Cecosesola of Venezuela Wins Right Livelihood Award!

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.

A Cecosesola food market

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.

Cecosesola's food operations have become so large and socially sophisticated that they set their own prices, independent of markets. They operate their own trading spaces — four huge marketplaces, one in each section of the state capital, Barquisimeto, a metropolis of 1.25 million people in the northwest of the country.

When we published the piece about Cecosesola, it was selling some 700 tons of fresh produce at a single price per kilo, which is significantly lower than the prices charged by conventional grocers. The net effect was to driven down market prices in the region, allowing about 700,000 people to enjoy both lower prices as they secure half of the food they need.

When Silke interviewed a few of the hundreds of members of the federation in 2011, here are a few things that members shared:

  • "We are less interested in producing 'something that's ours' than creating 'us.' We want to understand and change ourselves. That generates a kind of collective energy….We try to conceive of Cecosesola as a personal process of development, not as work."
  • "We don't pay ourselves wages. Instead, we pay an advance on what Cecosesola will presumably make. But we don't work in order to make a profit or to accumulate goods. That isn't what drives us, and that's why our surpluses are relatively modest."
  • "Everybody gets paid the same amount. The cook earns the same as the bookkeeper, but we also take different needs into account, for example, if someone has just had a baby. The only exception is the physicians. They get about twice as much…"
  • "The decisive factor is that we don't follow the market or the market price. If prices for tomatoes and potatoes go up someplace, that doesn't mean that we'll raise prices, too. What matters for us is that we earn what we need."
    The Spanish above translates as: "The deepening of ethical relations. The emergence of trusting relationships. The widening of the circle of "we" towards an increasingly extended family.

     

In Free, Fair and Alive, Silke and I returned to consider the Cecosesola experience:

Cecosesola asks a simple question to its farmers and service providers, all of them members of the federation: what do you need to produce the harvest that you do? (It is exactly the same question some CSA members ask the CSA farmer so that they can share the risk of provisioning.) The rural cooperative members working in the fields, and Cecosesola members who coordinate the federation or sell at markets in Barquisimeto, gather in the shadow of a tree. While sitting on simple wooden benches, their casual chat slowly turns to the serious work of estimating what is needed for production: So many days of work, this much seed, that much fuel, enough irrigation pipes, and so forth. The more experienced members remind the less experienced ones that things may fall apart and need to be repurchased, or that more mule fodder may need to be bought because the last 800 meters up steep hills will increase transportation costs. Bit by bit, members bring their situated knowing to bear. Together, they identify the very concrete costs for production in their specific conditions of life and farming. Producers and distributors (people from Cecosesola’s central office in the city; traders or middlemen in the conventional economy) coordinate together.

This is price-making, right in front of everybody’s eyes – but not in any anticompetitive, monopoly-driven sense! Each cooperative within the Cecosesola system does its own calculations, and in the end, the federation sums up the results of all the meetings, adds in some additional sums for extras and losses (yes, tomatoes get spoiled on their way to the capital and some get stolen at the market).

Then Cecosesola takes a radical, counterintuitive step: “We decouple the price of vegetables from the time and effort we put into them,” as coop member Noel Vale Valera explains. “We add up the number of kilograms produced across the entire produce range, on the one hand, and we add up the costs on the other hand. Then we divide one by the other to figure out our average price per kilogram. Our yardstick is simply the production costs including what the producers need to live …What matters for us is that we earn what we need.” Cecosesola members don’t think of producers, traders, and consumers as separate, each having separate interests. They think of everyone as a whole in which everyone has to meet their needs along with the entire enterprise.

Vale’s colleague Jorge Rath insists, “This system saves people quite a lot of money … Our price per kilogram reduces red tape, we don’t work with middlemen, and seasonal fluctuations don’t make a difference, either.” The single per-kilo price for all produce emerges from open discussion among all those who produce and the many others who collaborate with them. In the end, it is no surprise that costs and therefore prices are significantly lower than those of conventional markets. There are no hidden costs, thanks to the trust and transparency within Cecosesola. There are no costs for marketing and advertisements. There are no intermediaries charging inflated prices to act as a wholesaler or distributor. Cecosesola is able to show money efficiency and price sovereignty.

The really stunning fact is the remarkable strength of Cecosesola as a provisioning system in times of political and economic crisis. It is basically due to the federation’s capacity to react quickly to dramatically changing circumstances.

A hearty congratulations to Cecosesola for the recognition made by the Right Livelihood Award! May your work be an inspiration and model to others seeking better ways to meet needs in fair, participatory, and effective ways!

Cecosesola of Venezuela Wins Right Livelihood Award!

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.

A Cecosesola food market

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.

Cecosesola's food operations have become so large and socially sophisticated that they set their own prices, independent of markets. They operate their own trading spaces — four huge marketplaces, one in each section of the state capital, Barquisimeto, a metropolis of 1.25 million people in the northwest of the country.

When we published the piece about Cecosesola, it was selling some 700 tons of fresh produce at a single price per kilo, which is significantly lower than the prices charged by conventional grocers. The net effect was to driven down market prices in the region, allowing about 700,000 people to enjoy both lower prices as they secure half of the food they need.

When Silke interviewed a few of the hundreds of members of the federation in 2011, here are a few things that members shared:

  • "We are less interested in producing 'something that's ours' than creating 'us.' We want to understand and change ourselves. That generates a kind of collective energy….We try to conceive of Cecosesola as a personal process of development, not as work."
  • "We don't pay ourselves wages. Instead, we pay an advance on what Cecosesola will presumably make. But we don't work in order to make a profit or to accumulate goods. That isn't what drives us, and that's why our surpluses are relatively modest."
  • "Everybody gets paid the same amount. The cook earns the same as the bookkeeper, but we also take different needs into account, for example, if someone has just had a baby. The only exception is the physicians. They get about twice as much…"
  • "The decisive factor is that we don't follow the market or the market price. If prices for tomatoes and potatoes go up someplace, that doesn't mean that we'll raise prices, too. What matters for us is that we earn what we need."
    The Spanish above translates as: "The deepening of ethical relations. The emergence of trusting relationships. The widening of the circle of "we" towards an increasingly extended family.

     

In Free, Fair and Alive, Silke and I returned to consider the Cecosesola experience:

Cecosesola asks a simple question to its farmers and service providers, all of them members of the federation: what do you need to produce the harvest that you do? (It is exactly the same question some CSA members ask the CSA farmer so that they can share the risk of provisioning.) The rural cooperative members working in the fields, and Cecosesola members who coordinate the federation or sell at markets in Barquisimeto, gather in the shadow of a tree. While sitting on simple wooden benches, their casual chat slowly turns to the serious work of estimating what is needed for production: So many days of work, this much seed, that much fuel, enough irrigation pipes, and so forth. The more experienced members remind the less experienced ones that things may fall apart and need to be repurchased, or that more mule fodder may need to be bought because the last 800 meters up steep hills will increase transportation costs. Bit by bit, members bring their situated knowing to bear. Together, they identify the very concrete costs for production in their specific conditions of life and farming. Producers and distributors (people from Cecosesola’s central office in the city; traders or middlemen in the conventional economy) coordinate together.

This is price-making, right in front of everybody’s eyes – but not in any anticompetitive, monopoly-driven sense! Each cooperative within the Cecosesola system does its own calculations, and in the end, the federation sums up the results of all the meetings, adds in some additional sums for extras and losses (yes, tomatoes get spoiled on their way to the capital and some get stolen at the market).

Then Cecosesola takes a radical, counterintuitive step: “We decouple the price of vegetables from the time and effort we put into them,” as coop member Noel Vale Valera explains. “We add up the number of kilograms produced across the entire produce range, on the one hand, and we add up the costs on the other hand. Then we divide one by the other to figure out our average price per kilogram. Our yardstick is simply the production costs including what the producers need to live …What matters for us is that we earn what we need.” Cecosesola members don’t think of producers, traders, and consumers as separate, each having separate interests. They think of everyone as a whole in which everyone has to meet their needs along with the entire enterprise.

Vale’s colleague Jorge Rath insists, “This system saves people quite a lot of money … Our price per kilogram reduces red tape, we don’t work with middlemen, and seasonal fluctuations don’t make a difference, either.” The single per-kilo price for all produce emerges from open discussion among all those who produce and the many others who collaborate with them. In the end, it is no surprise that costs and therefore prices are significantly lower than those of conventional markets. There are no hidden costs, thanks to the trust and transparency within Cecosesola. There are no costs for marketing and advertisements. There are no intermediaries charging inflated prices to act as a wholesaler or distributor. Cecosesola is able to show money efficiency and price sovereignty.

The really stunning fact is the remarkable strength of Cecosesola as a provisioning system in times of political and economic crisis. It is basically due to the federation’s capacity to react quickly to dramatically changing circumstances.

A hearty congratulations to Cecosesola for the recognition made by the Right Livelihood Award! May your work be an inspiration and model to others seeking better ways to meet needs in fair, participatory, and effective ways!

Greg Watson’s Bold Campaign for a World Grid

As humanity hurtles inexorably toward a steady-state, no-growth economy, whether by choice or the imperatives of climate collapse, the idea of sharing electricity on a global scale is becoming more relevant than ever. Such an infrastructure would deliver huge benefits. It would spur adoption of renewable energy and reduce carbon emissions while making the world's power systems more flexible and resilient.

The systems thinker and maverick architect Buckminster Fuller first proposed the World Grid idea in the 1970s. While the idea was daringly futuristic then, it garnered some serious attention. When the World Grid concept was presented by Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau to then-USSR premier Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet technical experts concluded that the concept was "feasible" and "desireable."

The point of a world electrical grid is to re-engineer hub-and-spoke transmission networks designed for central power plants so that electricity can be easily transmitted between daytime to nighttime regions of the world, and between the Global North and South. The infrastructure would make it more feasible for countries to rely on renewable energy because the grid would solve the problem of intermittent energy flows (no solar energy can be generated at nighttime; the wind is not always blowing).

For years, Greg Watson, Director of Policy and Systems Design at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, has been leading an effort to integrate the world's electricity production and distribution into a single network of networks. The World Grid's design would loosely resemble the design of the Internet, whose standard protocols enable different types of networks to interconnect and share on a global scale.

A free flow of electricity across national boundaries would allow nations to acquire electricity at lower costs, most notably by moving from expensive, atmosphere-destroying carbon energy sources to renewables. The benefits from the vast savings on a global scale could be mutualized through a standard (lower) world price. The Grid would also greatly reduce the need for storage capacity and make the entire electricity-delivery system more flexible and resilient.

To explore the history of the World Grid idea and Buckminster Fuller's wide-ranging influence on systemic solutions, Greg Watson spoke with me on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #31). 

Watson's push for a World Grid is a logical outgrowth of his long, pioneering work in sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and community development. He was formerly the Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture under three governors; the first Director of the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust, which develops offshore wind energy; and the head of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, a grassroots community land trust that converted 1,300 abandoned lots in Roxbury, Massachusetts, into a healthy, affordable neighborhood.

Watson often talks about the "Energy Trilemma" that we face – how to "simultaneously optimize sustainability, energy equity and energy security." He argues that a World Grid could address all three optimally: "It could tap the global solar, wind and water renewable energy resources and take full advantage of their geographic, seasonal, and night-day complementarity. In the process it could turn what has been considered a liability—i.e., the intermittency of renewable energy generation—into an asset, making the goal of a secure 100% renewable energy system accessible to all a realizable one."

Dymaxion projection map of the world

Watson's work as Executive Director of the New Alchemy Institute in the 1980s was a springboard into his current line of advocacy.  For twenty years, until 1991, the Institute was a hotbed of bold eco-experimentation and systems thinking – a "new age mecca," as the New York Times Magazine called it. It was a testing ground for organic agriculture, sailwing windmills, solar algae ponds stocked with fish, and of course, geodesic domes.

It was at the Institute that Watson encountered a related project that Buckminster Fuller had proposed, the "World Game." This game-like workshop process is designed to help nations think more systematically and practically about global problems, and to develop cooperative solutions.

To help participants understand the inescapable global interdependencies facing humanity, Fuller developed what he called the "Dymaxion Project" – a map that visualizes the entire planet without the geographic distortions of conventional Mercator-projection maps. As Watson has said, "The one-island perspective is obscured by conventional map projections. The resource and energy flows that fuel the Earth’s resiliency are severely limited by the world’s 195 nation-state boundaries that Bucky likened to blood clots."

The Dymaxion map, by contrast, promotes an understanding of global cohesion: "It does not follow the North-up convention. Neither does it follow any South-up, East-up nor West-up—there is no right way up….Perhaps most important regarding the current climate crisis, is the Dymaxion revelation of a 'one island, one ocean planet.' The unfettered flows and recycling of resources make possible synergetic, emergent, regenerative energy interpatternings that are a primary source of Earth’s resilience.

You can listen to my full podcast interview with Greg Watson here.

Greg Watson’s Bold Campaign for a World Grid

As humanity hurtles inexorably toward a steady-state, no-growth economy, whether by choice or the imperatives of climate collapse, the idea of sharing electricity on a global scale is becoming more relevant than ever. Such an infrastructure would deliver huge benefits. It would spur adoption of renewable energy and reduce carbon emissions while making the world's power systems more flexible and resilient.

The systems thinker and maverick architect Buckminster Fuller first proposed the World Grid idea in the 1970s. While the idea was daringly futuristic then, it garnered some serious attention. When the World Grid concept was presented by Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau to then-USSR premier Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet technical experts concluded that the concept was "feasible" and "desireable."

The point of a world electrical grid is to re-engineer hub-and-spoke transmission networks designed for central power plants so that electricity can be easily transmitted between daytime to nighttime regions of the world, and between the Global North and South. The infrastructure would make it more feasible for countries to rely on renewable energy because the grid would solve the problem of intermittent energy flows (no solar energy can be generated at nighttime; the wind is not always blowing).

For years, Greg Watson, Director of Policy and Systems Design at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, has been leading an effort to integrate the world's electricity production and distribution into a single network of networks. The World Grid's design would loosely resemble the design of the Internet, whose standard protocols enable different types of networks to interconnect and share on a global scale.

A free flow of electricity across national boundaries would allow nations to acquire electricity at lower costs, most notably by moving from expensive, atmosphere-destroying carbon energy sources to renewables. The benefits from the vast savings on a global scale could be mutualized through a standard (lower) world price. The Grid would also greatly reduce the need for storage capacity and make the entire electricity-delivery system more flexible and resilient.

To explore the history of the World Grid idea and Buckminster Fuller's wide-ranging influence on systemic solutions, Greg Watson spoke with me on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #31). 

Watson's push for a World Grid is a logical outgrowth of his long, pioneering work in sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, and community development. He was formerly the Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture under three governors; the first Director of the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust, which develops offshore wind energy; and the head of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, a grassroots community land trust that converted 1,300 abandoned lots in Roxbury, Massachusetts, into a healthy, affordable neighborhood.

Watson often talks about the "Energy Trilemma" that we face – how to "simultaneously optimize sustainability, energy equity and energy security." He argues that a World Grid could address all three optimally: "It could tap the global solar, wind and water renewable energy resources and take full advantage of their geographic, seasonal, and night-day complementarity. In the process it could turn what has been considered a liability—i.e., the intermittency of renewable energy generation—into an asset, making the goal of a secure 100% renewable energy system accessible to all a realizable one."

Dymaxion projection map of the world

Watson's work as Executive Director of the New Alchemy Institute in the 1980s was a springboard into his current line of advocacy.  For twenty years, until 1991, the Institute was a hotbed of bold eco-experimentation and systems thinking – a "new age mecca," as the New York Times Magazine called it. It was a testing ground for organic agriculture, sailwing windmills, solar algae ponds stocked with fish, and of course, geodesic domes.

It was at the Institute that Watson encountered a related project that Buckminster Fuller had proposed, the "World Game." This game-like workshop process is designed to help nations think more systematically and practically about global problems, and to develop cooperative solutions.

To help participants understand the inescapable global interdependencies facing humanity, Fuller developed what he called the "Dymaxion Project" – a map that visualizes the entire planet without the geographic distortions of conventional Mercator-projection maps. As Watson has said, "The one-island perspective is obscured by conventional map projections. The resource and energy flows that fuel the Earth’s resiliency are severely limited by the world’s 195 nation-state boundaries that Bucky likened to blood clots."

The Dymaxion map, by contrast, promotes an understanding of global cohesion: "It does not follow the North-up convention. Neither does it follow any South-up, East-up nor West-up—there is no right way up….Perhaps most important regarding the current climate crisis, is the Dymaxion revelation of a 'one island, one ocean planet.' The unfettered flows and recycling of resources make possible synergetic, emergent, regenerative energy interpatternings that are a primary source of Earth’s resilience.

You can listen to my full podcast interview with Greg Watson here.

Pirate Care, a Syllabus

The following is one of a series of features from The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead, by David Bollier. The Commoner's Catalog, a compendium of dozens of vanguard commons projects and movements, is available through book stores and online (for free) at https://commonerscatalog.org.

 

Alarmed that certain types of caring for people has been criminalized, a large group of Europeans assembled a course syllabus in 2019 on what they call “Pirate Care.” As the convenors of the project explained, “We live in a world where captains get arrested for saving people’s lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldn’t get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.”

Hence the idea of “pirate care” – and the need to offer humanitarian or lifesaving care even if the state chooses to criminalize it.  The Pirate Care syllabus, developed  by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak, fashions itself as “a research process – primarily based in the transnational European space – that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of ‘care’ and ‘piracy.’  It proposes new and interesting ways for intervening in "one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the ‘crisis of care’ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.”

The care deficit of our time can be seen as the failure of various market/state institutions – for healthcare, housing, food, social support  – to help those in desperate need.

In general, care is often the most vulnerable human service because markets often do not value care unless there is demonstrable "consumer demand."  State bureaucracies like to offer regularized units of service to people, as if they were machines. Large, rules-driven institutions are simply incapable of "care."

And so care remains largely unpaid or poorly paid work.  It is often gendered (and marginalized) as "women's work" or as work for people with nonwhite skin. 

The Pirate Care syllabus aims to elevate care as something that arises, and is maintained, through commoning. In this sense, care is about resisting state power and markets, and in so doing, revealing how power relations in a society are grossly unequal. This helps explain why providing care is often akin to a political act, such as the Good Samaritan helping an "enemy."  

The Pirate Care syllabus explores how providing humanitarian assistance to migrants and refugees represents an elemental human act of connection and compassion. The syllabus offers readings about "pirate care" and suggests practical responses for understanding it through structured reflection, direct action, and “collective memory-writing.” The latter is the process of reminiscing and writing memories as a way to heal collective and personal emotional wounds, especially in the aftermath of a violent historical past. 

The practitioners of pirate care see themselves as “experimenting with self-organization, alternative approaches to social reproduction, and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges.”  This can mean civil disobedience and the risk of persecution for providing “unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against, and condemned to the status of disposable populations.” The Pirate Care Syllabus presents itself as an open, evolving “tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices.”

I liked how the syllabus explains the political and power dynamics of care:

1. Caring is not intrinsically “nice”; it always involves power relations. Processes of discipline, exclusion and harm can operate inside the matrix of care.

2. Care labor holds the capacity to disobey power and increase our collective freedom. This is why when it is organized in capitalist, patriarchal and racist ways, it does not work for most living beings. We are in a global crisis of care.

3. There are no wrong people. Yet, caring for the “wrong” people is more and more socially discouraged, made difficult and criminalized. For many, the crisis of care has been there for a very long time.

4. Caring is labor. It is necessary and it is skilled labor.

5. Care labor is shared unfairly and violently in most societies, along lines of gender, provenance, race, class, ability, and age. Some are forced to care, while some defend their privilege of expecting service. This has to change.

6. Caring labor needs full access to resources, knowledge, tools and technologies. When these are taken away, we must claim them back.

Pirate Care, a Syllabus

The following is one of a series of features from The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead, by David Bollier. The Commoner's Catalog, a compendium of dozens of vanguard commons projects and movements, is available through book stores and online (for free) at https://commonerscatalog.org.

 

Alarmed that certain types of caring for people has been criminalized, a large group of Europeans assembled a course syllabus in 2019 on what they call “Pirate Care.” As the convenors of the project explained, “We live in a world where captains get arrested for saving people’s lives on the sea; where a person downloading scientific articles faces 35 years in jail; where people risk charges for bringing contraceptives to those who otherwise couldn’t get them. Folks are getting in trouble for giving food to the poor, medicine to the sick, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless. And yet our heroines care and disobey. They are pirates.”

Hence the idea of “pirate care” – and the need to offer humanitarian or lifesaving care even if the state chooses to criminalize it.  The Pirate Care syllabus, developed  by Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak, fashions itself as “a research process – primarily based in the transnational European space – that maps the increasingly present forms of activism at the intersection of ‘care’ and ‘piracy.’  It proposes new and interesting ways for intervening in "one of the most important challenges of our time, that is, the ‘crisis of care’ in all its multiple and interconnected dimensions.”

The care deficit of our time can be seen as the failure of various market/state institutions – for healthcare, housing, food, social support  – to help those in desperate need.

In general, care is often the most vulnerable human service because markets often do not value care unless there is demonstrable "consumer demand."  State bureaucracies like to offer regularized units of service to people, as if they were machines. Large, rules-driven institutions are simply incapable of "care."

And so care remains largely unpaid or poorly paid work.  It is often gendered (and marginalized) as "women's work" or as work for people with nonwhite skin. 

The Pirate Care syllabus aims to elevate care as something that arises, and is maintained, through commoning. In this sense, care is about resisting state power and markets, and in so doing, revealing how power relations in a society are grossly unequal. This helps explain why providing care is often akin to a political act, such as the Good Samaritan helping an "enemy."  

The Pirate Care syllabus explores how providing humanitarian assistance to migrants and refugees represents an elemental human act of connection and compassion. The syllabus offers readings about "pirate care" and suggests practical responses for understanding it through structured reflection, direct action, and “collective memory-writing.” The latter is the process of reminiscing and writing memories as a way to heal collective and personal emotional wounds, especially in the aftermath of a violent historical past. 

The practitioners of pirate care see themselves as “experimenting with self-organization, alternative approaches to social reproduction, and the commoning of tools, technologies and knowledges.”  This can mean civil disobedience and the risk of persecution for providing “unconditional solidarity to those who are the most exploited, discriminated against, and condemned to the status of disposable populations.” The Pirate Care Syllabus presents itself as an open, evolving “tool for supporting and activating collective processes of learning from these practices.”

I liked how the syllabus explains the political and power dynamics of care:

1. Caring is not intrinsically “nice”; it always involves power relations. Processes of discipline, exclusion and harm can operate inside the matrix of care.

2. Care labor holds the capacity to disobey power and increase our collective freedom. This is why when it is organized in capitalist, patriarchal and racist ways, it does not work for most living beings. We are in a global crisis of care.

3. There are no wrong people. Yet, caring for the “wrong” people is more and more socially discouraged, made difficult and criminalized. For many, the crisis of care has been there for a very long time.

4. Caring is labor. It is necessary and it is skilled labor.

5. Care labor is shared unfairly and violently in most societies, along lines of gender, provenance, race, class, ability, and age. Some are forced to care, while some defend their privilege of expecting service. This has to change.

6. Caring labor needs full access to resources, knowledge, tools and technologies. When these are taken away, we must claim them back.

Konda Mason on Land, Race, Money, and Spirit

For African-American farmers -- afflicted by the legacy of slavery, racism, and land theft -- the struggle for emancipation has not been easy. I was therefore excited to learn about Jubilee Justice, a fledgling project that is trying to reclaim farmland for BIPOC farmers and secure their economic livelihoods. Besides embracing cooperatives and community land trusts, Jubilee Justice is dedicated to an open-source, climate-friendly type of rice farming and to courageous "transformational learning journeys" for racial healing.

You can learn more about these experiments in commoning in my interview with Konda Mason on the latest episode of my podcast Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #30).  

Konda Mason, cofounder & president of Jubilee Justice

Mason, cofounder and president of the Louisiana-based Jubilee Justice, is a long-time activist, social entrepreneur, and mindfulness teacher. Raised on social justice values by a farm family east of Los Angeles, she later cofounded the annual COCAP (Community Capital) conference in Oakland, which brings together progressive finance people to showcase new models of restorative economics and finance.

With Jubilee Justice, Mason decided that it is essential to confront issues of race and class as they manifest in land ownership, economics, culture, and our spiritual lives.

One way that the project does this is by helping reclaim land stolen from African Americans over the decades. There is a long and ugly history in American life of whites using various subterfuges – the legal power of eminent domain, discriminatory US Department of Agriculture lending, legal trickery, and more – to cheat African Americans out of their land.

As a 2019 New Yorker account of this history put it, "Between 1910 and 1997, African Americans lost about 90% of their farmland," resulting in a loss of hundreds of billions of dollars. (See also these pieces on the theft of Black land in The Atlantic and The Nation.) Land theft has had predictable consequences on the ability of Black households to accrue wealth over generations, aggravating White/Black economic inequality that persists today.

Jubilee Justice is a modest attempt to redress this history by helping farmers acquire land and develop economically stable agricultural practices. One key tool in this regard is to decommodify and secure land by putting it in community land trusts, which protects it against market speculation and future sale. 

"When you create a land trust and take the land out of private ownership and into a commons," said Mason, "the land becomes open to groups of people who can work the land and build on it. The land is not subject to the ups and downs of finance, nor can it be liquidated in the future. This approach defies our whole economic system, which allows certain people to get super-rich and others to have nothing."  (For more on the potential of community land trusts for African-Americans, see a proposal for a "Black Commons," by Susan Witt, Executive Director of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics.)

Through Jubilee Justice, African-American farmers are also using agricultural coops to build vertical supply chains as a way to protect themselves from market exploitation by big corporate players. Instead, farmer coops can have greater control over selling produce to markets and mutualize their collective gains.

Jubilee Justice has even larger ambitions, however. It has entered into a working alliance with a transnational network of farmers to develop a more climate-friendly form of rice farming. Known as the System of Rice Intensification, SRI is an open-source, community-driven style of rice farming whose techniques have been developed by farmers themselves, in India, Madagascar, Indonesia, and many other countries. SRI farming – coordinated and supported by Cornell University's agricultural college – does not depend on the Green Revolution practices using lots of water and fertilizer – and thus pollution and climate-destroying methane gases. It is a more of a localist strategy, with transnational collaboration, that improves rice yields and bolsters community food security while reducing methane emissions.

Even more impressive, Jubilee Justice is pioneering an experiment in racial reconciliation and healing. Its chief vehicles are "Jubilee Journey" encounter sessions that bring together wealthy white Americans and BIPOC wisdom-keepers. The point is to have honest, emotional reckonings with the realities of American racial history and capitalism that mainstream narratives downplay or ignore.  

"We brought together all sorts incredible minds here in Louisiana, on a former plantation, with all of its trappings, where we meet in the Big House and have conversations about land, race, money, and our spiritual dimension," said Mason. The sessions often have had life-changing impacts for  participants, helping them to understand the past and racial realities in new ways.

After five years, Jubilee Justice is still in its infancy, but it has already developed many productive, hopeful paths for moving forward. You can listen to my interview with Konda Mason here.

I'm happy to announce that this latest podcast episode includes a transcription of my interview with Konda Mason. Forthcoming episodes -- and some previously released ones -- will also include transcriptions. My deep thanks to Gane Ryan Duenas, a regular listener and commons enthusiast, for making this possible.

Konda Mason on Land, Race, Money, and Spirit

For African-American farmers -- afflicted by the legacy of slavery, racism, and land theft -- the struggle for emancipation has not been easy. I was therefore excited to learn about Jubilee Justice, a fledgling project that is trying to reclaim farmland for BIPOC farmers and secure their economic livelihoods. Besides embracing cooperatives and community land trusts, Jubilee Justice is dedicated to an open-source, climate-friendly type of rice farming and to courageous "transformational learning journeys" for racial healing.

You can learn more about these experiments in commoning in my interview with Konda Mason on the latest episode of my podcast Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #30).  

Konda Mason, cofounder & president of Jubilee Justice

Mason, cofounder and president of the Louisiana-based Jubilee Justice, is a long-time activist, social entrepreneur, and mindfulness teacher. Raised on social justice values by a farm family east of Los Angeles, she later cofounded the annual COCAP (Community Capital) conference in Oakland, which brings together progressive finance people to showcase new models of restorative economics and finance.

With Jubilee Justice, Mason decided that it is essential to confront issues of race and class as they manifest in land ownership, economics, culture, and our spiritual lives.

One way that the project does this is by helping reclaim land stolen from African Americans over the decades. There is a long and ugly history in American life of whites using various subterfuges – the legal power of eminent domain, discriminatory US Department of Agriculture lending, legal trickery, and more – to cheat African Americans out of their land.

As a 2019 New Yorker account of this history put it, "Between 1910 and 1997, African Americans lost about 90% of their farmland," resulting in a loss of hundreds of billions of dollars. (See also these pieces on the theft of Black land in The Atlantic and The Nation.) Land theft has had predictable consequences on the ability of Black households to accrue wealth over generations, aggravating White/Black economic inequality that persists today.

Jubilee Justice is a modest attempt to redress this history by helping farmers acquire land and develop economically stable agricultural practices. One key tool in this regard is to decommodify and secure land by putting it in community land trusts, which protects it against market speculation and future sale. 

"When you create a land trust and take the land out of private ownership and into a commons," said Mason, "the land becomes open to groups of people who can work the land and build on it. The land is not subject to the ups and downs of finance, nor can it be liquidated in the future. This approach defies our whole economic system, which allows certain people to get super-rich and others to have nothing."  (For more on the potential of community land trusts for African-Americans, see a proposal for a "Black Commons," by Susan Witt, Executive Director of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics.)

Through Jubilee Justice, African-American farmers are also using agricultural coops to build vertical supply chains as a way to protect themselves from market exploitation by big corporate players. Instead, farmer coops can have greater control over selling produce to markets and mutualize their collective gains.

Jubilee Justice has even larger ambitions, however. It has entered into a working alliance with a transnational network of farmers to develop a more climate-friendly form of rice farming. Known as the System of Rice Intensification, SRI is an open-source, community-driven style of rice farming whose techniques have been developed by farmers themselves, in India, Madagascar, Indonesia, and many other countries. SRI farming – coordinated and supported by Cornell University's agricultural college – does not depend on the Green Revolution practices using lots of water and fertilizer – and thus pollution and climate-destroying methane gases. It is a more of a localist strategy, with transnational collaboration, that improves rice yields and bolsters community food security while reducing methane emissions.

Even more impressive, Jubilee Justice is pioneering an experiment in racial reconciliation and healing. Its chief vehicles are "Jubilee Journey" encounter sessions that bring together wealthy white Americans and BIPOC wisdom-keepers. The point is to have honest, emotional reckonings with the realities of American racial history and capitalism that mainstream narratives downplay or ignore.  

"We brought together all sorts incredible minds here in Louisiana, on a former plantation, with all of its trappings, where we meet in the Big House and have conversations about land, race, money, and our spiritual dimension," said Mason. The sessions often have had life-changing impacts for  participants, helping them to understand the past and racial realities in new ways.

After five years, Jubilee Justice is still in its infancy, but it has already developed many productive, hopeful paths for moving forward. You can listen to my interview with Konda Mason here.

I'm happy to announce that this latest podcast episode includes a transcription of my interview with Konda Mason. Forthcoming episodes -- and some previously released ones -- will also include transcriptions. My deep thanks to Gane Ryan Duenas, a regular listener and commons enthusiast, for making this possible.

Ruangrupa Introduces the Spirit of ‘Lumbung’ to International Art

It's exciting to see how an Indonesian artists collective, ruangrupa, is attempting to elevate the ideas of commoning in the international art world. A few years ago, ruangrupa, based in Jakarta, was selected to curate one of the most prestigious art exhibitions in the world, documenta. The event is a showcase for cutting-edge artistic work, held in Kassel, Germany every five years for only 100 days. This 15th edition of documenta ("documenta 15") confirms that commoning is surging as a way to re-imagine the political economy of art-making.

Any artist knows that making a livelihood from one's creativity means coming to terms with the brutal realities of markets. The economics of painting, music, photography, and performance are each different, of course, but they generally privilege individual artists over groups, require that artworks be converted into commodities, and tend to splinter and transform coherent artistic communities as market players buy artworks they regard as prestigious, fashionable, or lucrative investments.

Ruangrupa. (Photo credit: Jin Panji/Gudskul)

This process can be necessary and benign, and at least help secure artists' livelihoods. But it can also end up corroding the ethic of collaboration and sharing that are indispensable to any creative genre. Whether it's jazz, hip-hop, painting, conceptual art, or sculpture, artists need each other to flourish. They need a community of caring colleagues who can mentor, criticize, inspire, imitate, and mutually support each other, especially when livelihoods are precarious.

Thanks to ruangrupa, documenta 15, which opened in June and will run through September, is not just an art exhibition. It's an attempt to re-imagine the political economy of art and artistic cultures. 

My latest episode of Frontier of Commoning (Episode #29), I speak with Farid Rakun, a member of ruangrupa, who discusses how his collective used their documenta curation to convene a global assembly of artists to develop new ways to organize and support art-making.

Documenta 15 breaks new ground because this is the first time that an Indonesian or even Asian artist or group has been invited to curate the exhibition. Historically, documenta has featured European and Western artists, so the choice of ruangrupa as curators was clearly meant to give non-Western artistic sensibilities greater visibility and validation.

What may be more significant, however, is how ruangrupa has chosen to produce the event. It decided to abandon the traditional curation process by launching a massive experiment in artistic collaboration.

Over the past three years, the collective brought dozens of artists from around the world to discuss, deliberate, and collaborate in producing the exhibition. Through large and small democratic assemblies with a flavor of Occupy, artists decided whom to invite to exhibit, how to allocate funds, and how to develop new nonmarket infrastructures and processes to support artistic solidarity.

For example, ruangrupa decided that funds given to artists groups would not be treated as commissions to produce art. They see the funds, instead, as general support for artists' livelihoods. So the social meaning of the money is changed. It is not a market transaction; it is a recognition of the collective relationships that have enabled artists to exist as artists. The money is meant to recognize the ongoing struggles that artists overcome to produce their work, and a tribute to the ecosystems of artistic support. In this sense, artists' commissions were reimagined as a kind of universal income for a limited period, rather than transactional payment for services.

Farid Rakun of ruangrupa. (Photo credit: Jin Panji/Gudskul)

The animating spirit of runagrupa's bold experiment is called lumbung -- an Indonesian word for a shared rice barn in which surplus is stored and later allocated for collective benefit. Lumbung is an apt metaphor for the cultural sharing that ruangrupa is trying to bring to a higher level in the art world.

International art exhibitions have traditionally been discreetly aligned with art markets and all of their competitive greed and capitalist priorities. An artist featured in a major exhibition typically causes their reputation to soar, along with the future prices of their artworks. Everyone in the commercial ecosystem then scrambles to get a piece of the action.

But what if artists could develop relations of trust, cooperation, and social solidarity – not just in producing exhibitions, but in managing follow-on collaborations? What if artists could bypass the commercial feeding frenzy by developing their own collective vehicles of mutual support and sharing, outside of commercial markets? 

After all, introducing money into artistic process often interferes with the sharing and collaboration that an artistic community needs. When markets enter the picture, talented artists often decide to leave their friends and colleagues behind to pursue (more lucrative) solo careers. Other artists may skew their works to pander to market trends. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but why should that be the only option for developing an artistic career?

Ruangrupa's brave experiment at documenta has been marred by one troubling incident. A German blogger accused an artwork by a Palestinian artist of containing antisemitic imagery, which became a major controversy in the German media. How that artwork relates to ruangrupa's curation or not remains a subject of debate.

The more enduring legacy of documenta 15 is likely to be that ruangrupa developed some exciting new structures of artistic curation and solidarity on an international scale. The exhibition has prototyped some impressive new forms of commoning at scale, in the spirit of lumbung, which may inspire other artistic communities to further develop and institutionalize these models after documenta 15 concludes in September.

You can listen to my interview with Farid Rakun here.

Ruangrupa Introduces the Spirit of ‘Lumbung’ to International Art

It's exciting to see how an Indonesian artists collective, ruangrupa, is attempting to elevate the ideas of commoning in the international art world. A few years ago, ruangrupa, based in Jakarta, was selected to curate one of the most prestigious art exhibitions in the world, documenta. The event is a showcase for cutting-edge artistic work, held in Kassel, Germany every five years for only 100 days. This 15th edition of documenta ("documenta 15") confirms that commoning is surging as a way to re-imagine the political economy of art-making.

Any artist knows that making a livelihood from one's creativity means coming to terms with the brutal realities of markets. The economics of painting, music, photography, and performance are each different, of course, but they generally privilege individual artists over groups, require that artworks be converted into commodities, and tend to splinter and transform coherent artistic communities as market players buy artworks they regard as prestigious, fashionable, or lucrative investments.

Ruangrupa. (Photo credit: Jin Panji/Gudskul)

This process can be necessary and benign, and at least help secure artists' livelihoods. But it can also end up corroding the ethic of collaboration and sharing that are indispensable to any creative genre. Whether it's jazz, hip-hop, painting, conceptual art, or sculpture, artists need each other to flourish. They need a community of caring colleagues who can mentor, criticize, inspire, imitate, and mutually support each other, especially when livelihoods are precarious.

Thanks to ruangrupa, documenta 15, which opened in June and will run through September, is not just an art exhibition. It's an attempt to re-imagine the political economy of art and artistic cultures. 

My latest episode of Frontier of Commoning (Episode #29), I speak with Farid Rakun, a member of ruangrupa, who discusses how his collective used their documenta curation to convene a global assembly of artists to develop new ways to organize and support art-making.

Documenta 15 breaks new ground because this is the first time that an Indonesian or even Asian artist or group has been invited to curate the exhibition. Historically, documenta has featured European and Western artists, so the choice of ruangrupa as curators was clearly meant to give non-Western artistic sensibilities greater visibility and validation.

What may be more significant, however, is how ruangrupa has chosen to produce the event. It decided to abandon the traditional curation process by launching a massive experiment in artistic collaboration.

Over the past three years, the collective brought dozens of artists from around the world to discuss, deliberate, and collaborate in producing the exhibition. Through large and small democratic assemblies with a flavor of Occupy, artists decided whom to invite to exhibit, how to allocate funds, and how to develop new nonmarket infrastructures and processes to support artistic solidarity.

For example, ruangrupa decided that funds given to artists groups would not be treated as commissions to produce art. They see the funds, instead, as general support for artists' livelihoods. So the social meaning of the money is changed. It is not a market transaction; it is a recognition of the collective relationships that have enabled artists to exist as artists. The money is meant to recognize the ongoing struggles that artists overcome to produce their work, and a tribute to the ecosystems of artistic support. In this sense, artists' commissions were reimagined as a kind of universal income for a limited period, rather than transactional payment for services.

Farid Rakun of ruangrupa. (Photo credit: Jin Panji/Gudskul)

The animating spirit of runagrupa's bold experiment is called lumbung -- an Indonesian word for a shared rice barn in which surplus is stored and later allocated for collective benefit. Lumbung is an apt metaphor for the cultural sharing that ruangrupa is trying to bring to a higher level in the art world.

International art exhibitions have traditionally been discreetly aligned with art markets and all of their competitive greed and capitalist priorities. An artist featured in a major exhibition typically causes their reputation to soar, along with the future prices of their artworks. Everyone in the commercial ecosystem then scrambles to get a piece of the action.

But what if artists could develop relations of trust, cooperation, and social solidarity – not just in producing exhibitions, but in managing follow-on collaborations? What if artists could bypass the commercial feeding frenzy by developing their own collective vehicles of mutual support and sharing, outside of commercial markets? 

After all, introducing money into artistic process often interferes with the sharing and collaboration that an artistic community needs. When markets enter the picture, talented artists often decide to leave their friends and colleagues behind to pursue (more lucrative) solo careers. Other artists may skew their works to pander to market trends. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but why should that be the only option for developing an artistic career?

Ruangrupa's brave experiment at documenta has been marred by one troubling incident. A German blogger accused an artwork by a Palestinian artist of containing antisemitic imagery, which became a major controversy in the German media. How that artwork relates to ruangrupa's curation or not remains a subject of debate.

The more enduring legacy of documenta 15 is likely to be that ruangrupa developed some exciting new structures of artistic curation and solidarity on an international scale. The exhibition has prototyped some impressive new forms of commoning at scale, in the spirit of lumbung, which may inspire other artistic communities to further develop and institutionalize these models after documenta 15 concludes in September.

You can listen to my interview with Farid Rakun here.