economics

Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelmann, an international secondary school educator and curriculum developer, had long been appalled by the dismal state of economics education for young people.  Students at middle and high schools learn about a "degenerative economic system," as she puts it, in which "the economy" is framed as something separate from society and nature. With little sense of contemporary realities, economics courses assume that endless economic growth is desirable and possible. It focuses on businesses and markets, ignoring the vital role that household care and the commons play.

Brandsberg-Engelmann decided to do something about these deficiencies. Inspired by Kate Raworth’s pioneering book Doughnut Economics, Brandsberg-Engelmann instigated a collaborative project to create a comprehensive Regenerative Economics syllabus. She wants young people to learn about economics as if the planet and people really mattered – and to showcase many fresh new schools of economic thought.

On my podcast Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #46), I spoke with Jennifer to learn more about this important work-in-progress.

Like Doughnut Economics, the Regenerative Economics syllabus focuses on a core framework: how to keep the economy within ecological limits while meeting minimum social needs.

This focus naturally elevates all sorts of topics that introductory economics courses marginalize or ignore:  feminist critiques of care work and households; strategies for preventing the ecological "externalities" that standard economics blithely accepts; the psychic, social, and cultural ramifications of capitalist economics; and the range of alternative economic perspectives now emerging, such as degrowth, the "circular economy," "doughnut economics," commons, and related movements.

What a thrill to learn that Cecosesola (Central de Cooperativas de Lara) -- the Venezuelan network of community organizations from low-income areas – has won the 2022 Right Livelihood Award!  Cecosesola is a federation of co-operatives and other groups that has created its own distinct social and economic ecosystem. Since 1967, the group has relied on commoning to develop a humane provisioning system that meets the needs of more than 100,000 families across seven Venezuelan states.

The Right Livelihood Award cites Cecosesola for "establishing an equitable and cooperative economic model as a robust alternative to profit-driven economies."  It has achieved this in the face of serious problems in Venezuela – a financial crisis, food shortages, hyper-inflation, and a massive out-migration of 7 million people. 

Cecosesola doesn't simply provide competitive market prices for food, healthcare, loans, and cooperative funeral services, among other ventures. It changes well below normal retail prices. You could say that Cecosesola has learned how to ignore the market and set its own terms for providing goods and services. Its economic activities are almost entirely self-financed, and its internal governance and culture of solidarity and trust reject the standard management practices of businesses and bureaucracies.

Over five decades Cecosesola has made it a priority to develop a culture of transparency and mutual support. It is committed to an ethic of fairness and concern for well-being. These values and practices have flourished through the group's radically horizontal system of collaboration that pointedly avoids hierarchical control. The culture enables Cecosesola to deal with changing circumstances and crises in highly efficient, flexible, and adaptive ways. "We are just one big conversation," as one of its members said in an interview.

My late colleague Silke Helfrich first alerted me to this fantastic organization after she met with many of its members in the early 2010s. Her interview with them was published in our book Patterns of Commoning in 2014. We later wrote an interpretive summary of Cecosesola in our 2019 book Free, Fair and Alive, seeing Cecosesola as an "omni-commons" because it serves as a hosting infrastructure for all sorts of experimental, niche ventures in commoning. Silke last year nominated Cecosesola for the Right Livelihood Award.

It takes a lot of effort by small-scale commons to get started, especially to raise and manage money, negotiate budgets, pay people, comply with tax laws, etc. That got easier with the rise of Open Collective, a new type of platform nonprofit that helps many types of collectives gather and spend money transparently.

You can consider Open Collective an infrastructure for commoning -- a backend system that makes it easier and more normal for people to manage money fairly, collectively, and with open accountability.

In the latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning, I speak with Alanna Irving, Chief Operating Officer of Open Collective, a nonprofit that handles the complicated, messy administrative and financial work for small, often-underfunded collectives. This work includes handling donations, providing fiscal sponsorship, making payments, and so forth, which are often too costly and complex for mutual aid groups, cooperatives, commons, and other small projects to manage.

Irving comes to the challenges of network-based governance with a wealth of firsthand experience.  She was an early member of Enspiral, the pioneering New Zealand group that developed new organizational structures and culture for their online community. That project had two notable offshoots that helped pave the way for Open Collective: the software platforms known as Loomio, for group deliberation and decisionmaking, and Cobudget, an app for managing shared spending and allocations of money within a collective. 

As an early participant in this journey, Irving became an expert in "distributed leadership" and peer governance in horizontal, networked organizations striving to live by open source principles. She also learned about cooperative governance.... technology that is designed to be participatory.... and radically collaborative uses of money.

Irving believes that it is entirely possible for people to self-manage themselves on horizontal networks, eliciting a diversity of talent and nurturing people's personal growth while serving the common good. But this challenge usually requires "hacking organizational structures with our values," as she puts it. 

In recent weeks, we commoners have lost three great visionaries. Each spawned robust institutions and movements to carry their visions forward; the continuing vitality of their projects confirm that their spirits remain very much with us. We should pause to reflect on and celebrate their towering contributions.

I'm talking about the British architect/philosopher Christopher Alexander, who invented the "pattern language" approach to urban design and building; Edgar Cahn, the creative American legal activist who invented timebanking and cofounded Antioch School of Law; and Gustavo Esteva, the post-development thinker and founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca.

Christopher Alexander's Fearless Exploration into Aliveness and Design

I remember encountering Christopher Alexander's seminal book, A Pattern Language, in the late 1970s, a cultural moment that was erupting with all sorts of mind-blowing ideas. Alexander wanted to know why certain designs in architecture and urban spaces were consistently used across cultures and history. These include the proportions of space in rooms....the placement of windows....the design of public squares... the popularity of cafes in cities....among dozens of other forms. What accounts for their timeless appeal?   

Alexander and his coauthors came to see that beauty, grace, and spiritual satisfaction actually play vital roles in the design of everyday life and buildings. Certain designs embody aliveness! But that quality can only be seen through a certain prism, which is what Alexander set out to name and analyze. He called his method a pattern language.  

A pattern, in Alexander's view, describes "a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice." 

Each solution is unique because the context of the problem -- the geography, culture, values, and history of the designers -- is always different. Yet there are regularities -- or patterns -- to be  identified and studied. In A Pattern Language, Alexander identified 253 interrelated patterns in urban and building design. 

As my late colleague Silke Helfrich and I began to think about the nature of commons as social systems, we saw how the pattern language methodology could help us explain how commons actually work -- because commons, like buildings, are not primarily about physical things. They are about the interactive social dynamics of humans as they engage with each other and the Earth.

On the latest episode of my Frontiers of Commoning podcast (Episode #23), I speak with Sara Arnold and Sandra Niessen, two leading activists who are boldly calling for "a radical defashion future" based on degrowth, commoning, and clothing cultures that escape consumerism.  

Through the organization Fashion Act Now, a growing band of dissident fashionistas want to make the clothing industry more ecologically responsible, relocalized, and culturally in sync with this moment in history, especially with respect to climate change, economic justice, and decolonialization. This means greatly reducing the industry's resource and energy use, and moving away from hyper-consumerist "fast fashion" business models that generate colossal waste and ecological harm.

My podcast interview with Arnold and Niessen is a spirited, often surprising conversation. It's not often that I've heard the words "fashion," "biodiversity" and system-change" uttered in the same sentence.

British fashion designer Sara Arnold started her career by launching a clothing rental platform, Higher Studio. Her idea was to incentivize a more environmentally sensitive "circular economy" in clothing by promoting rentals and re-use over consumption.

Sounds good, but she soon realized that her business  was actually helping to expand the market for clothing. Moreover, she saw that there are many larger environmental and climate problems that the fashion industry is largely ignoring.

So Arnold joined Extinction Rebellion to organize its #BoycottFashion and Cancel Fashion Week campaigns. Taking things further, in 2020 she co-founded Fashion Act Now as a campaign organization for defashion -- a term she coined to describe deep, systemic shifts in the industry that can address climate change and respect planetary limits.

If you're up for a serious deep dive into new-economy ideas and action, check out the 4th edition of the Synergia Institute online course. It's an eight-module designed for activist-minded progressives that starts on February 7 and runs through June 24.

Each module runs for 2 weeks and requires between 1.5 and 3 hours a week, depending on the study track that you choose. Self-designated "Explorers" can expect to commit 1.5 hours per week while "Changemakers" will spend 3 hours per week studying and engaging with peers. "Deep Divers" will engage with experienced changemakers and supplementary materials. 

The Synergia course is a MOOC -- a Massive Open Online Course -- that brings together some carefully selected readings, videos and other materials to show what progressive system-change can look like. The 2019 edition of the course had 1,060 registrants from 42 countries, and focused on such topics as co-operatives, alternative finance, degrowth, and the Solidarity Economy, among many others.

The new updated, upgraded course, "Toward Co-operative Commonwealth: Transition in a Perilous Century," focuses on four overarching themes -- solidarity, co-operation, reciprocity, and sustainability. It offers a rare opportunity to dig into the practical, legal, and policy particulars in a rigorous way, augmented by study circles and action groups of other learners.

How is it possible that extreme hunger and food abundance coexist in today's world? Why is it that food, one of the most fundamental necessities of life, is so scarce for so many people even though the global food system produces so much and wastes so much? These questions have long bothered Jose Luis Vivero Pol, an anti-hunger activist, agricultural engineer, and advocate for treating food as commons.

Studying the reasons for persistent hunger amidst plentiful food, Vivero began to see that the real problem is our societal treatment of food as a commodity -- an object valued by its market price and traded in global markets. The presumption that food should be a commodity departs from millennia of human history in which societies found ways to share food and ensure that people had enough to eat. Treating food as a commodity inevitably means that millions of people worldwide will not be able to afford food and therefore must go hungry or eat nutritionally degraded, unhealthy food.

I explored these themes in an interview with Vivero Pol in my latest podcast (Episode #22) on Frontiers of Commoning.  

Vivero Pol works as a PhD Research Fellow of Food Transitions at the Université catholique de Louvain, in Belgium. He realizes that attempting to decommodify food is a long-term proposition that requires a structural rethinking of our food system. But he emphasizes that food-as-a-commodity is an artificial social construct, not the natural order of life.

Indeed, food commons have been the norm throughout human history, and even in today's hyper-marketized world they remain widely prevalent. In many countries of Europe, the amount of land still managed as commons for growing food is 20 or 30%. In Iceland, 40% of land is still managed as commons.

Ivan Illich is one of those rare, seminal thinkers to whom I keep returning, again and again, because he fearlessly grapples with core themes that otherwise go ignored.  He addressed, for example, the totalizing power of modern institutions, the corrupting influences of capitalism on spiritual life, and the power of vernacular practice to build more wholesome, insurgent cultures.    

In my latest podcast (Episode #21), I had the pleasure of interviewing David Cayley, a close friend and colleague of Illich’s who recently published a magisterial synthesis and interpretation of his thought, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey. Cayley is a former broadcaster for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and independent scholar and author who has written numerous books on topics literary, political, and ecological.

Illich was an iconoclastic social critic, radical Christian, and cultural historian who soared to international fame in the 1970s with searing critiques of Western modernity, Christianity, and the professionalization of care in healthcare, education, and social services. An Austrian-born Catholic priest who often clashed with the Vatican, Illich eventually left the priesthood to become an itinerant speaker, public intellectual, and best-selling author. His thinking was sprawling and eclectic, but much of it focused on how we might pursue deeper, more meaningful spiritual lives in a modern world that seems designed to deny our elemental humanity.

While some of Illich’s perspectives now seem rooted in their time, mostly the 1960s and 1970s, his thinking remains highly relevant to contemporary life in developing a rich, detailed perspective that dissents from modern economics and politics. His work is perhaps even more relevant now that neoliberal capitalism, over the past forty years, has intensified its disempowerment of ordinary people.  

Can property law be used to reclaim our common wealth and transform capitalism in the process? Peter Barnes, a socially minded entrepreneur and commoner, believes it can. He has just published a brilliant new book, Ours: The Case for Universal Property that explains how a new class of property rights and trusts can help protect common assets and generate revenues for everyone in the process.  You can hear Barnes explain his ideas in my latest podcast episode (#19) of Frontiers of Commoning.Frontiers of Commoning. 

The book Ours amounts to a capstone of twenty years of Peter’s thinking – and I should know: Peter and I were close colleagues twenty years ago in the start up of the Tomales Bay Institute, later renamed On the Commons. Together with journalist and policy expert Jonathan Rowe, we set out to develop a new, activist-minded discourse about the commons. From different perspectives, each of us shared a deep concern about reckless enclosures of shared wealth and sought to develop novel ways to protect the commons.

Peter’s inquiries into this topic had begun years earlier with research into protecting land. In 2001, he took a new direction with his book Who Owns the Sky?, which offered one of the most serious and coherent early proposals for dealing with climate change. He proposed the Sky Trust, a new nongovernmental institution to set limits on carbon emissions and charge polluters for the right to emit carbon into the atmosphere.

The Sky Trust would manage the funds collected, which in turn would generate dividends to be paid to every citizen equally. The premise is that we collectively own the atmosphere as a commons, and so should have some reliable means to protect it and benefit from it. Under Barnes’ elegant proposal, market forces would deter carbon emissions (by making  polluters pay) while directing those revenues to all citizens. This would both help reduce inequality and incentivize lower carbon usage. 

Outside of the gaze of formal finance, an often-demonized form of informal social finance flourishes. This finance consists of the regular pooling of money among friends and neighbors. It’s a way for individuals to amass chunks of money for paying for a new (used) car, educational expenses, household emergencies, and other major expenses. The system is relied upon by millions of Black women in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America as a trusted alternative to formal banking systems that often exclude them. 

There are many names for these traditional systems – susu, partner, meeting-turn, box-hand, sol, depending upon the culture in which they arise. But they are generically known as ROSCAs, an acronym for “rotating savings and credit associations.” ROSCAs are a vital way for people of color and modest means to take care of their financial needs when banking systems are unfriendly or unaffordable, often for racialized reasons.

Professor Caroline Shenaz Hossein has studied the Black social economy for years, and especially cooperatives and informal economies. She has paid particular attention to ROSCAs as familiar, practical social vehicles for savings and credit.

In my latest Frontiers of Commoning podcast (Episode #18), Professor Hossein and I discuss the largely unknown realities of informal banking and the power of the Black social economy.

Black people have been “so traumatized by formal finance,” said Hossein, “that there are people who are unbanked or they choose to be under-banked. This means they’ll do the most minimal activities [with banks] because of the horror stories they have to endure – racism. Anti-black racism in commercial banking is not a secret anymore,” she said, which explains why many African-American women choose to “avoid those kind of stresses and engage with people who actually value their humanity” – their friends and neighbors.