From the Citizen Debt Audit Platform in Spain (PACD), we have worked on convergence with different groups in the debt axis in order to be able to come up with common strategies, dynamics and calender, with Florence10+10 in mind and the objective of building a united international resistance movement to face the neoliberal agenda.
AGORA99 2nd-4th Nov, Madrid
http://99agora.net/2012/07/euro-mediterranean-meeting-debt-rights-democracy/
In the article I give a personal review on some of the important spaces of convergence and mobilisations some of which took place in 2011 and 2012 and others are currently being planned: like, 15O, Joint Social Conferences, Hub Meetings of Indignados, Global May, Agora 99 and Florence 10+10 among others. I also deliver my observations on the dramatic rise of peer to peer (P2P) communication as well as increasing involvement of new generation activists in these spaces and mobilisations. Such developments might allow radical reformist and revolutionary forces to invent an upgraded methodology for working together which might in return make it possible to form transnationally connected and strong alliances between horizontal and less vertical forms of agency, so called movement of movements.
A directory of social and political movements related to the P2P (participatory), open (open access to knowledge), and ‘commons’ paradigms.
Please read: Mapping a Coalition for the Commons. By Philippe Aigrain.
Contents[hide] |
Marco Berlinguer:
“The free culture movements comprise a wide range of experiences mainly emerging around the internet and the digital revolution. They have generally developed independently, but they are loosely aligned and show a mutually reinforcing dynamism – a ‘viral spiral’, as David Bollier terms it.
Hey all you hacktivists, cypherpunks, mystical anarchists and global revolutionaries out there,
As the one year anniversary of OWS approaches, where do we stand?
To put it in a nutshell: the Zuccotti encampment model might have passed its heyday, but the spirit of Occupy is still very much alive … evolving and inspiring, expanding our understanding of the possible, exploding our political imagination. Before S17 we relied on the same dinosaur paradigm of the dusty old left. We looked backward for inspiration instead of forward. With Occupy we jumped over that old dead goat. Now it’s time to leap fresh again.
FLORENCE 10+10Ten years ago, Florence hosted the first ever European Social Forum. It constituted an extraordinary moment in the construction of a continent-wide demos, which presented analyses, proposals and solutions which would have avoided Europe crashing into the terrible economic, social and democratic crisis in which it is now mired.
Europe is today pervaded by a need to build, albeit in new forms, a European public space, and by the need to look to the next 10 years with common objectives, agendas and strategies. The crisis and the austerity policies can be beaten, but we are aware that to achieve this we have to get away from fragmentation and the closure of each in their own narrow national dimensions.
The European forum Florence 10+10 will bring together over four days citizens, social movements, trade unions, network and social forces from throughout Europe recognising themselves in the demand for radical European democracy and the necessity of re-building a popular and democratic front of European citizens.
A proposal for working on a convergence of the ideas of Gramsci, Robert Cox and P2P Theory, by Örsan Şenalp:
Our intention is to draw mainlines for an historical materialist narrative of the rise of the p2p as the dynamic of true communal culture and social relationships among individuals and the peoples. We want to analyse how was it existed in each mode of production and now [based on Cox and Van der Pijls’ approaches] transnationalised and globalised. In a way we could draw a line between ‘cognitive’ and ‘transnational’ capitalism theories. We wish to explore empirically how did the spreading p2p relational dynamics has been transforming central productive forces (primarily society itself), and capitalist social relations of production, so how did this bring about a possibility of truly communal culture and social relationships first time at a global scale.
He further explains:
“Since the previous global crisis, that started in the late 60s, there has been major contributions made, from critical perspectives, to our understanding of the expanding of capitalist mode of production and the formation of the world market. Much of the insights were developed by political economists from the West/Center. The first and second generation classics were those of Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Rudolf Hilferding, Vladimir I. Lenin, Bukharin, Karl Polanyi, Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci. The third generation classical works has arrived in this period. Luis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Ralph Milliband, Christian Palloix, Robin Murray, Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Harry Magdoff, Henry Breverman, and Nichos Poulantzas -among others- have been key names who reopened and expanded the analysis of the state, classes, capitalism. In this post-war and New-Left era, both Gramsci and Polanyi had been rediscovered and their work stimulated -especially via Poulantzas’ analysis- the development of the analysis of the transnational dimension of the new transformations that capitalism were undergoing.
Popular utopias have always demanded abundance, and when empowered with technology, have established it in very similar terms to those we use today. Degrowth, on the other hand, only has historical roots in the Church’s reaction to feudal decomposition.
The country of Jauja is a typical example of the popular utopias of the Middle Ages and the beginning of Modernity. It’s a good reflection of the aspirations of the lower tiers of society, which were crushed by hunger and misery. Abundance, which is the end of work forced by need, free [gratis] food, and the end of conflicts and violence due to its scarcity, conjures up the image of a world we deserve to live in.
At the end of the nineteenth century, when the first “modern utopias” appeared as part of the popular cultural flowering that led to the First International, the impulse was rationalized, was argued, was developed didactically by imaginary local societies. But abundance continues to be the inspiration, the engine of hope that connects with the aspirations of millions of people. The first utopias of this time in the Western Latin world,Pensive, by Juan Serrano Oteiza (1876) and New Utopia, by Ricardo Mella (1889), were written when Prodhounian mutualism was still hegemonic in the workers’ movement. Both focused on developing a concept familiar today to readers of Juan Urrutia: the economy of abundance.
DescriptionWith the vast majority of Facebook users caught in a frenzy of ‘friending’, ‘liking’ and ‘commenting’, at what point do we pause to grasp the consequences of our info-saturated lives? What compels us to engage so diligently with social networking systems? Networks Without a Cause examines our collective obsession with identity and self-management coupled with the fragmentation and information overload endemic to contemporary online culture.
With a dearth of theory on the social and cultural ramifications of hugely popular online services, Lovink provides a path-breaking critical analysis of our over-hyped, networked world with case studies on search engines, online video, blogging, digital radio, media activism and the Wikileaks saga. This book offers a powerful message to media practitioners and theorists: let us collectively unleash our critical capacities to influence technology design and workspaces, otherwise we will disappear into the cloud. Probing but never pessimistic, Lovink draws from his long history in media research to offer a critique of the political structures and conceptual powers embedded in the technologies that shape our daily lives.
April 7, 2011 — Poor Richard
I probably should have titled this “Hacking the Organization”.
What follows is not a primer of organizational design but simply a back-of-the-envelope sketch of how a number of organizational design and management ideas might be applied to peer-to-peer (P2P) organizations. My intention is for these ideas to be adapted or “hacked” for P2P applications without getting hung up on ideology or terminology, much of which has historical baggage. The idea is to ignore the baggage, take what you can use, and leave the rest. However, if this gets picked apart and criticized from top to bottom it may still have served some purpose.
I recognize that many p2p activities may be amorphous, fluid, informally organized, or conducted by completely autonomous and independent individuals. My own preferred lifestyle is agrarian and communitarian. I’m not a particularly good team player. But I would like to think of a world where p2p organizations can launch satellites, build solar-powered factories, and make trains run on time.
In The Political Economy of Peer Production, Michel Bauwens describes peerism as “cooperative individualism”. I think that is an important perspective and I think it can be extended to groups as well. Whether cooperation is one to one, one to many, many to one, or many to many, all cooperators are peers. If they are not peers, the enterprise should not be called cooperation.
Grupo Cooperativo de las Indias ~ http://grupolasindias.coop ~
reindustrializa@grupolasindias.coop
History of the industrial P2P sector
The explosion in the social use of the Internet in the ’90s generated notable changes in the whole productive process. One of the most striking effects was the apperance in the area of the dissemination of information of what economist Juan Urrutia then called a “logic of abundance.”
The logic of abundance appears when the structure of production and costs becomes unnecessary to collectively settle on what is produced and what not. Urrutia departs from the topics of the information economy to imagine markets that are evolving towards a situation of Pareto sub-optimality in an undefined way, as a product of the extension of the network effect. At its limits, the consequence would be the equivalent of what would be produced by a market with perfect competition in neoclassical models. Which is to say, the price would be equivalent to the marginal cost… but the marginal cost of spreading one more unit of information on the network is zero.
Posted 1 day ago on April 25, 2012, 9:05 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt
Workers across New York City are organizing “99 Picket Lines” building up to May Day, where New Yorkers will join a broad coalition of unions, immigrant rights groups, community- and faith-based organizations, worker centers, and the Occupy Wall Street movement in a mass mobilization against the economic, social, and political injustice wrought by the one percent.
KEY PICKETS (click here for more):
Restaurant Opportunities Center–Wed April 25, 6-7 PM, at Capital Grille (155 42nd Street, b/w 3rd Ave and Lexington)
A brief introduction to the method by Aaron (see script)
We are proud to announce the beta release of an the Extreme Manufacturing platformfor Open Source Ecology. We are now testing the platform.
Extreme Manufacturing (XM) is an open source hardware development methodology based on the principles of Extreme Programming in the field of software. XM focuses open source design and collaboration, and the revenue model is Distributive Enterprise. Extreme Manufacturing is lean in all respects, while retaining sufficient structure to anable scalability. The platform is currently in development. Joe Justice of Team Wikispeed and I have coined the term. We’re here to change the paradigm of how things are made – by unleashing economic collaboration and eliminating competitive waste. My fundamental motivation stems from a conclusion that the rate of innovation could increase significantly – if open collaboration were the norm for doing business.
We create an aesthetic and political experiment in the Berlin Biennale space for people from all over the world to gather, organize assemblies, direct action, interactive self-education, strategy-development and other forms of politico-social engagement. Thus we create a Global Square to connect and interrelate the revolts and thus contributing to the coordination and strengthening of social culture opposed to the arrogance of power.
Wir errichten einen politisch-gesellschaftlichen Raum, in dem Menschen aus Berlin und aller Welt zusammenkommen, um Versammlungen, interaktive Wissensaneignung, gemeinsame Strategieentwicklung, direkte Aktionen politischer Intervention sowie andere Formen politisch-gesellschaftlichen Engagements auf die Beine zu stellen. Es geht dabei um die Schaffung eines Global Square, der die Aufstände miteinander vernetzt, in Beziehung bringt und so der Koordinierung und Stärkung sozialer Kultur gegenüber der Arroganz der Macht dienen soll.
Posted 5 hours ago on April 16, 2012, 10:37 a.m. EST by OccupyWallSt
The following was translated from Democracia Real Ya (Real Democracy Now) Barcelona, aSpanish protest movement that helped inspire #OWS. While some things are specific to Spain/Europe, they echo our reasons for taking the streets on the May 1st General Strike here in North America and beyond. For more about Democracia Real Ya and the upcoming #12M15 global days of action in English and other languages, see here.
We will take to the streets on May 12th in a creative, nonviolent popular demonstration to continue working toward a May 15th in defense of the people!
On May 15th, 2011, millions began a process of social change, delivering a clear and unequivocal signal that we are not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers, and stating publicly that our current representative democracy is dying. The political class and the powerful have not gotten the message. Despite the growing protests and cries of distress from the 99%, these elites are exploiting the crisis to plunder the common wealth and endangering the lives of the people.
Michel Bauwens, 15th April 2012
The birth of the era of mass production, based on economies of scale, which is now ending, was when Ford instituted the Assembly line. The birth of the era of physical peer production, based on economies of scope, occured thanks to the convergence of Marcin Jakubowski’s Open Source Ecology, an integrated set of openly designed machines that can sustain a ‘Global Village’; and Wikispeed’s pioneering use of distributed software development techniques, to the production of the Wikispeed open source car.
Like the invention of Bitcoin as a first workable post-Westphalian currency, this is another seminal moment in the transition to a peer to peer society.
Via Marcin Jakubowski:
(see also the the explanatory video below)
“”Extreme Manufacturing (XM) is an open source hardware development methodology based on the principles of Extreme Programming in the field of software. XM focuses open source design and collaboration, and the revenue model is Distributive Enterprise. Extreme Manufacturing is lean in all respects, while retaining sufficient structure to anable scalability. The platform is currently in development. Joe Justice of Team Wikispeed and I have coined the term. We’re here to change the paradigm of how things are made – by unleashing economic collaboration and eliminating competitive waste. My fundamental motivation stems from a conclusion that the rate of innovation could increase significantly – if open collaboration were the norm for doing business.
THE PLAN
For May 1st, 2012 Occupy Los Angeles is organizing around a “4 Winds” People’s Power Car and Bike Caravan through the urban sprawl of Los Angeles that will culminate in Direct Action in and around the Financial District of downtown LA. People from all sectors of the city will have a chance to plug in to the routes from any corner of the city, helping to shut down the flow of capital while addressing the 99%’s major grievances.
These 4 caravans, beginning in the late morning, coming from the North, South, East & West, will be an amalgam of cars and bikes, occupiers and unions, community orgs and organic communities — taking over our streets on routes designed to bring to light to societies ills, past and present, and engaging with residents and workers as we connect the disparate voices, races, classes and nationalities that make up Los Angeles. The caravans will stop at flashpoints along the way. Flash occupations, food giveaways, and other direct actions targeting the foreclosure crisis and police brutality will be undertaken at these flashpoints on our slow, city-paralyzing, carnival-esque descent into the center of the city.
MASTER MAP [coming]
DOWNTOWN LA CONVERGENCE
The convergence point at 6th & Main streets, at 2:30 PM, will have the People’s Print Lab, the Welcome Tent, the Wellness Tent and will be focused on shining light on LA’s homeless issues, feeding the people of Skid Row and raising awareness of social and economic inequality, including the brutally ineffective Safer Cities Initiative that criminalizes the homeless population while doing absolutely nothing to change the systemic problems that make LA the homeless capital of the country. At 3 PM, we will mobilize direct actions in the financial district of downtown LA.
THE 4 WINDS
NORTH WIND [coming soon]
1.1 Arab Spring: One goal, One strategy
The Arab Spring was sparked by the first protests that occurred in Tunisia on 18 December 2010 following Mohamed Bouazizi‘s self-immolation in protest of police corruption and ill treatment. With the success of the protests in Tunisia, a wave of unrest sparked by the Tunisian “Burning Man” struck Algeria, Jordan,Egypt, Syria and Yemen, then spread to other Arab countries.
Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia on 14 January following the Tunisian revolution protests. In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarakresigned on 11 February 2011 after 18 days of massive protests, ending his 30-year presidency.
A major slogan of the demonstrators in the Arab world has been “ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam” (“the people want to bring down the regime”) and they did it in Tunisia and Egypt with a sustained campaigns or “non-stop protest” involving strikes, demonstrations, marches, occupations…
Note:
The Icelandic rejection of the debt and the Greek mobilizations against austerity plans, as well as the surge of new technologies with the uprising of movements such as Anonymous, Zeitgeist, Wikileaks, Democracy Now, Reopen911 or Yes men, amongst others, have also been of great influence to this (r)evolution.
1.2 Real Democracy Now, birth of a new movement
All through the winter of 2010 the collective “Democracia Real Ya!” (DRY), in association with approximately 200 smaller organizations, had been preparing a huge demonstration for real democracy in Spain. The protest movement gained momentum on May 15 with a camping occupation in Madrid’s main square, the Puerta del Sol, spreading to squares in 57 other major and smaller cities in Spain, and then to Spanish embassies all around the world.
First post of a series of key documents that trace back the efforts have been made for the creation of a Globally Networked -preferably in a p2p distributed way- and reinvented Labour Movement, what we call on this blog Social Network Unionism.
Below video is the interview with Marco Berlinguer, who have played a key role in coordination and faciliation of the Labour & Globalisation network in Belem and afterwards. Peter Waterman’s critical response in L&G email list with several attachments gives a good snapshot of the process under taken at the time.
In the eve of a global strikes being planned, as the first time in human history, and there is a growing globally self-organised grassroots movements, it can be helpful to revisit these important documents.
Will an Alternative Global Labour Network Take Off and Take Shape at the World Social Forum, Belem, 2009?
Peter Waterman, p.waterman at inter.nl.net
INTRODUCTION
This is a contribution to discussion that has been taking place atvarious Social Forums and related events over the last year or two. Much of this has been within the ‘Labour and Globalisation’ (L&G) network. It has been something of a haphazard process since the network has no fixed abode, far less an office or officers, and its rather attractive list, http://openesf.net/projects/labour-and-globalization/summary, has been regretably under-utilised and was affected, late-2008, by some infantile disorder (of a digital kind). I expressed my confusion at that moment (Waterman 2008a). The problem has now been corrected.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is a model for a new economic paradigm, in which value is first created by communities.
Chiang Mai, Thailand – Last week I discussed the value crisis of contemporary capitalism: the broken feedback loop between the productive publics who create exponentially increasing use value, and those who capture this value through social media – but do not return these income streams to the value “produsers”.
In other words, the current so-called “knowledge economy” is a sham and a pipe dream – because abundant goods do not fare well in a market economy. For the sake of the world’s workers, who live in an increasingly precarious situation, is there a way out of this conundrum? Can we restore the broken feedback loop?
Strangely enough, the answer may be found in the recent political movement that is Occupy, because along with “peer producing their political commons“, they also exemplified new business and value practices. These practices were, in fact, remarkably similar to the institutional ecology that is already practiced in producing free software and open hardware communities. This is not a coincidence. Continue reading
Dear comrades,
Here goes!! Already the third issue of the Newsletter dedicated to offer updates form Assemblies around the world that are preparing actions next May 2012.
Please share and spread, paste it in your facebook groups, send it to all your mailing lists and invite others to subscribe through this link:http://eepurl.com/klvBr
PS: the NL is long, you don’t have to read it all at once!! take is slowly, you have one whole week to find out what your comrades are up to 😉
Online version: http://www.globalmay.org/blog/item/59-occupy-inidgnados-may12-#12m15m-newsletter-issue-no-3&Itemid=145
PLEASE pay attention to this invitation: what if we take a break together? for a moment, gather in an Open Space where everyone is welcome to contribute and learn and effectively boost the Global May we envision. The more we are and the more diverse our points of views and backgrounds, the richer the dialogue will be. Is this Saturday 14th.
———- Forwarded message ———-
Social Network Unionism 