Permanent Culture Now » Theory

Solutions to Credit Crisis and Essential Articles to read

Michael — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:00:17 +0000

Solutions are;-

1/ The Chicago Plan of 1909, a version of the New Deal rejected by Franklin D Roosevelt as too radical.

This was essentially a program of public works; make work schemes with decent wages and severe restrictions/regulation on the activities on banks. The banking act introduced by FDR was less restrictive.

2/ Default on bad debts, make the speculators on debt pay.

3/ The Vladimir Putin method of dealing with Oligarchs and re-nationalizing while minimizing cost to the government.

Essentially collapse the share price of a company with a massive tax demand (or other methods) allows them to go bankrupt then buy them up for a fraction of the cost.

This approach could have been used by Gordon Brown in re-nationalizing the banks at a much reduced cost. Also as the banks had been allowed to go bankrupt, the debts would not be passed on to the government.

Avoiding the £1.3 Tn of the banks liabilities would have been a good idea

The Gov could supply credit directly cutting out the parasitical middle man in the form of the banks to stop the collapse in credit collapsing the economy.

4/ A citizens wage, also called a integrated Tax and Benefit system

5/ Abolish Tax Credits, as they are a subsidy for bad employers to make a profit paying poverty wages at the Taxpayers’ expense.

6/ Raise Tax thresholds.

7/ Raise benefits, as this will encourage employers to pay a living wage.

8/ A living minimum wage set above all the means tests, if you are working full time and have to claim means tested benefits to bring up a family, you do not have a job, and you are on a Stalinist work program. This would also minimize the cost to the Taxpayer of subsidizing bad employers to pay low wages.

9/ Introduce a proper progressive tax system.

10/ A maximum wage.

11/ A Tobin Tax., a tax on financial transactions

12/ Abolish non-domicile status.

13/ Abolish New Deal which finances private companies to make massive profits while offering little/no training. Spend the money on REAL training.

14/ A Land Tax.

15/ A very high Tax on 2nd homes.

16/ Harmonize Corporation, Capital Gains and Income Tax, to minimize Tax avoidance. Private equity often pays capital gains tax of 5%, on the little Tax liability they admit to.

17/ Change the Tax laws so Private equity cannot set the massive debt it used to buy a company against its Tax liability, allowing them to pay little/no Tax.

18/ VAT to be paid at country of origin, to minimize VAT carousel fraud.

19/ A Glass Segal act, the separation of investment and deposit banking to minimize insider trading

20/ Off shore companies to have no legal status in UK law. This would mean these off-shore companies could not enforce payment in the UK courts, meaning that any company making money in the UK would have to be registered in the UK and pay UK tax.

21/ Abolish PFI with the Vladimir Putin method outlined above.

22/ Go back to the 1854 law on usury that put a cap on interest rates of 10%. This was an excellent suggestion by the campaigning group LONDON CITIZENS, in their anti usury campaign. This would mitigate the asset stripping of the poor by the capital rich.

23/ Abolish Academy Schools.

24/ Re-Nationalize public transport, see Vladimir Putin method again.

25/ Re-Nationalize the public utilities, see the Putin method again.

26/ Re-introduce real education, (if it really existed), abolish these pointless target driven policies.

27/ Introduce full Student Grants.

28/ Take vocational training away from employers (as you only learn how to bodge to make them higher profits), and make it free at the point of use.

29/ Abolish Trident. And the rest of the UK nuclear weapons program

30/ Abolish Nuclear power.

31/ End military Imperialism for natural resources, as it is costly and politically de-stabilizing

32/ Repeal all the anti democratic legislation introduced by Conservatives and New Labour, too numerous to list.

33/ A proper law on corporate manslaughter involving jail.

34/ Abolish Job agencies, and impose a minimum length of contract.

35/ Protection against unfair dismissal from day 1.

36/ Abolish zero hour’s contracts.

37/ Abolish fake self employed status, very prevalent in the building industry.

38/ Introduce a maximum 32 hour week.

39/ Abolish inflation targeting (setting the interest rates to control inflation). Which leads to short term financial planning and a narrow view of economic planning? It after all did not take account of imported deflation from China, or control the housing bubble.

40/ Abolish Quantitive Easing (printing money to buy back government bonds) as this gives money to Hedge funds and investment funds (who hold Government Bonds) to speculate on food, fuel, other commodities and against the currencies/bonds of the countries that bailed them out

41/ Take away the ability of banks to create money, (Fractional Reserve Banking) and put this under democratic control so the Government not banks create money.

Most of the above boils down to the redistribution of wealth to stimulate the economy, if only a few have wealth nobody can buy stuff and the economy collapses.

The Plutocrats will concentrate wealth until the poor cannot even afford to eat, if they could get away with burning the poor to heat their swimming pools they would, they have to be stopped.

However given the present Cameron plans for the UK economy, the prognosis is not good.

There being little state assets left to sell, even the oils practically gone. Little spare industrial capacity to take advantage of the collapse in the value of sterling in the form of exports, (due to previous rounds of asset stripping), impoverished Social Capital, (Schools, University, and Other infrastructure such as transport), UK PLC is worthless.

As Author Daley said (in character) when asked about Mrs. Thatcher, He said,

“Thatcher, brilliant woman, got the utilities that the public already owned and sold it to them again”.

The current Con-Dem economic experiment will make dust what is left of the UK economy.

Essential Articles Links

On Neo liberalism/monetarism

Stephen King: The magicians of monetarism have very few tricks left up their sleeves (managing director of economics HSBC) Independent Monday, 29 August 2011

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/stephen-king/stephen-king-the-magicians-of-monetarism-have-very-few-tricks-left-up-their-sleeves-2345677.html

www.noshockdoctrine.org.uk

http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/the-book.

Adam Curtis the Trap

http://www.archive.org/details/adamcurtistrap1

Joseph Stiglitz former head economist of the World Bank

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/feb/12/joseph-stiglitz-economics-creditcrunch.

Data on effects of inequality

http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/why/evidence

On the banking bailouts

Not so much bail-out as rip-off’Nouriel Roubini Guardian 29 Sept 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/29/wallstreet.useconomy

The Great Bank Robbery Nassim Taleb

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/taleb1/English

Is Richard Branson all he’s cracked up to be? Guardian 21 November 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/21/richard-branson-northern-rock

It’s in all our interests to understand how to stop another Great Depression guardian 10 October 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/10/stop-another-great-depression-debt

Can Europe pull back from the brink? Newsnight’s Paul Mason, Gillian Tett of the FT’s guardian.co.uk,

11 Nov 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/11/the-conversation-eurozone-crisis

Lloyds Banking Group admits £4.3 Bn of loses on Irish loans guardian 17^th Dec 2010

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/dec/17/lloyds-banking-group-ireland-loan-losses

Peston on UK banking exposure to Irish property debt

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2010/11/ireland_how_much_punishment_fo.html

Tax Credits

http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/0809/managing_variations_in_workloa.aspx

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/darling-admits-soaring-cost-of-tax-credit-system-is-unacceptable-457035.html

Tax Credits a modern ‘Speenhamland system’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speenhamland_system

A citizens wage, also called a integrated Tax and Benefit system

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/a-nation-of-givers-and-takers-can-tax-and-benefits-be-integrated-gordon-borrie-thinks-there-are-simpler-solutions-1370852.html

On Keynesianism

Senator Dennis Kucinich and Robert Peston R4, Today on 17 Dec 2009 at 8.10 Am outlining why Obama plan will not work and why Chicago plan would.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7786000/7786997.stm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VarQLVl9BtI

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/stephen-king/stephen-king-lessons-from-the-great-depression-of-the-1930s-have-not-been-learnt-959408.htm

http://ideas.repec.org/p/lev/wrkpap/76.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnham_Plan

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/the-big-question-what-was-roosevelts-new-deal-and-is-something-like-it-needed-today-932942.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/jeremy-warner/jeremy-warner-crass-keynesianism-should-be-replaced-with-pure-keynes-1063033.html

On Speculation

Vulture funds circule EU bail out

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b016817r/File_on_4_Cash_from_the_Crisis/

Time to swoop on the vulture funds Tim Jones guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 November 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/17/vulture-funds-law

Or speculation explained through Goats

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/stephanieflanders/2009/05/the_great_hargeisa_goat_bubble.html

Matt Taibbi April 5, 2010 Rolling Stone, ‘The Great American Bubble Machine’. “The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” http://bigpicture.posterous.com/goldman-sachs-the-great-american-bubble-machi

Are you shocked by this stock market trader’s comments?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/poll/2011/sep/27/shocked-stock-market-trader-alessio-rastani

What price the new democracy? Goldman Sachs conquers Europe Stephen Foley Independent 18 Nov 2011 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/what-price-the-new-democracy-goldman-sachs-conquers-europe-6264091.html

Irish banks face mortgage strikes Henry McDonald in Dublin guardian.co.uk 18 November 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/nov/18/ireland-banks-mortgages-repossession-new-beginnings

A cap on interest rates http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/aug/09/london-citizens-loan-sharks-rbs

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jul/19/banking-royal-bank-scotlandgroup

Future payments across all PFI projects up until 2031-32 amount to 91 billion in today’s money

http://www.nao.org.uk/publications/0708/making_changes_in_operational.aspx

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00l5gm4/File_on_4_23_06_2009/

New Labour ‘New Deal’/Workfare/Work Program

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/domestic_politics/fraud+in+the+welfare+to+work+scheme+/3239467

http://intensiveactivity.wordpress.com/2009/06/28/new-deal-fraud-probe-begins-a4e-under-investigation/

http://intensiveactivity.wordpress.com/2009/06/07/the-failed-new-deal-scheme-in-figures/

http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2009/06/30/51238/pcs-union-calls-for-nao-check-on-channel4-new-deal-fraud.html

Joseph Stiglitz puts the figure for the Iraq War, the Afghan war and all the indirect costs at ₤20Bn for the UK taxpayer up to the year 2010

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/1631bnayear-cost-of-war-in-iraq-would-be-better-spent-on-nhs-hospitals-439988.html

On inflation targeting Stephen King Managing Director of Economics HSBC

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/stephen-king/stephen-king-memo-to-gordon-think-radical-and-dump-the-banks-inflation-target-967009.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/stephen-king/stephen-king-runaway-growth-was-a-sign-of-excess-credit-and-risktaking-1686929.html

Quantitative easing

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00x9z74/Face_the_Facts_Feeding_Frenzy/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/apr/25/barclays-faces-commodity-protests

‘Quantitative easing ‘is good for the rich, bad for the poor’ Heather Stewart, 14 Aug 2011

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/aug/14/quantitative-easing-riots

Fractional Reserve Banking

Senator Dennis Kucinich again http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRVmpQcaM2w

On why sustainable economic growth can not be built on low wages

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/04/global-recession-wealth-inequalities

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2005/apr/18/ukgeneralelection2005.economicpolicy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/nov/14/bubble-fears-as-asset-prices-jump

Prognosis for world economy

Former member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, former head of European Economics at the London School of Economics and now head economist at Citygroup on the UK economy, William Buitler. http://blogs.ft.com/maverecon/2009/04/the-green-shoots-are-weeds-growing-through-the-rubble-in-the-ruins-of-the-global-economy/

Meltdown Al Jazeera a four part documentary on the financial crisis

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/meltdown/

Marxist explanation:

David Harvey on the crisis in capitalism

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0

Professor Richard D Wolff

http://rdwolff.com/classes

Larry Elliot Guardian 2/3/4 June 2008 ‘The Gods that Failed’

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jun/02/globaleconomy.globalrecession

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jun/03/economics.policy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/jun/04/economicgrowth.banking

Nouriel Roubini of New York University stern business school on Al Jazeera ‘Is capitalism doomed’ and on why Marx was right “Karl Marx got it right, at some point capitalism can destroy itself,

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/2011816104945411574.html

http://online.wsj.com/video/roubini-warns-of-global-recession-risk/C036B113-6D5F-4524-A5AF-DF2F3E2F8735.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/stefan-stern-marx-was-right-about-change-2338234.html

On the benefit of inflexible markets (FT)

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f9e3fee4-0117-11de-8f6e-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1

Economy on the Edge http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2009/06/090608_economy_edge.shtml

Paul Krugman condemns coalition’s spending review austerity as a ‘fad’ Nobel-winning economist fears UK public will be ‘fashion victims’ of spending cuts that ‘boldly go in exactly the wrong direction’

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/oct/22/paul-krugman-condemns-spending-review

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/opinion/22krugman.html?_r=2&ref=opinion

DEBTOCRACY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKpxPo-lInk

A National Teach In On Austerity, Debt and Corporate Greed from NYC Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West

http://www.fightbackteachin.org/index.html

Stephen King (MD of economics HSBC) on the length of housing downturns

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/stephen-king/stephen-king-as-safe-as-houses-how-harsh-realities-are-dispelling-the-home-market-myths-826288.html

Jim Rodgers (one of Soros business acolytes) on sustainability of Sterling

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/jim-rogers-sell-any-sterling-you-might-have-its-finished-1452384.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_sovereign_debt_crisis

Solutions to Credit Crisis and Essential Articles to read is a post from: Permanent Culture Now

Interview with Anarchist Stuart Christie

Michael — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 09:01:00 +0000

Permanent Culture Now is proud to host a guest post from Warren James Jr of Forest of Dean Anarchists

Introduction

Perhaps the biggest challenge anarchists face is combating the masses of disinformation out there about anarchism, to educate the 99% and explain ourselves, and what anarchism means rather than what government and other propaganda tells us that it means. That’s part of the reason we set up Forest of Dean Anarchists.

Stuart Christie, since 1962 has been an active anarchist, through writing, publishing and action. The Glaswegian author of Granny Made Me An Anarchist, General Franco Made Me A Terrorist and Edward Heath Made Me Angry (his entertaining and inspiring three-part autobiography), and The Christie File: Enemy Of The State, first achieved notoriety in 1964 when at the age of 18 he hitch-hiked to Madrid to assassinate Franco, and was caught and imprisoned. He was freed three years later thanks to an international campaign led by Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell. In the 1970s, he helped to reform the Anarchist Black Cross association (to support political prisoners), edited the Black Flag magazine and was acquitted of being part of the Angry Brigade. He remains active in the south of England, where he runs a book publishers http://www.christiebooks.com and is looking for donations to get an anarchist/libertarian film archive up and running again (see appeal on his site).

One of FOD Anarchists sent him some questions, and when he got a spare few minutes from working on his latest Do you feel that earlier anarchist methods, such as ‘propaganda by the deed’ can be effective today?

The tactic of propaganda by the deed is an essential and unchanging element in the struggle for justice and fairness. What may differ from time to time, generation to generation, is the methodology of that direct action. When called on, each new generation and/or individual finds its own way to resist tyranny or advance the struggle. Methods that, for one reason or another, were morally or technically feasible or 20 or even 10 years ago are often no longer possible today. To paraphrase Karl Popper: because our knowledge and understanding of the world is constantly changing and evolving, especially so in our digital age, we cannot, therefore, know today what we can only know tomorrow

I have seen little evidence that the protagonists of recent movements such as the Indignados of southern Europe, the Arab Spring, and Occupy describe themselves as socialists or anarchists, yet it seems to me that their calls for direct democracy, their holding of general assemblies and call for the end of capitalism are similar, or the same, as anarcho-syndicalism. Do you agree, and if so, why do you think the words ‘anarchism’ or ‘socialism’ are rarely, if ever, mentioned, and do you think they should be?

My understanding of these movements is that anarchists and libertarians were — and are — very active in these movements, indeed central to them, especially in the case of the indignados in Spain. What they didn’t do, however, quite sensibly and correctly as anarchists, is lay ideological claim to these popular movements or attempt to use them as fertile organisational ‘recruiting grounds’, as inevitably occurs with the Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist and the Islamist/Jihadist groupings. Anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists and libertarian socialists are certainly active today in Egypt, Libya and other Maghreb countries, and I’ve no doubt there are also anarchists active in the Arabian Peninsula as well. If the terms ‘anarchism’ and ‘socialism’ are rarely heard that’s possibly down to the editorial policies of the mainstream broadcast and print media who have a different agenda and prefer to focus on the Jihadist/Muslim Brotherhood threat.

It seems that anarchism is regarded by many as a dirty word, partly due to successful anti-anarchist propaganda, partly due to the interpretation given to it by some anarchists themselves (such as ‘the black bloc’). Would you agree with me, and how might we ‘sell’ anarchism to the masses?

The words ‘Anarchism’ and ‘anarchists’ have always been demonised by the mainstream media; the time to worry is when the capitalist press and state spin doctors stop using them as ‘bogeymen terms. As for ‘selling anarchism to the masses’ the only way to do that is through education (spreading the Idea), inspiration — and example.

Would you consider yourself a socialist as well as an anarchist?

Yes

How hopeful, or hopeless, do you feel the anarchist struggle could be in the face of this current government?

It has never been a question of being hopeful or hopeless in the face of this or any future government/society; the struggle —with the human condition, not just the state — is forever with relentless struggle. All you can — or should — hope for along the way are a few little victories and, maybe, the occasional big one. ‘History’, Seamus Heaney says ‘Don’t hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime, the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme. So hope for a great sea-change on the far side of revenge. Believe that a further shore is reachable from here. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells.’

If there were a general election tomorrow, would you vote, and if so, who would you vote for (if they were standing)?

No, I wouldn’t vote for a party or for an individual no matter how honourable, but I would certainly consider a protest vote against a party — or for something achievable. For example, in the Spanish elections of 1936 the anarcho-syndicalist CNT tacitly withdrew its overt opposition to participation in the parliamentary process (ie, voting) in order to force the release of 30,000 political prisoners imprisoned by the Republic over the previous three years

Do you think we could achieve a wholesale anarchist society? Could it happen transitionally or would a rapid revolution be necessary?

I’ve really no idea; what appeared to work rapidly and violently in particular places and times (e.g., Russia, 1917, and Spain, 1936) clearly, for a whole variety of reasons, didn’t endure.Similar events may happen again, who knows, all we can do is work, hope and carry on. Even so, as, when,and if an ‘anarchist’ society comes into being we’ll still have to face the perennial problems of co-existence human beings have faced since time immemorial. One saving grace we should have — as anarchists — is that we’d hope to be more realistic and conscious of our human failings, shortcomings and limitations, particularly with regard to the corrupting influence of the exercise of power. However, I am an optimist and I share the view of American psychologist William James: ‘The ceaseless whisper of the more permanent ideals, the steady tug of truth and justice, give them but time, MUST warp the world in their direction.’

Do you think that a. the NHS, b. Social security, c. police, d. military, could continue to function, or would be necessary, in an anarchist society?

An anarchist society is and always will be an aspiration, an ideal — a ‘star’ to follow — one that provides us with an ethical code, a moral barometer and a libertarian political template for our everyday lives. If and when a social revolutionary situation recurs again (in this country or anywhere) the role of the anarchist will be to do what they can to ensure that the social institutions required to ensure that any human society (including health and welfare,and security/defence services), function justly, fairly and as conflict-free as is humanly possible, are — and remain — fundamentally democratic, libertarian and answerable to the community. It’s not about achieving Nirvana or a Utopia, only religious zealots and ideological fundamentalists believe in the ‘rapture’ that creates the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, or the ‘last fight’ mentioned in ‘The Internationale’. Anarchists appreciate only too well how ‘imperfect’ human beings are and, doubtless always will be, which is why they reject institutionalised power structures as the bedrock for the creation of oligarchies (well-meaning or otherwise) and the corrupting of the body politic.

What examples can you think of as anarchy in action today?

Can’t think of any offhand, specifically, but I’m sure your readers can come up with lots of examples of voluntary self-help and direct organisations and bodies that would fit into the category of ‘anarchy in action’.

Can laissez-faire capitalists/ the US Libertarian Party be considered as anarchists?

Not in the slightest. These people are minimal statists, the minimal part being the defence and advancement of self-interest and property rights — and not even ‘enlightened’ self-interest.

Have your ideas changed much over the decades, and if so, how?

Yes, my thoughts and views on lots of things have changed over the years, which is inevitable as you acquire more knowledge through different experiences, and meeta wide variety of people with different views on life to your own — and of course reading, TV, cinema, the internet, etc.. But my anarchist view of the world remains fundamentally unchanged, ie – see the following:

What is anarchism?

Anarchism is the movement for social justice through freedom. It is concrete, democratic and egalitarian. It has existed and developed since the seventeenth century, with a philosophy and a defined outlook that have evolved and grown with time and circumstance. Anarchism began as what it remains today: a direct challenge by the underprivileged to their oppression and exploitation. It opposes both the insidious growth of state power and the pernicious ethos of possessive individualism, which, together or separately, ultimately serve only the interests of the few at the expense of the rest.

Anarchism promotes mutual aid, harmony and human solidarity, to achieve a free, classless society – a cooperative commonwealth. Anarchism is both a theory and practice of life. Philosophically, it aims for perfect accord between the individual, society and nature. In an anarchist society, mutually respectful sovereign individuals would be organised in non-coercive relationships within naturally defined communities in which the means of production and distribution are held in common.

Anarchists, are not simply dreamers obsessed with abstract principles. We know that events are ruled by chance, and that people’s actions depend much on long-held habits and on psychological and emotional factors that are often anti-social and usually unpredictable. We are well aware that a perfect society cannot be won tomorrow. Indeed, the struggle could last forever! However, it is the vision that provides the spur to struggle against things as they are, and for things that might be.

Whatever the immediate prospects of achieving a free society, and however remote the ideal, if we value our common humanity then we must never cease to strive to realise our vision. If we settle for anything less, then we are little more than beasts of burden at the service of the privileged few, without much to gain from life other than a lighter load, better feed and a cosier berth.

Ultimately, only struggle determines outcome, and progress towards a more meaningful community must begin with the will to resist every form of injustice.

In general terms, this means challenging all exploitation and defying the legitimacy of all coercive authority. If anarchists have one article of unshakeable faith then it is that, once the habit of deferring to politicians or ideologues is lost, and that of resistance to domination and exploitation acquired, then ordinary people have a capacity to organise every aspect of their lives in their own interests, anywhere and at any time, both freely and fairly.

Anarchism encompasses such a broad view of the world that it cannot easily be distilled into a formal definition. Michael Bakunin, the man whose writings and example over a century ago did most to transform anarchism from an abstract critique of political power into a theory of practical social action, defined its fundamental tenet thus: In a word, we reject all privileged, licensed, official, and legal legislation and authority, even though it arise from universal suffrage, convinced that it could only turn to the benefit of a dominant and exploiting minority, and against the interests of the vast enslaved majority.

Anarchists do not stand aside from popular struggle, nor do they attempt to dominate it. They seek to contribute to it practically whatever they can, and also to assist within it the highest possible levels both of individual self-development and of group solidarity. It is possible to recognise anarchist ideas concerning voluntary relationships, egalitarian participation in decision-making processes, mutual aid and a related critique of all forms of domination in philosophical, social and revolutionary movements in all times and places.

Elsewhere, the less formal practices and struggles of the more indomitable among the propertyless and disadvantaged victims of the authority system have found articulation in the writings of those who on brief acquaintance would appear to be mere millenarian dreamers. Far from being abstract speculations conjured out of thin air, such works have, like all social theories, been derived from sensitive observation. They reflect the fundamental and uncontainable conviction nourished by a conscious minority throughout history that social power held over people is a usurpation of natural rights: power originates in the people, and they alone have, together, the right to wield it.

Do you think we in Britain are still threatened by fascism?

Fascism of one sort or another — as with any other reactionary populist ideology and fundamentalist belief system — is always a potential threat to society, especially when people’s fears and emotions can be manipulated and used in the furtherance of some elitist political or religious agenda. Who’d have thought twenty years ago that militant jihadist Islam or fundamentalist Protestantism/Catholicism would still be a serious and ongoing problem in the 21st century!

Should we try and build a movement and organise? If so, how might we do it and what form could it take?

Movements that are thrown up as a response to a particular threat or situation, yes, but you can’t just ‘set up’ a body with revolutionary aspirations in the hope of it developing it into a revolutionary movement’ without it — inevitably—degenerating into a self-perpetuating, self-serving vanguardist monster, e.g., the Communist Party, SWP, WRP, etc. A very useful text to read in that respect is Robert Michels’ ‘Political Parties’, especially the chapters outlining what he called ‘the Iron Law of Oligarchy’. The only way to build, organise, educate and proselytise anarchist libertarian ideas and solutions is through bodies with shared economic/class interests such as the trade unions, trades councils or other community-based groups.

As a prominent anarchist theorist, Stuart Christie’s words of wisdom should indeed be relevant to PCN.

Find out about the Forest Of Dean Anarchists here.

Interview with Anarchist Stuart Christie is a post from: Permanent Culture Now

Permaculture, Queerness & Feminism

Michael — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 16:11:24 +0000

Permanent Culture Now is proud to host a guest post from Nicole from Wild Heart Permaculture.

Gender, sexuality and design

This article is a conversation between queer permaculture practitioners and community organisers, Nicole Vosper and Annie-Rose London, communicating across continents about gender, sexuality and design.

Nicole: One of the key principles of permaculture is ‘Use & Value Diversity’, in terms of how we design our communities this may also apply to gender & sexuality. How do you think people can design for diversity?

Annie-Rose: In order to design for diversity, we first need to acknowledge one fundamental assumption – that we’re not already diverse. I think people often view social diversity as a passive thing that will just spontaneously happen if we’re not actively homophobic. We live in a power- and access-monoculture. So it ain’t that simple. When we look at fields that are overcome by an invasive grass, it’s clear that we can’t just set up a homestead and wait for biodiversity to kick in. The land is out of balance; it will take active nudging to welcome biodiversity. And you can’t fake it either – simply sowing a few seeds won’t result in a self-sufficient ecosystem. The conditions themselves need to be welcoming, not forceful; space must be made for life, not aggressively prodded into life with chemical fertilizers.

Increasing Diversity

Increasing diversity in our human communities doesn’t mean simply opening our doors and shouting loudly “Hey! We want diversity! Come on in!” We need to acknowledge that we’re coming from an extremely unhealthy society, one in which things are coming from a base-line of non-balance. I’ve been in a lot of places that think they’ve accomplished their work of increasing human diversity because they said so in their mission statement. If you want participation from anyone besides those already most empowered by society, i.e. heterosexual cis-gendered white males, here are the tools I believe are most important:

Decide why. Be honest. It’s important that you aren’t seeking diversity to be politically correct, to look good, or to make yourself feel better. Figure out why you, you personally, want to make this effort.

Make friends. We can deconstruct participation and diversity and outreach in many ways, but at the end of the day, people want to be with friends, they want to feel loved. Don’t plot all the time; actually make friends with people. And not just to manipulate them into joining your project, but to learn from each other, to have fun, to, you know, make a friend. This isn’t magic.

Listen. The stance of being an ally must be one of listening. We must engage with people of all kinds who are different from us and actively listen to their goals, their needs, and their inspirations. We can’t tell queers how they should want to participate. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have a stance of listening rather than one of telling. Remember that analogy to biodiversity (create nurturing environments that are conducive to growth rather than forcing growth)!

Lay aside your ego. This is an inevitable challenge that goes hand in hand with listening, especially when we get to the doing part. Listening to people who have different experiences of life and of oppression means that you will have to accept that someone else’s priorities are different from your own. In order to be an ally you may have to revise your own priorities. You will have to make the radical mental leap that other people’s lives are actually different from yours. For example, say you don’t get why it’s important to have mandatory break-time because in your opinion, people can take a break whenever they want. If someone is telling you that they want a mandatory break-time, they might have valid reasons that you don’t understand. Try to dig in and understand and be willing to try out ideas that don’t come easily to you. Also, you’re gonna get called out for oppressive behavior (or called in, as I’ll explain later.) Take this personally, cause it is within your personal power to change. But don’t take it as a negative reflection on who you are. We are all healing from a messed up society that has made us think in harmful ways. People are calling you out because you matter to them, they consider you an ally and because they think that you are capable of change.
Outreach. Don’t think a tab labeled “Values” on your website is enough to welcome in diversity. Tap in to local queer communities. Ask them if and how they might want to participate. Ask them to teach your community something. Remember, they don’t “get” to learn from you, you all get to learn from each other! Cultivate individual relationships, friendships!, with people rather than sending a flier to an organization’s front desk. Don’t worry whether people join your project or not; this is more about your own learning and personal expansion than it is about a diversity quota.

Solidarity. Solidarity is understanding that we all have different identities, experience different systems of oppression and require different pathways to liberation. It is not an attempt to homogenize. We can hold these differences and stand side by side, knowing that all oppression is linked and that dismantling oppression benefits everyone. Solidarity means action, not talk. It means coming to events that your allies hold AND inviting your friends. It means educating yourself and others about their issues. It means organizing your own projects that support their efforts and volunteering for things instead of just attending them. Basically, it means “I got your back.”

Please note that all of this is my opinion, derived from what I’ve experienced and heard from others. The best thing you can do is start the conversation from scratch in your own community! What does listening mean to you? Diversity? Solidarity? These are mega buzzwords and warrant more thought.

Nicole: What strength does this diversity bring to our communities?

Annie-Rose: The word “diversity” gets thrown around a lot to the point where I don’t know if I even know it or like it anymore. Right now I am defining it as collective thriving and authentic agency for all beings.

There are two parts to this answer – one is the inherent necessity of social justice as a part of permaculture and earth justice, the other is the extreme goodness that diversity brings.

Liberating the earth and people

I don’t think it makes sense to talk about liberating the earth if we don’t talk about liberating the people on it. To separate ourselves from the earth in that way, to view them as different projects, is to further alienate ourselves from the earth. This is the same kind of thinking that makes it possible to blindly destroy Earth in the first place. Social justice and permaculture go hand in hand for me. There is so much trauma that we all carry from the weight of homophobia, of racism. Even if we are those who benefit from these mindsets, there is a sickness that comes from the hurt and embodied alienation we have from each other. Permaculture is a practice that always looks at the process and incorporates the experience of practitioners into the value of the work itself. So we deserve to work out this trauma and create real alternatives. Otherwise the only people who are going to pick up these practices will be those already empowered to do whatever they want, and that’s a pretty limited movement in my opinion!

Diversity is delicious

Also, diversity is delicious. It is health. It is the joy of learning from those who you thought were different from you but it turns out you can love each other. It is discovering deeper roots, more stories, further richness. It is sustainable because it is interactive, productive, constantly generating new truths and new solutions. These things are not possible with a homogenous group of folks who already agree on everything. Diversity is the beauty of stretching further and staying humble. It is the ecstasy of discovering that you are smaller than ever but more a part of everything than you could have imagined.

Nicole: What does ‘queer’ mean?

Annie-Rose: Queerness asks that we calm our impulse to define. It asks that we engage in the infinite spaces between definition. “Queer” is an orientation towards sexuality and gender, and often reality at large, that allows for multiplicities of truth. There are as many types of queers as there are queers. Queerness is a journey of societal unlearning and an active relearning of our most authentic selves, the self that loves and expresses exactly as it desires. Because our brains are so bound by societal ideas of sexuality and gender, queerness is very much a process, a constant effort to realize our most stunning authentic juiciness. This stuff can get pretty heady, but essentially, queerness means doing what feels good and feeling good about doing it!

Nicole: What does ‘queer’ mean for you personally?

Annie-Rose: My queer identity operates as a constant nudge to sink deeper into my self, to question my choices and to expand further into new possibilities. Queerness is not a pre-formed decision of who I am; it’s an invitation to discover who I am.

Queerness to me means actively listening to myself and to others rather than assuming I already know the answer. It means peeling away the boundaries of love and gender that were artificially drawn around me by dominating forces in the interest of suppressing individuality.

My queerness is political. It is inherently anarchist, anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, feminist, and anti-racist. Many essays could be written about why I see all of those connections, but in short, it is a mindset that inherently values all life. I am so totally in the throes of understanding what queerness means to me! A huge part of me just has no idea! It is very much a constant experimentation and reflection. It means that my stance to life is one of always learning.

Nicole: How have you found being queer in relation to the permaculture movement at large?

Annie-Rose: It’s an extremely easy fit for me. Queerness is to sexuality what permaculture is to agriculture. The permaculture way of thinking, of considering process over goals, of stressing experience over ideals; that all breathes out of the same queer core of myself. I have been lucky to work at several queer homesteads where we don’t have to bother saying “queer” without “permaculture”, it always comes out as one word. The radical faeries are a great group to learn about to get a better sense of the roots of this connection. I found permaculture before I found queer politics, and one has been a natural outgrowth of the other.

Nicole: Big question but in short how does society need to be re-designed for real gender & sexual liberation? What role can permaculture designers play?

Annie-Rose: Start loving yourself! Love other people, people who are different from you! Stop being afraid! To me there are many correct answers to this, all of which require that folks believe that they have the right to be happy. I believe that teaching our youth to love themselves is key. I believe queer politics are huge and open up a whole new way of viewing

this liberation. I think that just having people’s needs met; i.e. making sure everyone has access to housing, healthcare, food and education is essential. There’s a tendency to speak in abstract revolutionary metaphors about questions like this, but really there are a ton of queer, gay, lesbian, bi, and trans youth living on the streets right now, sitting in classrooms that teach them self-hate right now, desperately searching for a job because they were fired due to their nonconventional gender right now. There’s plenty of concrete things we take for granted but are real symptoms of oppression.

Get it done

I believe strongly in getting stuff done. Don’t wait for the government to provide all your solutions and don’t hate on your friend because they want to work with the government change policy. Liberation is going to come as a result of millions of people doing millions of different sorts of things. Support each other, celebrate each other, and find what action inspires you.

Eco social design

Eco-social design can play a huge role, because it puts all forms of oppression on the table at once. Hierarchical, colonial, patriarchal, racist, heterosexist, able-ist, capitalistic

mindsets are all linked, all part of the same ability to “other” things that appear different from you and treat them as less valuable. Permaculture is an incredible experiment in creating the alternatives that we want to see, so it is an essential arena for creating social alternatives. If we can be self-sufficient together then we don’t have to rely on the systems of domination that have generated these unbalances in the first place. We can grow a balanced, inclusive culture from the inside.

Nicole: Have you experienced any homophobia within permaculture or land-based projects? How can people stay aware & avoid oppressive practices?

Annie-Rose: Yes. Homophobia is everywhere, friends. It’s even in my own head, although I challenge it and destroy it more and more every day. I’ve been in places where heterosexual couples get celebrated and encouraged while LGBTQ individuals get talked about in whispers. I’ve been asked to represent all queers, always fielding questions about queers in general and made to feel like an outsider. People have assumed who I know, who I sleep with, what I want. I’ve seen LGBTQ men teased for being womanly and weak, which is of course despicable. Homophobia and sexism go hand in hand (e.g. effeminate boys being teased as “girly,” as though that’s an insult).

Healing communities

One way to heal communities is to talk about it openly. Just as you might have a meeting to figure out what crops to plant or how to divide up chores, have a meeting to discuss community agreements and ways that folks want to address oppressive behavior. It is so much easier to address problems when people have already made contingency plans. I use to urge people to develop a culture of calling people out, which means to tell folks when they’ve done something that feels oppressive in the interest of seeing how oppression plays out on the daily and building a better culture.
Recently a friend told about some folks who instead “call people in.” I like that so much more and it’s far more accurate! Call people in who have hurt others.

Regular check ins

Have regular check-ins so that folks know that there’s a pre-established place for them to voice concerns, instead of letting things boil over. Develop some community accountability practices. Educate yourselves and others. Put up signs in bathrooms about gender identity. Ask for people to share their preferred gender pronouns as well as their names during introductions. There are tons of easy-to-read zines available for free online that talk about queerness, oppression, and how to re-educate ourselves. Have reading groups and discussions! One of my favorite farms is a spot outside of Providence, RI where we have big community harvests every sunday and talk about queer politics the whole time. That combination of physical and intellectual stimulation is the bomb-diggity. This can be fun folks!

Nicole: I recently read in a book on (1) Radical Community Organising that “The promise of queer struggles is the exposure to a multiciplity of desires that capital seeks to constrain, and subsequent demands and resistance to centralize pleasure, joy & creativity in everyday lives – all of which are important elements of self-care and community building.” What role can queer struggles play in creating a permanent culture?

Annie-Rose: Queer struggle offers a lens on movement-building in which there is no turning away from one’s experience on the road to liberation. It is the most permanent and sustainable of cultures because it defies the changing whims of social norms and rests solely on the individual and the group to always respond intuitively and uniquely to every new situation on hand. It demands a tolerance for multiplicity, so we can focus on creating love and health instead of wasting our breath trying to convince each other which side of the road to stand on.

Queer struggle
More concretely, queer struggle opens up an extremely useful conversation and way of thinking for anyone interested in permanent culture. You don’t have to identify as queer to participate in queer struggle, just as you don’t have to live full-time on a permaculture commune to know it’s worthwhile. We can all take part in this new world of liberation and discovery. It’s not even that there’s enough room for everyone; each person who joins the struggle invents whole new previously-undiscovered space. By engaging in queer struggle we realize our most gorgeous selves. We further incorporate the experiences of the participant into the practice of permaculture. It makes the “doing” of this movement way more succulent, way more fun, way more breathtakingly personal and for all those reasons way more likely to keep people engaged.

Designing for diversity helps create healthy ecosystems and so recognising & designing for sexual diversity in human communities is fundamental to building a permanent culture.

Links & Resources

1. Benjamin Shepard (2010), ‘DIY Politics and Queer Activism’ in Team Colours Collective, Uses of a whirlwind. Movement, movements and contemporary radical currents in the United States, Oakland, AK Press
2. To follow the journey of Annie-Rose London: thereisonlymake.tumblr.com, newtacticalltactics.blogspot.com
3. For more links between radical community organising and permaculture: www.wildheartpermaculture.co.uk

Permaculture, Queerness & Feminism is a post from: Permanent Culture Now

43 Essential essays on the commons and Peer 2 Peer theory

Michael — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 16:26:09 +0000

This list is from the great P2P foundation website, which has loads of great articles and information on Peer 2 Peer (P2P) theory. The p2p foundation has loads of interesting articles and is constantly update, a great resource to keep up with what is going on in the world of the commons and P2P theory. A big thank you to P2P for putting together this great resource, hope you learn lots from it.

This is a list of the articles followed by brief explanation of each and links to the full text.

1 Paul S. Adler and Charles Heckscher: Towards Collaborative Community
2 Ernesto Arias (et al.) on Transcending the Individual Human Mind through Collaborative Design
3 Adam Arvidsson on the Crisis of Value and the Ethical Economy
4 Yaneer Bar-Yam on Complexity, Hierarchy, and Networks
5 Richard Barbrook on the ‘High-tech Gift Economy’
6 Yochai Benkler on Peer Production
7 James Boyle, on the Public Domain and the Second Enclosure movement
8 George Caffentzis: On the Antagonistic Usage of the Commons Concept
9 Kevin Carson, on expanding peer production to the physical domain
10 Predrag Cicovacki, on the metaphysics of co-evolution and transdisciplinary methodology
11 Julia Cohen, on copyright law and sharing
12 Mark Cooper on a Policy for Collaborative Production
13 Mariarosa Dalla Costa on the Commons of Land and Food
14 Massimo De Angelis on The Production of the Commons and the Explosion of the Middle Class.
15 Massimo De Angelis on a political strategy to unite commons and political/social movements
16 Paul de Armond, on netwar in political protest
17 Erik Douglas, on peer governance and democracy
18 Stephen Downes on Free Learning and P2P epistemology
19 Nick Dyer-Witheford on the Circulation of the Common
20 Jo Freeman, on the dark side of Peer Governance
21 Brett Frischmann, an economic theory for the Commons
22 Richard Heinberg on The Decentralized Provisioning of the Basic Necessities as the Fight of the Century
23 John Heron on the relational ground of human consciousness: Notes on Spiritual Leadership and Relational Spirituality
24 Yasuhiko Genku Kimura: Creating a ommicentric Ideosphere
25 Magnus Marsdal on Socialist Individualism
26 Ugo Mattei
27 Eben Moglen on Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture
28 Cosma Orsi on The Political Economy of Solidarity
29 Bruno Perens on The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source
30 James Quilligan on a framework for Global Commons-based Governance
31 Alan Rayner: Attuning to Natural Energy Flows vs. Abstract Economic Rationality
32 Dirk Riehle on the Economics of Open Source Software
33 David Ronfeldt on the Evolution of Governance
34 Marshall Sahlins on The Original Affluent Society
35 Graham Seaman: Can peer production make washing machines?
36 Clay Shirky on the web as evolvable system
37 David Skrbina, the participatory worldview
38 Bruno Theret, on the tradition of ‘civil socialism’
39 Evan Thompson, on the enactive theory of consciousness
40 Jeff Vail, The Problem of Growth: Hierarchy vs. the Rhizome
41 Kazys Varnelis on how network culture differs from postmodernism
42 Roberto Verzola on Undermining vs. Developing Abundance
43 Raoul Victor, on Free Software, the sharing culture, and Marxism

Paul S. Adler and Charles Heckscher: Towards Collaborative Community

Essay: Paul S. Adler and Charles Heckscher. Towards Collaborative Community / (Book: The Corporation as a Collaborative Community)

URL = http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~padler/research/01-Heckscher-chap01%20copy-1.pdf

This is an absolutely remarkable essay that charts the history of community within the capitalist form, from the earliest community oriented paternalism (the ‘Gemeinshaft’ model described by Tonnies), to the bureaucratic (‘Gesellshaft’) model described by Weber and Durkheim, culminating in the emergence of collaborative community, existing in tension and contradiction within the hierarchical and market environment of for-profit companies.

Ernesto Arias (et al.) on Transcending the Individual Human Mind through Collaborative Design

Key essay to understand the shift to relationality as the main ontological paradigm.

“The power of the unaided, individual mind is highly overrated: the Renaissance scholar no longer exists. Although creative individuals are often thought of as working in isolation, the role of interaction and collaboration with other individuals is critical [Engelbart, 1995]. Creative activity grows out of the relationship between an individual and the world of his or her work, and from the ties between an individual and other human beings. The predominant activity in designing complex systems is that participants teach and instruct each other [Greenbaum & Kyng, 1991]. Because complex problems require more knowledge than any single person possesses, it is necessary that all involved stakeholders participate, communicate, and collaborate with each other.”

URL = http://l3d.cs.colorado.edu/~gerhard/papers/tochi2000.pdf

Adam Arvidsson on the Crisis of Value and the Ethical Economy

This is a very important essay, the first one to my knowledge to directly deal with the crisis of value that results from the emergence of generalized social innovation and peer production. Or in other words: more and more use value is created, but only a small part of it can be monetized. This creates an imbalance in society, where companies are profiting from social innovation, but there is no return mechanism to fund it properly.

The Dornbirn Manifesto by Michel Bauwens is a restatement with some additional remarks, some of which have already been incorporated in this second version of the essay. Both were published around June 2007.

Read it here: The Crisis of Value and the Ethical Economy

Yaneer Bar-Yam on Complexity, Hierarchy, and Networks

Essay which explains why rising complexity requires hierarchies to be changed by distributed forms of mutual control, i.e. distributed networks and peer to peer dynamics.

Source: COMPLEXITY RISING: FROM HUMAN BEINGS TO HUMAN CIVILIZATION, A COMPLEXITY PROFILE. Yaneer Bar-Yam

URL = http://necsi.org/projects/yaneer/Civilization.html

See our article on Hierarchy for selected key excerpts.

Richard Barbrook on the ‘High-tech Gift Economy’

The High-tech Gift Economy

URL = http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/

This is a seminal essay that was often discussed during the first phase of the dotcom era. Abstract from First Monday: “During the Sixties, the New Left created a new form of radical politics: anarcho-communism. Above all, the Situationists and similar groups believed that the tribal gift economy proved that individuals could successfully live together without needing either the state or the market. From May 1968 to the late Nineties, this utopian vision of anarcho-communism has inspired community media and DIY culture activists. Within the universities, the gift economy already was the primary method of socialising labour. From its earliest days, the technical structure and social mores of the Net has ignored intellectual property. Although the system has expanded far beyond the university, the self-interest of Net users perpetuates this hi-tech gift economy. As an everyday activity, users circulate free information as e-mail, on listservs, in newsgroups, within on-line conferences and through Web sites. As shown by the Apache and Linux programs, the hi-tech gift economy is even at the forefront of software development. Contrary to the purist vision of the New Left, anarcho-communism on the Net can only exist in a compromised form. Money-commodity and gift relations are not just in conflict with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis. The ‘New Economy’ of cyberspace is an advanced form of social democracy.”

Yochai Benkler on Peer Production

Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm.

URL = http://www.yale.edu/yalelj/112/BenklerWEB.pdf

Also at http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html

This essay explains “why the Peer Production mode has” systematic advantages over markets and managerial hierarchies when the object of production is information or culture, and where the capital investment necessary for production-computers and communications capabilities-is widely distributed instead of concentrated.

In particular, this mode of production is better than firms and markets for two reasons. First, it is better at identifying and assigning human capital to information and cultural production processes. In this regard, peer-production has an advantage in what I call “information opportunity cost.” That is, it loses less information about who the best person for a given job might be than do either of the other two organizational modes.

Second, there are substantial increasing returns to allow very larger clusters of potential contributors to interact with very large clusters of information resources in search of new projects and collaboration enterprises. Removing property and contract as the organizing principles of collaboration substantially reduces transaction costs involved in allowing these large clusters of potential contributors to review and select which resources to work on, for which projects, and with which collaborators.”

The Political Economy of the Commons

URL = http://www.upgrade-cepis.org/issues/2003/3/up4-3Benkler.pdf

The concept of Information Commons is defined by Yochai Benchler in “The Political Economy of Commons”, in Upgrade, juin 2003, vol. IV, n° 3

Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production.

URL = http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/114-2/Benkler_FINAL_YLJ114-2.pdf

“The paper offers a framework to explain large scale effective practices of sharing private, excludable goods. It starts with case studies of distributed computing and carpooling as motivating problems. It then suggests a definition for “shareable goods” as goods that are lumpy and mid-grained in size, and explains why goods with these characteristics will have systematic overcapacity relative to the requirements of their owners. The paper then uses comparative transaction costs analysis, focused on information characteristics in particular, combined with an analysis of diversity of motivations, to suggest when social sharing will be better than secondary markets to reallocate this overcapacity to non-owners who require the functionality. The paper concludes with broader observations about the role of sharing as a modality of economic production as compared to markets and hierarchies (whether states or firms), with a particular emphasis on sharing practices among individuals who are strangers or weakly related, its relationship to technological change, and some implications for contemporary policy choices regarding wireless regulation, intellectual property, and communications network design.” (http://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/114-2/Benkler_FINAL_YLJ114-2.pdf )

Freedom in the Commons: Towards a Political Economy of Information

URL = http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?52+Duke+L.+J.+1245/

“None of this is to say that nonmarket and decentralized production will completely displace firms and markets. That is not the point. The point is that the networked information economy makes it possible for nonmarket and decentralized models of production to increase their presence alongside the more traditional models, causing some displacement, but increasing the diversity of ways of organizing production rather than replacing one with the other.This diversity of ways of organizing production and consumption, in turn, opens a range of new opportunities for pursuing core political values of liberal societies — democracy, individual freedom, and social justice.” (http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?52+Duke+L.+J.+1245/)

James Boyle, on the Public Domain and the Second Enclosure movement

The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain

URL = http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/papers/boyle.pdf
The Opposite of Property

URL = http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/foreword.pdf

George Caffentzis: On the Antagonistic Usage of the Commons Concept

Article: A Tale of Two Conferences: Globalization, the Crisis of Neoliberalism and Question of the Commons. By George Caffentzis

URL = http://www.globaljusticecenter.org/papers/caffentzis.htm

A history of the political usage of the concept of the Commons which distinguishes reformist and radical usage.

Summary and excerpts in our entry: Antagonistic Usage of the Commons Concept

Kevin Carson, on expanding peer production to the physical domain

Kevin Carson: Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles

URL = http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/industrialpolicycarson0109.pdf

Very good essay arguing for a new ‘Neotechnic‘, decentralized format of production, largely based on the principles of peer production, and why relocalizing the economy makes a lot of sense.

Though I disagree with the political conclusions of Kevin Carson (abolishing almost all state intervention), I strongly recommend this well-researched essay which tackles nearly all the issues we’re concerned with at the P2P Foundation (note from Michel Bauwens)

Predrag Cicovacki, on the metaphysics of co-evolution and transdisciplinary methodology

URL = http://www.integralleadershipreview.com/archives/2009-10/2009-10-06-article-cicovaki.php

An important take on the integral ‘transdisciplinary’ method which is crucial to the full understanding of P2P phenomena.

Essay: Transdisciplinarity As An Interactive Method: A Critical Reflection On The Three Pillars Of Transdisciplinarity. Predrag Cicovacki. Integral Leadership Review. Volume IX, No. 5 – October 2009

Julie Cohen, on copyright law and sharing

“Copyright, Commodification and Culture: Locating the Public Domain,”

URL = http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=663652

Comment by David Bollier of the On The Commons weblog: “Georgetown law professor Julie E. Cohen has a path-breaking law review article on copyright law’s failure to recognize the “centrality of borrowing, collaboration and environment to creative practice of all sorts.” Cohen’s paper, “Copyright, Commodification and Culture: Locating the Public Domain,” calls for “a sociology of creative practice” and analyzes why the “public domain,” as traditionally understood in the law, fails to recognize the actual dynamics of creativity.

Cohen writes: “Although economic modeling can contribute to the understanding of markets for creative goods,…. by itself it cannot provide adequate theoretical foundation for understanding the dynamics that drive the development of artistic culture, and therefore it cannot provide adequate theoretical foundations for copyright policy….Creativity and creative practice are social phenomena that are both broader than and antecedent to the institutions with which both economics and more broadly political economy are concerned…. If copyright law is to recognize a right of creative access to the cultural landscape, it is precisely this right that must be limited, yet that is precisely what copyright law increasingly refuses to do. Instead, conventional wisdom holds that any curtailment of derivative rights would reduce “incentives” to invest in works of mass culture.”

“Attention to the social parameters of creative practice suggests that the common in culture is not a separate place, but a distributed property of social space. The legally constituted common should both mirror and express this disaggregation. The paper offers a different organizing metaphor for the relationship between the public and the proprietary that matches the theory and practice of creativity more accurately: The common in culture is the cultural landscape within which creative practice takes place.” (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=663652)

More articles by Julie Cohen at http://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/jec/publications.html

Mark Cooper on a Policy for Collaborative Production

The Political Economy of Collaborative Production in the Digital Information Age Journal on Law and High Technology (2006)

URL = http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/system/files/From+Wifi+to+Wikis+and+Open+Source.pdf

What kind of information infrastructures do we need for more widespread collaborative production to occur, and how do we achieve such policies? This essay has also remarkable good explanations of the various types of property and goods that we are dealing with.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa on the Commons of Land and Food

Mariarosa Dalla Costa has written 3 interrelated essays on Land as Commons and Food as Common and Community:

Reruralizing the World. PDF, on land as commons
Mariarosa Dalla Costa: Two Baskets for Change. PDF: 8 policy measures
Mariarosa Dalla Costa: Food as Common and Community. PDF: on food as common and how it is related to five other commons.

Massimo De Angelis on The Production of the Commons and the Explosion of the Middle Class.

Very important essay outlining a political strategy of Commoning, and how to deal with Middle Class subjectivity.

URL = http://www.taller-commons.com/downloads/angelis.pdf

Massimo De Angelis on a political strategy to unite commons and political/social movements

Massimo de Angelis, Crises, Movements and Commons. Borderlands e-journal, VOLUME 11 NUMBER 2, 2012.

URL = http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol11no2_2012/deangelis_crises.pdf

“Commons movements’ first goal is addressing directly different needs of reproduction by mobilising the natural and creative resources at their disposal. On the other hand, movements of protest mobilise these resources to put forward claims to the state so as to prevent the cut in these resources or their extension. For this reason, it is possible to find ideological and class divisions between commons movements and protest movements, which provide a fertile ground for capital to use these divisions and further its livelihood and ecological, crisis-ridden agenda. It is therefore becoming a vital necessity to develop paradigmatic horizons that favour an epistemic decoupling from capital, and a sense of how it is possible to link the formation of resilient alternatives that address the problems of ecology and livelihood posed by these crises, while at the same time building social movements that favour these alternatives and open more spaces for their development.”

Paul de Armond, on netwar in political protest

Netwar in the Emerald City, at http://nwcitizen.com/publicgood/reports/wto/

Legendary account of the new swarming tactics employed by the alterglobalist protesters in the Seattle anti-WTO protests.

Erik Douglas, on peer governance and democracy

Erik Douglas. Peer to Peer and the Four Pillars of Democracy

Examines the inter-relationship between peer governance and representative democracy.

Stephen Downes on Free Learning and P2P epistemology

Introduction to Connective Knowledge, by Stephen Dowes

URL = http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=33034

This is a marvellous non-technical introduction to participative epistemology. It ends with a critique of the naturalistic conceptions of the Power Law, which states that networks inevitably become unequal, counterposing Knowing Networks as a counter-example.

“First, diversity. Did the process involve the widest possible spectrum of points of view? Did people who interpret the matter one way, and from one set of background assumptions, interact with with people who approach the matter from a different perspective?

Second, and related, autonomy. Were the individual knowers contributing to the interaction of their own accord, according to their own knowledge, values and decisions, or were they acting at the behest of some external agency seeking to magnify a certain point of view through quantity rather than reason and reflection?

Third, interactivity. Is the knowledge being producted the product of an interaction between the members, or is it a (mere) aggregation of the members’ perspectives? A different type of knowledge is produced one way as opposed to the other. Just as the human mind does not determine what is seen in front of it by merely counting pixels, nor either does a process intended to create public knowledge.

Fourth, and again related, openness. Is there a mechanism that allows a given perspective to be entered into the system, to be heard and interacted with by others?”

Free Learning. Essays on Open Educational Resources and Copyright. Stephen Downes.

URL = http://www.downes.ca/files/FreeLearning.pdf

Collection of materials on the p2p values embedded in open education. Also contains important republished mini-essays such as: Copyright, Ethics and Theft‎

Nick Dyer-Witheford on the Circulation of the Common

URL = http://www.geocities.com/immateriallabour/withefordpaper2006.html

” Marx deemed the cellular form of capitalism to be the commodity, a good produced for exchange between private owners. His model of the circulation of capital traced the metamorphosis of the commodity into money, which commands the acquisition of further resources to be transformed into more commodities. The theorists of autonomist Marxism demonstrated how this circulation of capital is also a circulation of struggles, meeting resistances at every point. But although this concept proved important for understanding the multiplicity of contemporary anti-capital, it says very little about the kind of society towards which these struggles move, a point on which the autonomist tradition has mainly been mute. Today, new theorizations about multitude and biopolitics should to reconsider this silence. I suggest that the cellular form of communism is the common, a good produced to be shared in association. The circuit of the common traces how shared resources generate forms of social cooperation—associations– that coordinate the conversion of further resources into expanded commons. On the basis of the circuit of capital, Marx identified different kinds of capital—mercantile, industrial and financial—unfolding at different historical moments yet together contributing to an overall societal subsumption. By analogy, we should recognise differing moments in the circulation of the common. These include terrestrial commons (the customary sharing of natural resources in traditional societies); planner commons (for example, command socialism and the liberal democratic welfare state); and networked commons, (the free associations open source software, peer-to-peer networks, grid computing and the numerous other socializations of technoscience). Capital today operates as a systemic unity of mercantile, industrial and financial moments, but the commanding point in its contemporary, neoliberal, phase is financial capital. A twenty-first century communism can, again by analogy, be envisioned as a complex unity of terrestrial, state and networked commons, but the strategic and enabling point in this ensemble is the networked commons. These must however, also be seen in their dependency on, and even potential contradiction, with the other commons sectors. The concept of a complex, composite communism based on the circulation between multiple but commons forms is opens possibilities for new combinations of convivial custom, planetary planning and autonomous association. What follows expand on these cryptic observations.” (http://www.geocities.com/immateriallabour/withefordpaper2006.html)

Jo Freeman, on the dark side of Peer Governance

URL = http://www.spunk.org/texts/consensu/sp000760.txt

The alterglobalisation’s mode of functioning took a large part of its inspiration from the experience of feminist and civic action groups of the sixties and seventies. What they discovered was that structureless anti-authoritarian modes actually lead to hidden power distributions, so that it is important to have open and transparent procedures that can insure a flexible and wide distribution of power. The following comes from a seminal essay on the subject:

Source: ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’, by Jo Freeman, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, 1970

“Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a ‘structureless’ group. Any group of people of whatever nature coming together for any length of time, for any purpose, will inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible, it may vary over time, it may evenly or unevenly distribute tasks, power and resources over the members of the group. But it will be formed regardless of the abilities, personalities and intentions of the people involved. The very fact that we are individuals with different talents, predispositions and backgrounds makes this inevitable. Only if we refused to relate or interact on any basis whatsoever could we approximate ‘structurelessness’ and that is not the nature of a human group.”

When these principles are applied, they ensure that whatever structures are developed by different movement groups will be controlled by and be responsible to the group. The group of people in positions of authority will be diffuse, flexible, open and temporary. They will not be in such an easy position to institutionalize their power because ultimate decisions will be made by the group at large. The group will have the power to determine who shall exercise authority within it.” (http://www.spunk.org/texts/consensu/sp000760.txt )

Brett Frischmann, an economic theory for the Commons

Brett Frischmann, a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law has published an essay, “An Economic Theory of Infrastructure and Commons Management, (89 Minnesota Law Review 4, April 2005). “a rigorous, clear-headed explanation of the economic and social benefits of commons-based infrastructures:

“The basic problem with relying on markets to allocate access to common assets, Frischmann explains, is that the market mechanism exhibits a bias for outputs that generate observable and appropriable returns at the expense of outputs that generate positive externalities [public benefits that cannot be captured by market players]. This is not surprising because the whole point of relying on property rights and the market is to enable private appropriation and discourage externalities. The problem with relying on the market is that potential positive externalities may remain unrealized if they cannot be easily valued and appropriated by those that produce them, even though society as a whole may be better off if those potential externalities were actually produced. “Positive externalities” are precisely those “goods” that benefit all of us, as commoners – clean air, access to information, an open Internet, functioning ecosystems. Yet neoclassical economics and the laws based on it generally discount or ignore these types of value; they assume that monetized forms of individual property are the only important types of value worth maximizing. By looking at “infrastructure” through the lens of the commons, however, we can begin to appreciate the positive, non-market externalities that a resource actually generates – and begin to design public policies to protect these benefits on their own merits.” (Commentary from On the Commons blog, at http://onthecommons.org/node/613; original essay by Frischmann at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=704463; a bio on the author at http://www.luc.edu/law/faculty/frischmann.shtml)

Richard Heinberg on The Decentralized Provisioning of the Basic Necessities as the Fight of the Century

Introduces four scenarios for the future decades in which p2p infrastructures will be deployed. A must read strategic essay.

Full original at http://www.postcarbon.org/article/714558-the-fight-of-the-century

“The decentralized provision of basic necessities is not likely to flow from a utopian vision of a perfect or even improved society (as have some social movements of the past). It will emerge instead from iterative human responses to a daunting and worsening set of environmental and economic problems, and it will in many instances be impeded and opposed by politicians, bankers, and industrialists. It is this contest between traditional power elites on one hand, and growing masses of disenfranchised poor and formerly middle-class people attempting to provide the necessities of life for themselves in the context of a shrinking economy, that is shaping up to be the fight of the century.”

John Heron on the relational ground of human consciousness: Notes on Spiritual Leadership and Relational Spirituality

John Heron:

“I prefer to think of the spiritual development of human culture as rooted in degrees of relational, moral insight and not in an evolutionary logic. Evolution as a concept seems best left to natural processes. Otherwise intellectual bids to know what evolution is up to　and what is coming next culturally,　rapidly convert into hegemonic arrogance and attempts at social and intellectual control. The developing of the human spirit in cultural forms is a different category and is very close in my view to the way in which our realization of an extended doctrine of rights, in theory and practice, unfolds.
There seem to be　at least four degrees of such unfolding:

1. Autocratic cultures which define rights in a limited and oppressive way and there are no rights of political participation.

2. Narrow democratic cultures which practise political participation through representation, but have no or very limited participation of people in decision-making in all other realms, such as research, religion, education, industry, etc.

3. Wider democratic cultures which practice both political participation and varying degree of wider kinds of participation.

4. Commons peer-to-peer cultures in a libertarian and abundance-oriented global network with equipotential rights of participation in decision-making of everyone in every　field of　 human endeavour, in relation to nature, culture, the subtle and the spiritual.
These four degrees could be stated in terms of the relations between hierarchy, co-operation and autonomy (deciding for others, deciding with others, deciding by oneself).

1.Hierarchy defines, controls and constrains co-operation and autonomy.

2. Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere only.

3. Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere and in varying degrees in other spheres.

4. The sole role of hierarchy is　in its spontaneous emergence in (a)　the initiation , and (b) the continuous flowering, of autonomy-in-co-operation, of spirit-in-manifestation, in all spheres of human endeavour.”

Yasuhiko Genku Kimura: Creating a ommicentric Ideosphere

Kosmic Alignment. A Principle of Global Unity. By Yasuhiko Genku Kimura. Reprinted with permission from Kosmos Journal, Spring/Summer 2005, www.kosmosjournal.org.

URL = http://www.via-visioninaction.org/via-li/articles/Kosmic_Alignment.pdf

“We human beings are at our best not when we are engaged in abstract solitary reflection or on our individual transformation for its own sake but when we are engaged together in the act of transforming the world. The act of idea-generation through authentic thinking and the sustained engagement in the conversation of humankind, if conducted in the context of pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness, will lead to powerful moral action that will engender a New World. To engage in such moral action and to become a co-creator of a New World is to become a world-weaver in the act of weaving the world and a history-maker in the act of making history.”

Magnus Marsdal on Socialist Individualism

Socialist Individualism. Essay by Magnus Marsdal.

URL = http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/marxind2.html

“socialism is defined as the democratic management of society’s vital resources (“the economy‿). Under Stalinism, undeniably the economy was subject to explicitly political governance, but no-one would ever label that political economy “democratic‿. It belongs at the far end of our axis, with meagre individual liberties. Now, notice how the nearest challenger of the Evil Empire in this respect is unrestrained capitalism! Market liberalism weakens the position of the working individual on the labour market as far as it can, and does pretty much the same with the political bodies of democracy. Under the welfare state there are substantial “socialist inroads‿ in the capitalist system. This partial protection from “the tyranny of the rich‿ strengthens the position of the individual.

When the historical advancement of democracy is seen like this, the current position of “the new movements‿—arguing that “another world is possible‿ and at the same time fiercely defending the existing welfare state arrangements—becomes less paradoxical. Neoliberalism is perceived as reactionary. The foes of the welfare state are truly “winding the clock backwards‿. Therefore we fight to defend what already exists. But there is something to fight for beyond the instable truce of the so-called mixed economy of Keynesian times. Therefore, we also fight for what does not yet exist.”

Ugo Mattei

An absolutely crucial text by Ugo Mattei on how the Western legal tradition needs to be fundamentally overturned in order for the common and the commons to emerge as core principle of a new legal-institutional system:

The State, the Market, and some Preliminary Question about the Commons. Ugo Mattei.

URL = http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1040&context=ugo_mattei

Eben Moglen on Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture

The DotCommunist Manifesto

URL = http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/10/dot_communist.php

Classic statement for the freeing of copyright.
Introductory paragraph: “A specter is haunting multinational capitalism — the specter of free information. All the powers of “globalism” have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcize this specter: Microsoft and Disney, the World Trade Organization, the United States Congress and the European Commission. Where are the advocates of freedom in the new digital society who have not been decried as pirates, anarchists, communists? Have we not seen that many of those hurling the epithets were merely thieves in power, whose talk of “intellectual property” was nothing more than an attempt to retain unjustifiable privileges in a society irrevocably changing? But it is acknowledged by all the Powers of Globalism that the movement for freedom is itself a Power, and it is high time that we should publish our views in the face of the whole world, to meet this nursery tale of the Specter of Free Information with a Manifesto of our own.”
Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture

URL = http://old.law.columbia.edu/publications/maine-speech.html

What free software means for society and culture. A must-read.

Cosma Orsi on The Political Economy of Solidarity

URL = http://www.ruc.dk/upload/application/pdf/f51d6748/Research%20report%205_2005%20Cosma%20Orsi.pdf

The essay is a critique of what the author calls the Political Economy of Freedom, which is at the basis of our current system. This conception considers, erroneously of course, that humans are atomized individuals, solely in the game for their utilitarian benefit, making choices as if they were not a part of various concrete communities and societies. The dominant market form, based on impersonal relations, is based on a implicit contract of reciprocal indifference.

Hence what we need, if we want to develop more humane economies and societies, which do not futher disintegrate our natural habitat and human civilization, is a recognition of our connectedness. This will lead to a Political Economy of Solidarity, based on a implicit Contract of Reciprocal Solidarity, and to a conception of society which does not only recognized the separate individual with his negative rights not be interfered with, but also take into account the social right for the Common Good. The essay then investigates the results of such a new view.

For those who want to know even more, they can order the fascinating book, which I’m currently reading:

ORSI, Cosma (2006), The Value of Reciprocity. Arguing for a Plural Political Economy, Roskilde (DK): Federico Caffè Centre Publisher & University of Roskilde.

The author can be reached at cosma at ruc.dk

Bruno Perens on The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source

Key essay to understand how open source is embedded in the market, by one of the free software founding fathers.

URL = http://perens.com/Articles/Economic.html

“Open Source can be explained entirely within the context of conventional open-market economics. Indeed, it turns out that it has much stronger ties to the phenomenon of capitalism than you may have appreciated.”

James Quilligan on a framework for Global Commons-based Governance

Essay: People Sharing Resources. Toward a New Multilateralism of the Global Commons. James Bernard Quilligan. Published in Kosmos Journal, Fall | Winter 2009

URL = http://www.kosmosjournal.org/kjo2/bm~doc/people-sharing-resources.pdf

The author outlines the key concepts for establishing a Global Common Wealth:

Establishing Global Common Goods and a Commons Reserve Currency
The Co-Governance and Co-Production of the Commons through Commons Trusts on the basis of Social Charters

Alan Rayner: Attuning to Natural Energy Flows vs. Abstract Economic Rationality

We need to overturn our fundamental relationship to the natural world:

Essay: Inclusionality and sustainability – attuning with the currency of natural energy flow and how this contrasts with abstract economic rationality. By Alan D.M. Rayner

Paper available via the author at a.d.m.rayner@bath.ac.uk

Dirk Riehle on the Economics of Open Source Software

Dirk Riehle. “The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software: Stakeholder Perspectives.” IEEE Computer, vol. 40, no. 4 (April 2007). Page 25-32.

Original at http://www.riehle.org/computer-science/research/2007/computer-2007-article.html

This essay explains why open source software is a competitive choice for business stakeholders, and which parties it benefits in particular. It’s an excellent introduction to the economic part of the equation, explaining why it is becoming such an important model.

David Ronfeldt on the Evolution of Governance

Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks.. Text by David Ronfeldt.

Original at http://www.rand.org/publications/P/P7967/P7967.pdf

Excerpts at http://www.p2pfoundation.net/David_Ronfeldt_on_the_Evolution_of_Governance

“Power and influence appear to be migrating to actors who are skilled at developing multiorganizational networks, and at operating in environments where networks are an appropriate, spreading form of organization. In many realms of society, they are gaining strength relative to other, especially hierarchical forms. Indeed, another key proposition about the information revolution is that it erodes and makes life difficult for traditional hierarchies.

This trend ”the rise of network forms of organization” is so strong that, projected into the future, it augurs major transformations in how societies are organized.

What forms account for the organization of societies? How have people organized their societies across the ages?

The answer may be reduced to four basic forms of organization:

1. the kinship-based tribe, as denoted by the structure of extended families, clans, and other lineage systems.

2. the hierarchical institution, as exemplified by the army, the (Catholic) church, and ultimately the bureaucratic state.

3. competitive-exchange market, as symbolized by merchants and traders responding to forces of supply and demand.

4. and the collaborative network, as found today in the web-like ties among some NGOs devoted to social advocacy.”

Marshall Sahlins on The Original Affluent Society

The Original Affluent Society

URL = http://www.appropriate-economics.org/materials/Sahlins.pdf

Marshall Sahlins, celebrated anthropologist, was one of the first to challenge the industrial-era myth of progress, showing in his essay on The Original Affluent Society, that tribal economies were in fact operating in a context of abundance.

“When Herskovits (13) was writing his Economic Anthropology (1958), it was common anthropological practice to take the Bushmen or the native Australians as “a classic illustration; of a people whose economic resources are of the scantiest”, so precariously situated that “only the most intense application makes survival possible”. Today the “classic” understanding can be fairly reversed- on evidence largely from these two groups. A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society. The most obvious, immediate conclusion is that the people do not work hard. The average length of time per person per day put into the appropriation and preparation of food was four or five hours. Moreover, they do not work continuously. The subsistence quest was highly intermittent. It would stop for the time being when the people had procured enough for the time being. Which left them plenty of time to spare. Clearly in subsistence as in other sectors of production, we have to do with an economy of specific, limited objectives. By hunting and gathering these objectives are apt to be irregularly accomplished, so the work pattern becomes correspondingly erratic.”

Graham Seaman: Can peer production make washing machines?

Original title: The Two Economies Or: Why the washing machine question is the wrong question

URL = http://second.oekonux-conference.org/documentation/texts/Seaman.html

This is an extraordinary presentation examining how free software/peer production can co-exist with the capitalist system and eventually overtake it. It contrasts the co-existence of the two modes today, with the co-existence of the guild system with the early manufacturing undertaken by independent journeymen who could no longer find a place in that old guild system.

Large excerpts at Can peer production make washing machines?

Clay Shirky on the web as evolvable system

In Praise of Evolvable Systems’

One of the best essays explainging why the Web became the next big thing: because, despite its flaws, it was designed as an evolvable thing.

URL = http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html

David Skrbina, the participatory worldview

Participation, Organization, and Mind: Toward a Participatory Worldview.

URL = http://www.bath.ac.uk/carpp/davidskrbina/summarycontents.htm

“As I conceive it, the concept of ‘participation’ is fundamentally a mental phenomenon, and therefore a key aspect of the Participatory Worldview is the idea of ‘participatory mind’. In the Mechanistic Worldview mind is a mysterious entity, attributed only to humans and perhaps higher mammals. In the Participatory Worldview mind is a naturalistic, holistic, and universal phenomenon. Human mind is then seen as a particular manifestation of this universal nature. Philosophical systems in which mind is present in all things are considered versions of panpsychism, and hence I argue for a system that I call ‘participatory panpsychism’. My particular articulation of participatory panpsychism is based on ideas from chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics, and is called ‘hylonoism’. In support of my theory I draw from an extensive historical analysis, both philosophical and scientific. I explore the notion of participation in its historical context, from its beginnings in Platonic philosophy through modern-day usages. I also show that panpsychism has deep intellectual roots, and I demonstrate that many notable philosophers and scientists either endorsed or were sympathetic to it. Significantly, these panpsychist views often coexist and correspond quite closely to various aspects of participatory philosophy. Human society is viewed as an important instance of a dynamic physical system exhibiting properties of mind. These properties, based on the idea of participatory exchange of matter and energy, are argued to be universal properties of physical systems. They provide an articulation of the universal presence of participatory mind. Therefore I conclude that participation is the central ontological fact, and may be seen as the core of a new conception of nature and reality.” (http://www.bath.ac.uk/carpp/davidskrbina/summarycontents.htm)

Thesis Title: Participation, Organization, and Mind: Toward a Participatory Worldview.

Book: David Skrbina. Panpsychism in the West. MIT Press, 2005
David Skrbina is a student and continuator of Henryk Skolimowsky’s work on the Participatory Mind

“The astrophysicist John Archibald Wheeler may have been the first to announce, in an articulate way (in the early 1970s), the idea of the Participatory Universe. He wrote, “The universe does not exist ‘out there’ independent of us. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening. We are participators. In some strange sense this is a Participatory Universe.”

In the early 1980s, drawing from the insights of Wheeler, on the one hand (“In some strange sense this is a participatory universe”), and building on the insights of Teilhard de Chardin (“We are evolution conscious of itself”), I have developed the theory of the Participatory Mind. This theory, on the one hand, attempts to vindicate the claims of the New Physics about the participatory nature of the universe; and, on the other hand, attempts to fill the missing dimension in Teilhard’s opus — which wonderfully describes the unfoldment of evolution but misses the role of the mind in the whole process. Consciousness is one of the key terms in Teilhard’s story. But strangely, it is consciousness as if there were no minds. The theory of the Participatory mind provides an epistemological foundation to Teilhard’s cosmology. The participatory theory of mind maintains that our world is the creation of our mind. But not in a solipsistic manner a la Berkeley (esse-percipi), but in a participatory manner: we have become aware that we can elicit from reality only that much as our mind is capable of conceiving. This is precisely the sense in which we say that we dwell in a participatory universe. We elicit what is potentially ‘out there’ in continuous acts of participation. Participation is of the essence not only in our cognitive acts but also in our social activities and political endeavors. Tell me what you participate in and I will tell you who you are; and what the meaning of your life is. We become that in which we participate. As we participate so we become. If we participate all the time in trivial matters, we become trivial persons.” (http://epc.eco-tea.com/articles/cosmocracy.html)

Bruno Theret, on the tradition of ‘civil socialism’

The peer to peer movement differs from the traditional socialist movement in that it does not rely on the state, but on autonomous developments within civil society. Such a movement was prefigured by what Bruno Theret calls the tradition of civil socialism. Very interesting French-language essay.

The essay by Bruno Theret is at http://fr.pekea-fr.org/?p=11&c=2-3-Theret.html

Theret also refers to three historical traditions necessary to develop these ideas further: 1) the pre-marxist socialism of Pierre Leroux, very strong in the revolutions of 1848; 2) the federal or guild socialism of Karl Polanly, author of the landmark book The Great Transformation; 3) the contemporary neo-communautarian theory of Michael Walzer.

Evan Thompson, on the enactive theory of consciousness

Title: Human Consciousness: from intersubjectivity to interbeing

URL = http://www.philosophy.ucf.edu/pcsfetz1.html

Evan Thompson contrasts three approaches to human consciousness. He finds that both the cognitivist and the connectionist approaches rely on a undue separation between a reprentational mind and the world it represents. The enactive approach, pioneered by Varela and others, on the other hand, is based on a structural coupling of the brain, the body, and its environment.

“Human consciousness is not located in the head, but is immanent in the living body and the interpersonal social world. One’s consciousness of oneself as an embodied individual embedded in the world emerges through empathic cognition of others. Consciousness is not some peculiar qualitative aspect of private mental states, nor a property of the brain inside the skull; it is a relational mode of being of the whole person embedded in the natural environment and the human social world.”

More by Evan Thompson at http://individual.utoronto.ca/evant/

Jeff Vail, The Problem of Growth: Hierarchy vs. the Rhizome

Five-part essay by Jeff Vail, who also wrote the Theory of Power:

Jeff Vail:

“”The Problem of Growth” addresses what I see as the critical problem facing humanity: the structure of our civilization, its inherent need to grow (and therefore its unsustainability), and how we can fix the problem realistically. My proposed solution is, by definition, quite radical, because it rejects the prevalent problem-solving mechanism of modern technology: that we can use technology to continually mitigate the symptoms, rather than take the difficult (but, as I will argue, necessary) step of actually identifying and addressing the underlying problem.”

Access via http://www.jeffvail.net/2007/02/problem-of-growth.html

Kazys Varnelis on how network culture differs from postmodernism

In “The Meaning of Network Culture”, the author offers a cogent analysis of network culture compared to the earlier digital culture associated with postmodernism. He covers issues such as the evolution of the subject and discusses how networked publics affect democracy. I’m adding this as a key essay, as I’ve never seen a clear treatment comparing the emergent p2p culture with postmodernism.

Access via http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-01-14-varnelis-en.html

Roberto Verzola on Undermining vs. Developing Abundance

The above link contains long excerpts of two important texts developing a philosophy, politics and economics related to abundance.

For more context, see http://rverzola.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/classifying-managing-abundance/

1. Verzola, Roberto, Undermining Abundance (Counter-Productive Uses of Technology and Law in Nature, Agriculture and the Information Sector)(July 14, 2008). INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE, Gaelle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski, eds., Zone Books, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1160044
2. Verzola, Roberto, Studying Abundance. Draft at http://rverzola.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/studying-abundance-1.pdf

3. Verzola, Roberto. Essay: 21st-Century Political Economies: Beyond Information Abundance. by Roberto Verzola. International Review of Information Ethics. Issue No. 011, Vol. 11 – October 2009 [1]

Abstract:

“As a result of the relatively low cost of digital reproduction, a global transformation is occurring in the nature of products and processes and in types of goods and services. Arising from information abundance, this global transformation is making the phenomenon of abundance a major field of study, not only for economists but also for other social scientists and physical scientists as well. This essay proposes an economic definition of abundance and a typology of sources of abundance. It argues that real economic abundance can come about only when the demand for a good is finite and the plentiful supply makes the abundant good affordable enough to all members of society. It lists an abundance-nurturing ethic as a major goal of abundance management, and encourages economists to make abundance together with scarcity their conceptual point of departure. Finally it links the phenomenon of abundance to the concept of the commons.”

Raoul Victor, on Free Software, the sharing culture, and Marxism

The Visibility of the Revolutionary Project and New Technologies

URL = http://dorax.club.fr/Visibility.htm

Raoul is the pen name of a French socialist activist. His thesis is that the widespread emergence of sharing practices makes possible a visioning of what a non-capitalist future would look like, something hitherto impossible, and on of the key sources for the failure of radical social change efforts. This is a key text from within the Marxist tradition.
Free Software and Market Relations

URL = http://www.oekonux.org/texts/marketrelations.html

This essay defends the idea that free sofware is a germ of what the future society may look like, and is translated from a debate within a French Marxist group.

Marxism and Free Software, an analysis by Raoul Victor

URL = http://www.oekonux-konferenz.de/dokumentation/texte/Victor.html

The author examines three questions: 1) To which extent is Marxism confirmed by the reality of free-software? 2) To which extent is Marxism questioned by this reality? 3) Which relation between class struggle and free-software?
“Marx did not know computers, nor software. But the reality of the contradictions that gave birth to free-software is a perfect confirmation of his vision of history. But that is not all. Free-software is also an evidence of the Marxist idea that the post-capitalist society can be a worldwide non-merchant society, and not a bureaucratic wage-slave society, for example. Finally, it confirms the Marxist conviction that communist ideas are not the product of some brilliant individual brain but the movement of capitalist society itself. Even if many hackers still think that “Marxism” means a hundred million deaths in the 20th century, they are acting, without knowing it, some of the basic ideas of the true Marxism.

To which extent is Marxism questioned by the reality of free-software? For Marxism there is no possibility of development of a communist economic form within capitalism. The revolutionary class, the working class, is an exploited class, without power on the economy. It cannot have the power to build a new social organization without making first a political revolution, contrary to the past where the revolutionary class, the bourgeoisie, for example, had built its economic power within feudalism, within the old society. Graham Seaman, in a mail in the English list said that this idea “doesn’t seem to be ever explicit in Marx. But it certainly seems to be taken for granted by every communist after Marx”.

Marx wrote about the workers cooperatives, which were an important part of the workers movement in the 19th century. He said that the capitalist-worker relation was to a certain degree eliminated inside the cooperative. But he insisted on the fact that they remained prisoners of the surrounding capitalist world, that the workers were in fact their own collective capitalists and that they would not resist to the development of the trusts and monopolies. Marx never developed a theory about a possible coexistence between capitalism and lasting, stable germs of communism.

In that sense, if we understand free-software as germs of a communist society, it contradicts a specific aspect of Marxism. But many questions remain: 1) Can these germs easily coexist with capitalism? 2) Is a war between the two worlds avoidable? 3) Can these germs develop to the point of supplanting capitalism? 4) Is this possible without a political revolution?”

The Debate in French continues, at http://membres.lycos.fr/resdisint/Arch_capit/020629JCrt.htm ; http://membres.lycos.fr/resdisint/Arch_capit/020608RVrt.htm ; all these discussions take place at http://membres.lycos.fr/resdisint/

43 Essential essays on the commons and Peer 2 Peer theory is a post from: Permanent Culture Now

Conspiracy theories and keeping your eye on the ball

Michael — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 11:27:55 +0000

There is all sorts of stuff floating around the internet that might rightly or wrongly be labelled as Conspiracy theory.

YouTube is brimming with such videos, some are very well made and carrying some semblance of credibility, others are absurdly lacking in anything resembling objectivity and can rightly be labelled as conspiracy. Personally, my opinion on this vast web of information about some of these ideas that may or may not be conspiracy is neutral, I need to see credible evidence instead of vague links before I pass judgement and accept them as believable or rubbish.

One thing is for sure though, we have a very visible problem that is reaping havoc for people and planet, and that is global capitalism, there is no great mystery here, no fantastic stories of shadowy elites and high tech social control methods, its all there in our faces, and particularly since the banking sector took its greed to astonishing levels leaving the world with the credit crunch in 2008, a credit crunch which Bankers and their political leader friends are expecting us to pay for either through drastic cuts to social spending, or their expectation that we will all work ourselves into early graves to pay off their gambling debts.

What I am trying to put forward here is that we need to deal with what we can see, instead of what might be, and global capitalism and its gluttonous use of our scarce resources in the name of so called growth is very real and very dangerous. I believe that we need to keep our eye on the ball so to speak and not end up cutting down alleyways that lead us no-where, if we choose this latter path then we are choosing to ignore that which is making people and planet sick.

Steve

Conspiracy theories and keeping your eye on the ball is a post from: Permanent Culture Now

Requiem for Detroit – A film about what happens when Capitalism leaves the city

Michael — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 11:05:34 +0000

I just watched the Julien Temple documentary ‘Requiem For Detroit’ which showed the damage and destruction of communities, in particular black communities when the Capitalist Motor Industry decides to leave town.

Preview of the film:

BBC Documentary: Requiem For Detroit from Logan Siegel on Vimeo.

What was interesting about this documentary is that it highlighted how the Fordist capitalist model of production impacted on the development of Detroit. With the motorcar industry there also came the rise in the use of the motorcar and the development of the suburban way of life and consumerism. It also showed that today’s Detroit has has the stirrings of what a post capitalist societal model may look like.

The film showed the rise of the fordism and the manufacturing processes that accompanied it and also briefly showed the impact of the 1930′s depression (similar situation to the one we face now) and how it caused social strife, poverty and deprivation culminating in battles between working class people in unions and the Car Industry. It was only the second world war which saved the motor industry as they then began producing vehicles for war. War benefited the capitalist ruling class of the motor industry as it provided a huge demand for resources and products.

The motor industry was also key in the decline of public transport in favour of personal transport, with motorways being built instead of train tracks. This also precipitated the rise of the suburbs that are completely reliant on the car which in turn increases the dependency on the car. This obviously benefits the manufacturers. They also used standardised ways of making cars, but designed the shell to appeal to different social groups, thus creating aspirational consumption. People defined themselves through their cars, having a better car (sic) defined you as a successful person.

This was all showing how capitalist social relations and consumption defined a city. Then came the decline of the motor industry, with the emphasis on big SUV cars the industry was not prepared to deal with the huge increase in oil prices during the 1970s and after. People then wanted smaller less gas consuming cars which were produced outside of Detroit and this impacted hugely on the industry. The city relied on one industry to provide for it and when this industry was no longer able to provide it caused huge problems.

So, Detroit is now currently a city in capitalist decline, its tax base is now eroded and it is unable to provide social services to its population resulting in huge consequences, as Julien Temple states in a guardian interview.

“One in five houses now stand empty. Property prices have fallen 80% or more in Detroit over the last three years. A three-bedroom house on Albany Street is still on the market for $1. Unemployment has reached 30%; 33.8% of Detroit’s population and 48.5% of its children live below the poverty line. Forty-seven per cent of adults in Detroit are functionally illiterate; 29 Detroit schools closed in 2009 alone.”

But it appears that the community is beginning to organise itself to meet its needs through community gardening through the Detroit Urban Agricultural Network which has been setup to provide people with spaces to grow their own food. This is essential as most supermarkets have left the area, again another sign of capitalism retreating as the potential for profit decreases.

The reason Detroit is interesting as a case study and I hasten to add I am definitely no expert on the place, is that it shows how a place can be impacted upon by modes of production. The Fordist mode of production built the city on the back of the motor industry and then with the decline of the this industry the area suffered massively. This highlights how a city based on one capitalist industry driven by economics and growth can often be short sighted. Detroit as a capitalist city has not been particularly resilient to the economic forces that once benefitted it. This has devastated the communities of Detroit as they developed to serve this industry, particularly large swathes of black communities who came in from the south to work for the motor industry.

The Irony is that it was the people of Detroit who built up the motor industry and made these businesses their profits through production and consumption of their goods as they also bought many of the products themselves during the consumer boom of the 1950′s onwards. Yet that wealth has long left the city to go to shareholders and chief executives. This is what happens when you base a city around one industry, but also around an industry with the profit motive as its driving force, rather than having a system of economics where the person/community is at the centre.

Is this what the future holds for a lot of us, in the UK our reliance has been on the financial industry to provide income and this is now in decline and combined with the credit crunch puts us in a very precarious position. What do people think?

More Information:

Detroit Wikipedia
Interesting Guardian Article challenging requiem for detroit
Interview with Julien Temple about the film
Analysis of Thomas J. Sugrue’s “The Origins of The Urban Crisis” another view of Detroit history

Requiem for Detroit – A film about what happens when Capitalism leaves the city is a post from: Permanent Culture Now

Scientific evidence states happiness is linked to being kind and cooperative

Michael — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 12:27:06 +0000

This article is reprinted from Yes Magazine, the reason we like this article and wanted to share it with is that it shows how humans are actually happier when cooperating and being kind to each other.

Jeremy Adam Smith is editor of Greater Good, where this article originally appeared.

The science we cover here on Greater Good—aka, “the science of a meaningful life”—has exploded over the past 10 years, with many more studies published each year on gratitude, mindfulness, and our other core themes than we saw a decade ago.

2012 was no exception. In fact, in the year just past, new findings added nuance, depth, and even some caveats to our understanding of the science of a meaningful life. Here are 10 of the scientific insights that made the biggest impression on us in 2012—the findings most likely to resonate in scientific journals and the public consciousness in the years to come, listed in roughly the order in which they were published.

1. There’s a personal cost to callousness.

After people were instructed to restrain feelings of compassion in the face of heart-wrenching images, those people later reported feeling less committed to moral principles.

In March, researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, published a study in Psychological Science that should make anyone think twice before ignoring a homeless person or declining an aphigh peal from a charity.

Daryl Cameron and Keith Payne found that after people were instructed to restrain feelings of compassion in the face of heart-wrenching images, those people later reported feeling less committed to moral principles. It was as if, by regulating compassion, the study participants sensed an inner conflict between valuing morality and living by their moral rules; to resolve that conflict, they seemed to tell themselves that those moral principles must not have been so important. Making that choice, argue Cameron and Payne, may encourage immoral behavior and even undermine our moral identity, inducing personal distress.

“Regulating compassion is often seen as motivated by self-interest, as when people keep money for themselves rather than donate it,” write the researchers. “Yet our research suggests that regulating compassion might actually work against self-interest by forcing trade-offs within the individual’s moral self-concept.”

2. High status brings low ethics.

They may have more money, but it seems that the upper class are poorer in morality. In a series of seven studies, published in March in PNAS, researchers found that upper-class people are more likely than the lower class to break all kinds of rules—to cut off cars and pedestrians while driving, to help themselves to candy they know is meant for children, to report an impossible score in a game of chance to win cash they don’t rightfully deserve.

This line of research suggests not that the rich are inherently more unethical but that experiencing high status makes people more focused on themselves and feel less connected to others.

While the results surprised some, they didn’t come out of nowhere: They were the latest, if perhaps the most damning, in a series of studies in which researchers, including Greater Good Science Center Faculty Director Dacher Keltner, have looked at the effects of status on morality and kind, helpful (or “pro-social”) behavior.

Previously, as we’ve reported, they’ve found that upper-class people are less generous, less compassionate, and less empathic. (Many of these findings were summarized in a Greater Good article by Editor-in-Chief Jason Marsh, “Why Inequality is Bad for the One Percent,” published in September.) Considered together, this line of research suggests not that the rich are inherently more unethical but that experiencing high status makes people more focused on themselves and feel less connected to others—an important lesson in this age of growing inequality.

“The rich aren’t bad people, they just live in insular worlds,” study co-author Paul Piff told Greater Good earlier this year. “But if you’re able to reduce the extremes that exist between the haves and the have-nots, you’re going to go a long way toward closing the compassion and empathy gap.”

3. Happiness is about respect, not riches.

And there was other discouraging news for the wealthy this year. Research has long suggested that money doesn’t buy happiness; a study published in Psychological Science in July confirms that finding and goes a step further, changing the stakes of what we think of as high status: It turns out that if we’re looking to money, we’re looking in the wrong place.

Those who felt accepted, liked, included, and welcomed in their local hierarchy were happier than those who were simply wealthier.

Instead, the study found that happiness is more strongly associated with the level of respect and admiration we receive from peers. The study’s researchers, led by UC Berkeley’s Cameron Anderson (and again including Keltner), refer to this level of respect and admiration as our “sociometric status,” as opposed to socioeconomic status.

In one experiment, college students high in sociometric status in their group—their sorority, for example, or their ROTC group—were happier than their peers, whereas socioeconomic status didn’t predict happiness. Similarly, a broader, nationwide survey, which boasted people from a variety of backgrounds, income, and education levels, found that those who felt accepted, liked, included, and welcomed in their local hierarchy were happier than those who were simply wealthier.

“You don’t have to be rich to be happy,” Anderson told Greater Good, “but instead be a valuable contributing member to your groups.”

4. Kindness is its own reward—even to toddlers.

Several studies over the past six years have found that kids as young as 18 months old will spontaneously help people in need. But do they do so just to please adults? Apparently not: In July, researchers published evidence that their kindness is motivated by deep, perhaps innate, feelings of compassion for others.

Children just shy of their second birthday appeared happier when they gave away a treat than when they received a treat.

The researchers found that toddlers’ pupil sizes increased—a sign of concern—when they saw someone in need of help; their pupil size decreased when that person received helped. The kids’ pupils got smaller when they were the ones who helped—but also when they watched someone else help. These results, published in Psychological Science, suggest that toddlers’ kindness springs from genuine feelings of concern, not simply a concern for their own reputation.

This argument gains support from a study published around the same time in PLOS ONE. In that study, children just shy of their second birthday appeared happier when they gave away a treat than when they received a treat. What’s more, they seemed even happier when they gave away one of their own treats than when they were allowed to give away a treat that didn’t belong to them. In other words, performing truly altruistic acts—acts that involve some kind of personal sacrifice—made the kids happier than helping others at no cost to themselves.

“While other studies have suggested adults are happier giving to others than to themselves and that kids are motivated to help others spontaneously,” Delia Fuhrmann, a Greater Good research assistant, wrote in August, “this is the first study to suggest that altruism is intrinsically rewarding even to very young kids, and that it makes them happier to give than to receive.”

When a behavior is intrinsically rewarding like this, especially at the earliest stages of life, it suggests to scientists that it has deep evolutionary roots. Watch the video below to see one toddler going through the experiment.

5. We can train ourselves to be more compassionate.

For decades, psychology was preoccupied with alleviating negative emotional states like depression, chronic anger, or anxiety. More recently, we’ve come to understand that we can also “treat” people to cultivate positive emotions and behaviors, and that traits like empathy and happiness are skills we can consciously develop over time.

But what about compassion? This has been less investigated, which is why a study published in the July issue of the Journal of Happiness Studies stands to be so influential.

Stanford researcher Hooria Jazaieri and colleagues (including GGSC Science Director Emiliana Simon-Thomas) randomly assigned 100 adults to a nine-week compassion cultivation training program or to a waitlist control condition. Before and after taking the compassion course, participants completed surveys that “measured compassion for others, receiving compassion from others, and self-compassion.”

The results have important implications: Across all three domains, participants showed big increases in compassion. More research needs to be done, but this paper clearly suggests that we can train people—in schools, workplaces, churches, and elsewhere—to ease suffering in themselves and other people.

6. Gratitude sustains relationships through tough times.

Feeling appreciated by our partner gives us a sense of security that allows us to focus on what we appreciate about him or her.

Several studies have shown that feeling grateful for one’s romantic partner can improve one’s relationship. But this year, new research by Amie Gordon built on that research significantly, factoring in another critical dimension: the extent to which people feel appreciated by their partner.

Synthesizing the science of successful relationships with recent research on gratitude, Gordon and her colleagues developed a new model of what it takes to sustain a good relationship. They found that feeling appreciated by our partner gives us a sense of security that allows us to focus on what we appreciate about him or her—which, in turn, make us more responsive to his or her needs and more committed to the relationship in general … which then makes our partner feel more appreciated as well.

So when we hit a rocky patch, this research suggests, it’s the upward spiral of gratitude that encourages us to risk vulnerability, tune in to our partner’s needs, and resolve the conflict, rather than turning away from him or her. “Feeling appreciated helps people with relationship maintenance by giving them the security they need to recognize they have a valuable relationship worth maintaining,” write Gordon and her co-authors in their study, published in August in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “Cultivating appreciation may be just what we need to hold onto healthy, happy relationships that thrive.”

7. Humans are quicker to cooperate than compete.

In a September paper published in Nature, a group of Harvard researchers took on an age-old question: Are humans instinctively selfish or cooperative?

To get at an answer, they had more than 1,000 people play a game that required them to decide how much money to contribute to a common pool. In a blow to conventional wisdom, the researchers found that people who made their decision quickly—in less than 10 seconds—gave roughly 15 percent more to the pool than people who deliberated for more time. In a second study, the researchers instructed some people to make their decision in less than 10 seconds and other people to think for longer than that; again, they found that quick decisions led to more generosity while deliberating bred selfishness.

“These studies provide strong evidence that people, on average, have an initial impulse to behave cooperatively—and with continued reasoning, become more likely to behave selfishly,” writes GGSC Science Director Emiliana Simon-Thomas. “The authors caution that their data do not prove that cooperation is more innate than selfishness at a genetic level—but they point out that life experience suggests that, in most cases, cooperation is advantageous, so that’s generally not a bad place to start by default.”

8. There’s a dark side to pursuing happiness.

As we often report here on Greater Good, happy people have it better: They’ve got more friends, they’re more successful, and they live longer and healthier lives. But in May, Yale psychologist June Gruber wrote a Greater Good essay outlining “Four Ways Happiness Can Hurt You.” Based on research Gruber and others have conducted over the past few years, she explained how feeling happy can actually make us less creative, less safe, and, in some cases, less able to connect with other people.

Mauss and her colleagues found that inducing people to value happiness increases feelings of loneliness.

Then, in October, some of Gruber’s collaborators published a study deepening the dark side to happiness: It seems that wanting to be happy might make us feel lonely.

Led by UC Berkeley’s Iris Mauss, the study, published in the journal Emotion, found that the more people value happiness, the more likely they are to feel lonely during stressful events. What’s more, Mauss and her colleagues found that inducing people to value happiness increases feelings of loneliness and even causes a hormonal response associated with loneliness—troubling news given how much emphasis our culture places on happiness, particularly through the media.

Why this effect? The researchers argue that, at least in the West, the more people value happiness, the more likely they are to focus on the self—often at the expense of connecting with others, and those social connections are a key to happiness. “Therefore,” they write in their Emotion paper, “it may be that to reap the benefits of happiness people should want it less.”

**9. Parenthood actually does make most—but not all—people happier**.

American parents tend to say that parenthood is stressful and hard on marriages, a feeling seemingly confirmed by many studies. One 2004 paper even found that moms prefer watching TV, shopping, and cooking to parenting their children. These findings led to a spate of media coverage claiming that parenthood will screw up your life.

But most of these studies have had a weakness: They didn’t directly compare the well-being of parents to that of non-parents. Moreover, they were contradicted by many other studies suggesting that men and women can find tremendous meaning and satisfaction in parenthood, even despite high stress levels.

To correct for these weaknesses, psychologist S. Katherine Nelson and colleagues (including GGSC friend Sonja Lyubomirsky) ran three studies. The first used the massive World Values Survey to compare the happiness of parents to non-parents; the second tested moment-to-moment happiness of both parents and non-parents; the third looked specifically at how parents felt about taking care of children, compared to other daily activities.

Taken together, these three studies found that, overall, parents seem to be happier and more satisfied with their lives—and that as a group they derived tremendous meaning and positive feelings from parenting.

However, these findings, published in November by Psychological Science, come with several rather important caveats.

First, parenthood makes men happier than women—quite a bit happier, though mothers still reported less depression and more positive emotion than did child-free women. And contrary to conventional wisdom, single parenthood does not automatically lead to unhappiness. Parents without a partner did tend to be less happy than child-free peers—but they also reported fewer depressive symptoms than non-parents without a partner, largely, it seems, because they derived more meaning from their lives.

10. Kindness makes kids popular.

In some ways, researcher Kristin Layous and her colleagues are like everyone in middle school: They pay attention to the popular kids. But their research stood out this year for how it explored what makes those kids popular in the first place.

The researchers gave more than 400 students one of two simple tasks: Every week for four weeks, they were either to perform three acts of kindness or visit three places. At the end of the four weeks, all the kids in the study, who ranged in age from 9 to 11, reported greater happiness than they had before, and more of their peers said they wanted to spend time with them. But the kind kids saw a much greater spike in their popularity, gaining an average of 1.5 friends—roughly twice as many as their counterparts.

10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy

In other words, the results, published in December by PLOS ONE, offer perhaps the most convincing argument you could make to a tween for why they should share their lunch with someone or give their mom a hug when she’s feeling stressed (two of the kind acts students said they performed): Kids who are kind to others are more well-liked, helping their own popularity even as they help other people.

What’s more, Layous and her colleagues point out that, according to prior research, kids who are well-liked are less likely to bully and more likely to do nice things for others, and classrooms with an even distribution of popularity have higher average mental health. So a lesson for teachers: For a classroom of happy kids, consider adding to your curriculum the purposeful practice of pro-social behavior.

Jeremy Adam Smith is web editor of the Greater Good Science Center where this article originally appeared, and author or coeditor of four books, including The Daddy Shift, Rad Dad, and The Compassionate Instinct. Before joining the GGSC, he was a 2010-11 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. You can follow him on Twitter.

This article shows that happiness is not resultant on material gains or competitiveness, in fact we are much happier when cooperating and being nice to each other. It also shows that having meaningful connections with other humans makes us happy and fulfils our emotional needs in a better way. It also shows that the more people accumulate status and riches the less ethics they have leading to less compassion and empathy. We would argue that all these negative aspects are fuelled by the capitalist economic model that counters our true essence as human beings as it promotes individualism and competition, rather than solidarity and cooperation. Imagine how happy we could be if we lived in a society based around the well being of people and common ownership of resources that we collectively manage together.

Scientific evidence states happiness is linked to being kind and cooperative is a post from: Permanent Culture Now

Neoliberalism: Back to the cave?

Steve — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 15:41:17 +0000

I called this piece ‘Back to the Cave’ because I and no doubt many of you believe in some ways that after thousands of years of human, scientific, and cultural development that we had finally left the caves with our spines upright and the faculty of reason ticking away in our brains. Indeed we have come a long way since we lived in caves and eked out a precarious and dangerous existence in a dog eat dog world, but where money and economics are concerned we have been tricked into buying into the idea of individualism and self, this to me represents a regression of our collective development and is pushing us back towards the caves that we came from in our earlier development.

The solitary individual

Make no mistake all of our science, culture, and everything else we do as human beings on a daily basis has come about because of mutual collective efforts, even ideas that have turned into inventions created by individuals have a history of collective knowledge that have evolved the idea into a workable model that the inventor molds into existence. The solitary individual as I will call him is a product of Neoliberalism and free market capitalism. He believes that the world is full of individuals and that there are no such things as communities and societies, the solitary individual is only out for what he can get in terms of material gain and its associated status. He believes that it is morally OK to live in this way because greed and the self have been promoted through our Political system and its associated media coverage for the last three decades which has made this way of living socially acceptable. Ironically the solitary individual is also a victim; he has been cajoled into his way of thinking and acting so that he will be a good consumer, and if anything goes economically wrong in his life he will blame himself as opposed to the external structural mechanisms of inequality.

The return of community

We presently face a very uncertain future in terms of natural resources, climate change and the inevitable economic collapse of the Fiat Monetary system. In short this is the end of the individualism myth that Neoliberal thinkers have been developing for decades, it is the selfish consumption of the individual that is causing ecological degradation and economic inequality, and it is also the selfishness of individualism that bought about the Global credit crunch in 2009. The protests that have come about as a result of Neoliberal political dominance and their protection of the Banking system that caused the credit crunch has been huge, and interestingly many new alliances have been forged and communities born. In the UK there are anti-cuts groups rubbing shoulders with Unemployed peoples support groups and solidarity federations, in the US the Occupy movement is still gathering momentum and has branched out into other areas of protest such as the Occupy food movement. In Iceland we have seen activists pull together the Icelandic community to get rid of their banker friendly Government and many of the Banks that operated in Iceland, within the ecological movement there is a widespread development of intentional communities that are springing up here there and everywhere because they have realised that communities are people organisms with diverse skills set that are able to support each others mutual well being.

Communities of the Future

In a future world of fewer resources we need communities and collective action more than ever, as groups of individuals we all have different skills to offer to put into the collective pot. The future can only happen if we get together with others and make it happen, there will never again be able live the individual life where we only think about ourselves and out own selfish ends, a world of fewer resources and a dying monetary system demands that we work with each other to create a better world.

Steve

Neoliberalism: Back to the cave? is a post from: Permanent Culture Now

Permaculture & Human Rights

Steve — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 10:07:57 +0000

Here at Permanent Culture Now we are always interested in peoples insights, experiences and ideas as a way of fostering and developing community links through sharing knowledge and skills, this particular contribution was written by our friend Lasse Bresson Krøner.

Human Rights

Human rights as a concept is, in my humble opinion, one of the most beautiful philosophies that ever sprang from the civilized world. However, it would appear that since the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 we have hardly come any closer to a world where all “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” In world where we still slaughter people for profit and gain, where thousands starve to death while others eat themselves to death, a world where money is priority and love is neglected, how could we possibly carry out the altruistic society that we have been seeking for so long?

Only a world where “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” and “act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” can we truly hope to create such a society. This is what permaculture has inspired in me – the hope that human rights could one day prevail. A thought occurred to me slowly but surely as I was finishing my last year of bachelor (BA International Relations & Politics), where I had decided to take a module in Human Rights Theory (funny enough, a subject that is outside of the Government department, and never mentioned much in political theory). It was that the Western initiatives to eradicate poverty and corruption in the so-called ‘third world’ countries were mostly inefficient due to the pervasive greed and corruption within Western politics and economics. I’ve heard many personal accounts of how vast amounts of charity funds land in the hands of private individuals rather than the communities they are meant to reach. It is not a secret either that rape and violence is a continuing problem that the so-called ‘peace-keeping forces’ around the world do little to prevent from their own troops. The entire reason for me studying international politics was so as to pursue a career in diplomacy in the hope of helping restore peace to the world. By the time I graduated I had been entirely disillusioned. Politics and economics are two very dangerous games that are destroying any chance of a future for the human race.

Thus the line of thought occurred to me – instead of attempting to ‘play the game’ and become a politician, thus simply continuing the miseries bestowed upon the world every day, would it not be better to try and become independent from the system? Many people arrive at this point and become activists, like I did too. Having engaged in plenty of activist projects since graduating from university, it has to be my conclusion that such phenomena such the Occupy Movement can only do so much so as to enlighten people. Of course, we still need such movements to make people understand the severity of the problems we face today. However, in the end we still face the problems of a destructive and uncaring system. In that way I am a disillusioned revolutionary as well. So the conclusion was really that to become independent, one needs to become self-sufficient. A friend, who works writing human right reports for the UN, once pointed out that the people of the ‘third world’ countries do not really need anyone to build schools for them or teach them agriculture. They know perfectly well how to manage themselves, and so they did for many eons, before the arrival of the European colonialists. It is only within the context of the present socio-economic situation that these people are destitute and starving.

Permaculture as a solution

The only reason that the ‘third world’ is held in this state of poverty is because of the greedy incentives of the economic systems. The only reason why this model continues today is because people do not believe in or are not aware of any other alternative. But if we were to truly realise that there are plenty of alternatives, which could serve us and mother nature better in every other way, and if we could actualise this, well, then there would be a hope for a brighter future. I see permaculture as a solution, not only to the immediate concerns of the world today such as poverty and hunger, but also a way to recover from the traumas we as a species have bestowed upon ourselves and the planet. To be free and equal also means to share in a collective responsibility, in this spirit of brother and sisterhood. Permaculture requires a collective responsibility because for it to work efficiently it needs people working together as local, autonomous communities. It will not work in any way if people continue to shun themselves into the mainstream lifestyle of the present-day, where a screen becomes the source of all leisure, where we are unaware of the existence of our neighbours, and money underlines all means of love. This is a conclusion reached by many people, almost as a collective awakening. Such movements as Occupy is proof of this. However, we need to step beyond the advocation of rebellion, and now actualize what we know in our hearts to be true.

A grassroots movement

For us to have any working model based on human rights, we need to build these rights from the ground up. And what better way than to plant seeds that will eventually one day grow to feed ourselves and the communities to which we belong, through sustainable and Eco-friendly methods and technology? Through this the excessive need and focus on money would slowly be abolished, and thus the need for an economic system that taxes nature and the human species through greed, violence and oppression, would cease to exist. As Jacque Fresco, has pointed out, “if we had grown up in a society where people do not stress material wealth, money would not have played an important part in our value structure.” It is time to build a new set of value structures, and claim our rights as human beings.

Permaculture & Human Rights is a post from: Permanent Culture Now

Permaculture as a revolutionary force for change

Steve — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 11:09:48 +0000

Permaculture has grown, developed and flourished exponentially since is original stirrings in the 1970s through the work of David Holmgrem and Bill Mollison. Fast forward to 2012 and there are now hundreds of permaculture design course hosted in every corner of the globe, and hundreds of land based permaculture projects with new editions appearing on a weekly basis. As a system of practices and ideas, permaculture is perfectly suited to dealing with and finding solutions for the current appalling ecological and economic mess that capitalism has imposed on us.

Capitalism does not work

In terms of objective truths, capitalism does not work for the majority of the people on the planet, as US thinker and activist Michael Parenti put it ‘Most of the world is capitalist and most of the world is poor’ Capitalism and its feeder consumerism are also responsible for the destruction of the natural world and its seemingly endless exploitation of precious resources and destruction of wildlife habitats. Similarly capitalism actively encourages and engages in separating people from their communities through the promotion of individualism and status. To the capitalists strong communities represent a threat to their power and control, so social division is all important to the functioning of capitalism and the flow of capital.

Permaculture works!

Unlike Capitalism, applied permaculture works for the benefit and well being over single living organism on the planet, within its ever expanding storehouse of knowledge and practices are the tools to repair eco systems, methods of feeding ourselves in a local and low impact way with little in the way of inputs. Within the ethics and principles of permaculture we are also able to transcend the binary Political thinking that has dominated politics for a century and organise ourselves along the lines of need and the fair share ethic that is one of the core components of permaculture. With the development and proliferation of urban permaculture we have the ability to repair our cities on so many different levels, including: local ecology, food, health, education, well being and greater meaningful interaction with a wider community.

Permaculture: A force for the future

There is no greater collection of ideas and practices do deal with our current predicament that we all locked into than those offered by permaculture. We have come a long way since the days of Holmgren and Mollison both in terms of the popularity of permaculture and in the natural evolution of permaculture design and applied practice. We have seen Australian Permaculture designer Geoff Lawton Greening the Deserts of Jordan, we have seen David Holmgren rejuvenating land affected by volcanic lava, and I am sure these exciting developments with continue to flourish. We need to ensure that permaculture continues that upward climb into our consciousnesses and every day practices, and at all costs stop any attempt by capitalism of co-opting permaculture for its onw control and profit motiv

Steve

Permaculture as a revolutionary force for change is a post from: Permanent Culture Now

Permanent Culture Now » Theory

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Introduction

One of FOD Anarchists sent him some questions, and when he got a spare few minutes from working on his latest Do you feel that earlier anarchist methods, such as ‘propaganda by the deed’ can be effective today?

It seems that anarchism is regarded by many as a dirty word, partly due to successful anti-anarchist propaganda, partly due to the interpretation given to it by some anarchists themselves (such as ‘the black bloc’). Would you agree with me, and how might we ‘sell’ anarchism to the masses?

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If there were a general election tomorrow, would you vote, and if so, who would you vote for (if they were standing)?

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Permaculture, Queerness & Feminism

Gender, sexuality and design

Nicole: One of the key principles of permaculture is ‘Use & Value Diversity’, in terms of how we design our communities this may also apply to gender & sexuality. How do you think people can design for diversity?

Nicole: What strength does this diversity bring to our communities?

Nicole: What does ‘queer’ mean?

Nicole: What does ‘queer’ mean for you personally?

Nicole: How have you found being queer in relation to the permaculture movement at large?

Nicole: Big question but in short how does society need to be re-designed for real gender & sexual liberation? What role can permaculture designers play?

Nicole: Have you experienced any homophobia within permaculture or land-based projects? How can people stay aware & avoid oppressive practices?

Links & Resources

43 Essential essays on the commons and Peer 2 Peer theory

Paul S. Adler and Charles Heckscher: Towards Collaborative Community

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Kevin Carson, on expanding peer production to the physical domain

Predrag Cicovacki, on the metaphysics of co-evolution and transdisciplinary methodology

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Mark Cooper on a Policy for Collaborative Production

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Massimo De Angelis on The Production of the Commons and the Explosion of the Middle Class.

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Erik Douglas, on peer governance and democracy

Stephen Downes on Free Learning and P2P epistemology

Nick Dyer-Witheford on the Circulation of the Common

Jo Freeman, on the dark side of Peer Governance

Brett Frischmann, an economic theory for the Commons

Richard Heinberg on The Decentralized Provisioning of the Basic Necessities as the Fight of the Century

John Heron on the relational ground of human consciousness: Notes on Spiritual Leadership and Relational Spirituality

Yasuhiko Genku Kimura: Creating a ommicentric Ideosphere

Magnus Marsdal on Socialist Individualism

Ugo Mattei

Eben Moglen on Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture

Cosma Orsi on The Political Economy of Solidarity

Bruno Perens on The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source

James Quilligan on a framework for Global Commons-based Governance

Alan Rayner: Attuning to Natural Energy Flows vs. Abstract Economic Rationality

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