigrants, many from Germany, poured into Chicago after the Civil War. Class war was advanced

Nationally, May First 1886 was important because a couple of years earlier the Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada, "RESOLVED... that eight hours shall constitute a legal day's labor, from and after May 1, 1886.

Haymarket Square

Thomas Morton was a thorn in the side of the Boston and Plymouth Puritans, because he had an alternate vision of Massachusetts. He was impressed by its fertility; they by its scarcity. He befriended the Indians; they shuddered at the thought. He was egalitarian; they proclaimed themselves the "Elect". He freed servants; they lived off them. He armed the Indians; they used arms against Indians.

176 policemen charged the crowd that had dwindled to about 200. An unknown hand threw a stick of dynamite, the first time that Alfred Nobel's invention was used in class battle.

All hell broke lose, many were killed, and the rest is history.

May Day, or "The Day of the Chicago Martyrs" as it is still called in Mexico "belongs to the working class and is dedicated to the revolution," as Eugene Debs put it in his May Day editorial of 1907.

reliance on horizontal networks and distributed power within communities

opposed to the competition between hierarchical organisations

inequality

contradictions

Empowerment in an era of growing inequalities

the exact opposite of capitalism

the exact opposite of homo economicus’ iconic egotism

Two main groups of criticism have emerged: one on ownership structures and the other on employment.

Growing economic inequalities

fueled both by patrimonial inequalities

income inequalities

If we want to assess whether it should be seen as the first part of a new economic paradigm or as capitalism’s latest trick to survive at all costs, we have to analyze its likely effects on inequality.

From a collective standpoint, it might well be better to have access to a resource rather than owning it.

But if someone asks you to free yourself from all earthly possessions, you should always ask: if it’s not mine, then who owns it?

Sometimes, owning is a way not to be owned!

sharing economy: after all, it mostly consists of venture capitalist-backed startups

Employees and customers are but a mean to an end, and in general, a good way to maximize return on investment is to get your customers to pay as much as possible (non-price competitiveness) and on the other side to pay your employees as little as possible (price competitiveness).

shareholders are not peers (from Latin par, “equal”), but overlords

your business model is based on your ability to sustain a community

This point is the most controversial of all. Sharing economy services could accelerate the phenomenon of job destruction.

Despite all those nice speeches about empowerment and entrepreneurship, people in the sharing economy are nothing but an extreme precariat

Real wages started stagnating while productivity per capita continued to increase.

a new deal had to be made: people would no longer be paid according to the value they actually produced, but they would get — seemingly — unlimited access to credit.

computers and robots will soon replace most human labor anyway. Wage labor cannot be saved, and rather than fighting long-lost battles, people should start thinking seriously about solutions such as Universal Basic Income.

neo-liberal revolution has left the basic structures of welfare

relatively untouched

If you cannot predict something with a reasonable amount of certainty, stop arguing endlessly about it and start acting towards the outcome you would like to see

What happens next, no one can tell. Are Silicon Valley venture capitalistss currently being fooled into creating the embryo of a P2P economic paradigm, in which they will lose most of their influence? Or are the enthusiasts talking about empowerment being tricked into creating a new kind of serfdom?

ancient Skeptic philosophers

epoché

remarks

I will make two

First, we should avoid using the concept of a “sharing economy”

Men are both altruistic and egoistic, and that’s perfectly fine.

Will big companies be able to face new competition from startups and win over new customers? If that is your main concern, you should probably stop talking about communities and peers. If the collaborative economy cannot help you solve our growing inequality problem, it should be of no interest to you.

collective-action problem in an open network context

How do you know that a given document, certificate or dataset -- or a vote or "digital identity" asserted by an individual -- is the “real thing” and not a forgery? 

online “ledger” that keeps track of all transactions of all bitcoins

set of transactions known as the “block”

a kind of permanent record maintained by a vast distributed peer network

blockchain technology could provide a critical infrastructure for building what are called “distributed collaborative organizations.”

to give its members specified rights within the organization, which are managed and guaranteed by the blockchain

blockchain technology is not confined to digital currency

reliable systems to manage their inter-relationships on network platforms.

Bitcoin 2.0 projects

a way to create distributed networks of solar power on residential houses

Transactions would be near-instantaneous, and transaction costs would be minimal.

traditional issues related to shared common-pool resources—such as the free rider problem or the tragedy of the commons—could be addressed with the implementation of blockchain-based governance, through the adoption of transparent decision-making procedures and the introduction decentralized incentives systems for collaboration and cooperation.

to reach consensus and implement innovative forms of self-governance. The possibility to record every interaction on a incorruptible public ledger and the ability to encode a particular set rules linking these interactions to a specific transactions (e.g., the assignment of cryptographic tokens) makes it possible to design new sophisticated incentive systems

Decentralized blockchain technologies bring trust and coordination to shared resource pools, enabling new models of non-hierarchical governance, where intelligence is spread on the edges of the network instead of being concentrated at the center

commons-based peer-production communities

have had a hard scaling up, without turning into more bureaucratic and centralized institutions

could overcome many collective-action challenges that cannot be easily solved by conventional institutions today

Who guards the guards? 

blockchain technology does offer more formidable tools for better protecting the perimeter of the commons and for empowering commoners to decide their own fate

the underlying architecture has potentials not only for the future of money, but also for the future of networked cooperation.

Blockchain-based technologies may still have a role to play.

Just as Bitcoin makes certain financial intermediaries unnecessary, new innovations on the blockchain remove the need for gatekeepers from other processes

The broader implication is that the blockchain could support the activities and resources necessary to the commons

A lot of what follows is pretty speculative, but worth discussing in the context of peer-production.

The blockchain is the distributed ledger that keeps track of all transactions made using the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Arguably this is Bitcoin’s key innovation

the blockchain could support new forms of peer-production, and fully decentralised infrastructures for applications as varied as finance, mesh networks, cloud databases and share economies.

Decentralised Autonomous Organisations.

There are a number of start-ups and groups currently innovating in this space such as Ethereum, Ripple and Mastercoin.

extends the decentralised capabilities of Bitcoin beyond financial transactions

Bitcoin involves two parameters: a trustless database (more on this later) and a transactions system capable of sending value from place to place

Ethereum builds a generalised framework that extends the capabilities of the blockchain to allow developers to write new consensus applications.

Distributed Organisations & the Trust Web:

claim is that blockchain-based technologies such as Ethereum can support and scale distributed forms of cooperation on a global scale.

it doesn’t matter whether I believe in my fellow peers just so long as I believe in the technical efficiency of the blockchain protocol.

Where questions about how to reach consensus, negotiate trust and especially scale interactions beyond the local are pervasive in the commons, the blockchain looks set to be a game changer.

the blockchain could support not only cryptocurrencies but also other financial instruments like equity, securities and derivatives; smart contracts and smart property; new voting systems; identity and reputation systems; distributed databases; and even the management of assets and resources like energy and water.

Cohen and Mougayar have dubbed this innovation the “trust web”

Ethereum incentivises participation, encouraging actors to contribute without introducing centralisation

Node Incentivisation:

In order to use an Ethereum application, users make micropayments to the developers in ether, Ethereum’s coin, or ‘cryptofuel’ as they term it.

Monetary transactions aside, this encourages people to contribute to the commons and puts systems in place to try and protect its resources from commercial expropriation.

a change to infrastructure

Decentralised Infrastructures:

Instead, we can imagine infrastructure as something immaterial and dispersed, or managed through flexible and transient forms of ownership.

The payoff seems to be that new blockchain-based technologies have the potential to support new forms of commons-based peer production, supplying necessary tools for cooperation and decision making, supporting complementary currencies and even provisioning infrastructures.

Other issues concern the design of trustless architectures and smart property.

Trustless Architectures: First of all, what kind of subjectivity does the blockchain support?

‘trust in the code.’

proof-of-work is not a new form of trust, but the abdication of trust altogether as social confidence in favour of an algorithmic regulation

‘consensus’ algorithms

proceeds from a perspective that already presumes a neoliberal subject and an economic mode of governance in the face of social and/or political problems. ‘How do we manage and incentivise individual competitive economic agents?’ In doing so, it not only codes for that subject, we might argue that it also reproduces that subject

Smart Property:

new controls implied by smart property also have worrying implications

Property doesn’t disappear, but instead it is enforced and exercised in different ways. If rights were previously exercised through norms, laws, markets and architectures, today they are algorithmically inscribed in the object.

There is real potential in the blockchain if we appreciate it not as some ultimate techno-fix but as a platform that, when combined with social and political institutions, has real possibilities for the future of organisation.

yritykset voivat lähettää juristinsa lakimuutosta valmistelevaan sosiaali- ja terveysministeriöön kertomaan, ettei esitys ole mieleinen ja jos se toteutuu, luvassa on haaste kansainväliseen välimiesoikeuteen

Investointisuoja muuttaa neuvottelutilannetta olennaisesti

TTIP-sopimuksen investointisuojan turvin yhdysvaltalaiset sijoittajat voivat kyseenalaistaa eurooppalaisen demokraattisen lainsäädäntötyön, viranomaisten hallintopäätökset sekä riippumattomien oikeuslaitosten tuomiot. Kyse huomattavasta julkisen vallan siirrosta kansalaisyhteiskunnan ja muun kontrollin ulottumattomiin.

tähän mennessä nostettu noin 600 kannetta, joista reilu puolet on ratkaistu. Välimiesoikeuksien toiminta on osoittautunut ongelmalliseksi

– Tiedämme tähän mennessä ratkaistujen juttujen perusteella, että lopputulos riippuu merkittävästi kokoonpanosta. Samoilla faktoilla on tehty vastakkaisia ratkaisuja – eikä niistä voi valittaa, Koskenniemi sanoo.

uhka demokratialle ja oikeusvaltiolle

painostuskeinon vaikuttavuutta lisää se, etteivät välimiesoikeuden ratkaisut ole ennakoitavissa

ulkomainen investoija voi nostaa itseään koskevan oikeusjutun eurooppalaisen oikeusjärjestelmän ulkopuolella. Toisin sanoen, kansainväliset investoijat saavat oman oikeusjärjestelmän

investointisuojamekanismeja

Yhdysvaltalaisten investointien osuus Suomessa ja Euroopassa on monikymmenkertainen, eivätkä kymmenien miljoonien oikeudenkäyntikulut ole merkittäviä suursijoittajien näkökulmasta. Yhdysvalloissa on myös hyvin aggressiivinen oikeusperinne, jossa suuryritykset ja sijoittajat pyrkivät vaikuttamaan sääntelyyn oikeusteitse.

Investointisuojajärjestelmä on kolonialistinen strategia

pysyvää yhteiskomissiota, jossa EU:n ja Yhdysvaltain edustajat ottaisivat kantaa kaikkeen lainsäädäntöön vapaakaupan näkökulmasta.

Yhteiskomissio toimisi poliittisesti merkittävässä roolissa ilman demokraattista vastuuta.

korppikotkarahastoja, jotka ostavat talouskriisiin ajautuneiden valtioiden velkakirjoja murto-osalla niiden nimellisarvosta ja vaativat sitten koko summaa maksettavaksi investointisuojan nojalla oikeusteitse

korppikotkarahastot pystyvät ajamaan kriisivaltiot perikatoon estämällä velkajärjestelyt

Aika näyttäisi olevan TTIP-sopimuksen vastustajien puolella. Sopimuksen sisältö pitäisi saada neuvoteltua valmiiksi tämän vuoden loppuun mennessä, jotta Yhdysvaltain nykyhallinto ehtisi viedä asian kongressiin ennen presidentinvaaleja 2016.

Koskenniemi arvioi TTIP-sopimuksen kaatuvan, sillä hänen mukaansa EU:lla ei ole valtuuksia hyväksyä sopimusta kansallisten parlamenttien ohitse.

sekasopimus

epävirallisissa keskusteluissa EU-komission virkamiesten kanssa on käynyt selväksi, ettei ole sellaista tahoa, joka katsoisi EU:n voivan ratifioida vapaakauppasopimuksen yksin.

Se tarkoittaa, että sopimuksen täytyy mennä 28 EU-valtioon – eikä se tule hyväksytyksi tämän kaltaisella investointisuojajärjestelmällä 28 EU-valtiossa. Sama koskee CETA-sopimusta.

TTIP- ja CETA-ratkaisut ovat voimakkaasti poliittisia päätöksiä, koska sopimukset kajoavat yhteiskunnan perusrakenteisiin

EU-komission tilaaman selvityksen mukaan sopimus kasvattaisi lähivuosina talousalueen bruttokansantuotetta keskimäärin 0,05 prosenttia vuodessa – mikä on esitetyistä arvioista positiivisin. Sopimuksen kriitikot pitävätkin mahdollisia hyötyjä riskeihin nähden olemattomina. Toisissa laskelmissa TTIP-sopimuksen taloudelliset seuraukset on arvioitu negatiivisiksi.

TTIP-ratkaisu on nimenomaan poliittinen

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.

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 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

While HTML5 has already brought many new capabilities to the web, it is WebRTC that will spark the most innovation. The ability to directly connect to other web browser opens a new world of possibilities for web developers, enabling new types of applications in telecommunications, gaming, and any other field involving direct user-to-user interaction.

WebRTC will also provide new challenges for government censorship and controlling regimes; the peer-to-peer streams will be very difficult to monitor and shut down.

WebRTC will cause major disruption to the billion dollar markets of video conferencing and Internet telephony. You will no longer need Skype on your desktop or smartphone, nor will you need a complex Webex or a Telepresence system.

The Internet is about to undergo a new wave of innovation. We’re moving to a world of seamless communication, directly between peers and across all devices.

When the announcement to close the plant was made, the workers were told that their jobs would be terminated immediately, and that they would not be given their contractually obligated backpay or severance

The workers decided to occupy the factory in protest, and the community came out in extraordinary numbers to support them. See the Michael Moore Short about it.

The workers and the community won enough of this struggle to get the money that was owed to them. A new green construction company, Serious Energy, took control of the factory and partially reopened it.

Serious Energy's business plan, which only involved the windows factory in a tertiary role, never functioned

The plan to start a new worker owned cooperative business began.

In 2008, after many decades of operation, Republic Windows and Doors went bankrupt and was shut down. This seemed odd as the windows business appeared profitable

we have decided to call it New Era, as we hope it will be an inspiration

Everyone can participate in building the economy we all want

no one should be treated as temporary or just raw material for someone else's business.

We have built the highest quality windows ever made in Chicago, ones that are soundproof and extremely energy efficient, meaning they are both green and save money. Our windows will be the best on the market at prices no one can beat.

More resources on the formation of New Era Windows Cooperative   New Era Windows, The Working World  Grand Opening of Worker-Owned Factory, As Former Republic Windows Workers Launch New Era Windows Cooperative, United Electrical Workers Worker Co-op New Era Windows Opens For Business, CommunityWealth.org Republic Windows Opens New Era for Coops in Chicago, Race, Poverty, and the Environment New Era Windows Cooperative Is Open for Business in Chicago,The Nation Chicago Workers Open New Cooperatively Owned Factory Five Years After Republic Windows Occupation, Democracy Now Window makers start manufacturing cooperative in Chicago, ABC News Former Republic Windows Employees Start Their Own Factory, CBS News

Video and Radio

This is about remarking on the battleground itself: big cities, not nations, as the symbolic and political space for the network society.

In SP, and especially in Istanbul, the mobilizations have had a clear discourse on the development of state authoritarianism

they don’t see themselves reflected or recognized in the social discourse, which is now outdated. The struggles for public space in Istanbul or for access to transportation in Sao Paulo are a lot more than mere municipal policies

But the leaders — and beneficiaries — of this growth, a precarious first generation of a new middle class, lives a hard, intense life, between low-paying jobs and constant training.

turns toward the authoritarian development of the nation-state

movements on the digital, social and even geographic periphery, have created their own centrality and their own logic, which we can summarize in three points as we look to the future:

The starting point and point of conflict with power is in the closest urban policies.

The demands are concrete and clear, and could, in fact, be satisfied by a local administration, but they summarize a much broader social situation

the debate

This authoritarian drift, paired with a reactionary discourse on intellectual property that criminalizes a generation which has made P2P culture a mark of daily identity, seems to be the only way the nation-state knows how to react technological change, trying to exclude, both in the present and in the future, those who somehow feel they could share as they build.

Istanbul and Sao Paulo are a step into a new phase of distributed social movements

In Turkey, protesters have been taking to the streets and clashing with riot police for over two weeks in response to government attempts to tear down the trees and resurrect an old Ottoman-era barracks at the location of Istanbul’s beloved Gezi Park.

Now, protests over similar seemingly “trivial” local grievances are sparking mass demonstrations elsewhere. In Brazil, small-scale protests against a hike in transportation fees in Sao Paulo revealed the extreme brutality of the police force

Meanwhile, in Sarajevo, the inability of a family to obtain travel ID for their sick baby — who needs urgent medical attention that she cannot receive in Bosnia-Herzegovina — exposed the fundamental flaws at the heart of the nominally democratic post-Yugoslavian state. On June 5, while the government was busy negotiating with foreign bankers to attract new investment, thousands of people occupied parliament square, temporarily locking the nation’s politicians up inside and forcing the prime minister to escape through a window.

Fed up with increasing inflation, crumbling infrastructure and stubbornly high inequality and crime rates, many Brazilians are simply outraged that the government is willing to invest billions into pharaonic projects that do not only ignore the people’s plight but actively undermine it.

After four nights of violent repression this week, the protests now appear to be gaining momentum.

On Friday, Bulgaria joined the budding wave of struggles that began in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 and that was recently revived through the Turkish uprising. After the appointment of media (and mafia) mogul Delyan Peevski as head of the State Agency for National Security, tens of thousands took to the streets of Sofia and other cities throughout the country to protest his appointment, which was approved by parliament without any debate and with a mere 15 minutes between his nomination and his (pre-guaranteed) election.

Greece, in the meantime, finally appears to have been waken up from its austerity-induced slumber. Following the decision of the Troika’s neoliberal handmaiden, Antonis Samaras, to shut down the state’s public broadcaster ERT overnight and to fire its 2,700 workers without any warning whatsoever, the workers of ERT simply occupied the TV and radio stations and continued to emit their programs through livestreaming, making ERT the first worker-run public broadercaster in Europe.

At first sight, it may seem like these protests are all simply responses to local grievances and should be read as such. But while each context has its own specificities that must be taken into account, it would be naive to discard the common themes uniting them.

If we take a closer look at each of the protests, we find that they are not so local after all. In fact, each of them in one way or another deals with the increasing encroachment of financial interests and business power on traditional democratic processes, and the profound crisis of representation that this has wrought.

In a word, what we are witnessing is what Leonidas Oikonomakis and I have called the resonance of resistance: social struggles in one place in the world transcending their local boundaries and inspiring protesters elsewhere to take matters into their own hands and defy their governments in order to bring about genuine freedom, social justice and real democracy.

Now that has come to an end. A new Left has risen, inspired by a fresh autonomous spirit that has long since cleansed itself of the stale ideological legacies and collective self-delusions that animated the political conflicts of the Cold War and beyond. One chant of the protesters in Sao Paulo revealed it all: “Peace is over, Turkey is here!”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

Maapallon kantokykyä kuormittaa eniten väestön rikkaimman kymmenosan kulutus sekä tavat, joilla tuotetaan rikkaiden ostamat tavarat ja palvelut. Taloudellisen eriarvoisuuden vaikutus ilmastonmuutoksen on huima: ”Vain 11 prosenttia väestöstä aiheuttaa noin puolet maailman hiilidioksidipäästöistä.”

Läntisten kulutusyhteiskuntien väestö ja kolmannen maailman rikkain eliitti käyttävät lähes 80 prosenttia maailman luonnonvaroista.

Raportissa todetaankin olevan ironista, että nykyisestä ekologisesta kriisistä on päävastuussa se suhteellisen hyvin koulutettu väestöviidennes, joka asuu lähinnä Pohjois-Amerikan, Euroopan, Japanin ja Australian kulutusyhteiskunnissa.

Raportti nostaa yhdeksi suurimmaksi haasteeksi yhteiskunnan ja kulttuurin alueella tapahtuvat muutokset: "Tehtävä ei ole sen vaatimattomampi kuin korvata nykyinen jatkuvaan kasvuun tähtäävä kulttuuri uudella."  Tosin raportti ei pohdi sitä, miten tämä vaatimus liittyy kapitalismiin ja sen tuottamaan pakkoihin.

kilpailu ja jatkuva taloudellisen kasvun vaatimus ovat nykyiseen kapitalistiseen talousjärjestelmään sisään rakennettuja pakkoja.

Kohti kestävyyden kulttuuria

Nykyinen kulutuskulttuuri on olennaisesti syöpynyt länsimaisen ihmisen mentaliteettiin. Mutta se on myös olennaisesti sidoksissa kapitalistisen markkinatalouden pakkoihin.

Makrotaloudellisesti kirjoittajat korostavat nykyisen rahajärjestelmän kestämättömyyttä.  On vaadittava kansallisten ja kansainvälisten rahamarkkinoiden sääntelyä. He varoittavat ekspotentiaalisesti kasvavan velan johtavan systeemin romahtamiseen. Verotuksen osalta raportin kirjoittajat ehdottavat painopisteen siirtämistä ansio- ja pääomatuloista ekosysteemeille "pahojen" asoiden, kuten luonnonvarojen käytön ja saastuttamisen verotuksen kiristämisen suuntaan. Tämän lisäksi heidän mukaansa tulisi ns. ansiottomia tuloja (pääoman normaalituoton ylittävä voitto, maan arvonousu) verottaa raskaammin. Raportissa nähdään progressiivinen verotus ja marginaalivero, jonka tulisi lähestyä sataa prosenttia tulojen kasvaessa äärimmilleen, välttämättömäksi.

Mitkä ovat Worldwatch-instituutin raportin kirjoittajien mielestä edellytykset siirtyä kestävään elämäntapaan? Heidän mielestään ehdoton edellytys on kulutukseen perustuvasta elintavasta luopuminen

Esimerkiksi nostetaan sijoitusyhtiön johtaja Jon Paulson, joka ansaitsi vuonna 2010 4,9 miljardia dollaria. Vaikka hänen veroprosenttinsa olisi ollut 99 prosenttia, niin hänelle olisi jäänyt käteen lähes miljoona dollaria viikossa.

Raportissa lainataan myös johtavan saksalaisen Wuppertal Instituten vanhempaa tutkijaa Wolfgang Sachsia, joka on esittänyt synkän realistisen kuvan siitä, miten kasvulle perustuva kehitys voi säilyä vielä joitakin vuosikymmeniä kansainvälisen politiikan johtotähtenä, jos maailmanlaajuinen apartheid hyväksytään.

Ekologisen vastarinnan kysymykset

on pohdittava myös ”laittomia taktiikoita, jotta ympäristöuhat voidaan pysäyttää”.

Ongelmana on se, että poliittiset järjestelmät eivät ole kyenneet pysäyttämään tuhoisaa kehitystä. Sen vuoksi raportin kirjoittajan mukaan ”vallitsevaa lakia ja järjestystä on toisinaan lupa ja jopa pakko vastustaa”. Esimerkeiksi nostetaan historiasta Gandhin, Martin Luther Kingin ja Nelson Mandelan toiminta.  Artikkelin lopussa lainataan filosofi Henry David Thoreauta: ”Jos mitään kadun, niin hyvää käytöstäni. Miksi pirussa käyttäydyin niin hyvin?” Artikkeli päättyy toteamukseen: Kysymys on ajankohtainen kaikille.