Just Published: The Italian Edition of “Think Like a Commoner”

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I am happy to report that the Italian translation of my book, Think Like a Commoner, has now been published. La Rinascita dei Commons: Successi e potenzialita del movimento globale a tutela dei beni comuni -- or The Rebirth of Commons:  Successes and Potential of the Global Movement for the Protection of Commons --was translated by Bernardo Parrella over the past year. 

My thanks to Bernardo for his initiative and tenacity in doing the translation and in finding a suitable publisher, Stampa Alternativa. And my thanks also to the pioneering Italian commons thinker and activist Ugo Mattei for writing the preface. 

Italy is at the vanguard of many commons innovations these days.  One sign of this is the first International Festival of the Commons (organized by Mattei), which will be held in Chieri, Italy, from July 9 to 12. I plan to attend, so perhaps I will see you there.

For the record, the Italian edition of Think Like a Commoner is the third translation, following the Polish and French translations. Translations into Spanish, Korean and Chinese are now pending.

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Michel Bauwens: Here’s What a Commons-Based Economy Looks Like

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So what might a commons-based economy actually look like in its broadest dimensions, and how might we achieve it?  My colleague Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation offers a remarkably thoughtful and detailed explanation in a just-released YouTube talk, produced by FutureSharp. It’s not really a video – just Michel’s voiceover and a simple schematic chart – but the 20-minute talk does a great job of sketching the big-picture strategies that must be pursued if we are going to invent a new type of post-capitalist economy.

Michel focuses on the importance of three specific realms that are crucial to this new vision – ecological sustainability, open knowledge and social solidarity. Each is critical as a field of action for overturning the existing logic of market capitalism. 

Fortunately, there are many promising developments in each of these realms. Many parts of the environmental movement seek to go beyond the standard “market-oriented solutions.” There is a growing body of open source-inspired projects for software code, information, design and physical production, which is now spawning new types of global sharing of information with distributed local production. And there are many advocates and initiatives for social justice and fairness in the economy, such as cooperatives and the solidarity economy movement.

The problem, says Bauwens, is that these movements do not generally connect with each other or coordinate internationally. He therefore sees the need for “meta-economic networks” to bridge these fields of action. So, for example, we need “open cooperativism” enterprises to bridge open knowledge systems and cooperatives, so that open network (or licensed) systems are not simply dominated by large corporations in the way that Google, Uber and Airbnb have done. We also need to develop an “open source circular economy” to bridge the worlds of eco-sustainability and open knowledge.  We will never address major environmental problems if the technological and product solutions are based on proprietary knowledge; open circulation of knowledge can change that.

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Modernity and Despair: What Should We Hope For?

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I’m giving a short talk in Boston today, at the conference Frontiers of Democracy. Here are some of the points I’m hoping to mention:

The modern world produces a certain kind of despair and helplessness because the primary sources of hope are technological development and the institutional efforts of technocrats. The best hope of progress is always elsewhere: the Supreme Court, Silicon Valley, the Justice Department. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been waiting with quite a bit of excitement to see whether one man–Justice Kennedy–will decide to legalize same sex marriage. Looking around, we see lots of progress but no role for ourselves in achieving them. I care a lot about same sex marriage, but I can’t point to a single thing I’ve done to bring it about: it has seemed inevitable for most of my life, even when Democratic politicians passed laws outlawing it and campaigned against it.

This is because of modernity’s structuralist bias: problems are most easily parse-able as the result of systematic factors, and thus only large-scale statist solutions seem adequate to respond to them. In this sense we live in the world imagined by Max Weber: progress is achieved by professionals, through the slow boring of hard boards. Bureaucratic solutions are the norm, and even social movements must have their solutions instantiated in bureaucratic institutions to truly count themselves successful. It’s not enough to march or protest: your marches and protests have to lead to new policies, new laws, or new spending. Politics seems like it is reducible to a fight to steer the large organizations that make up our world.

We seem to understand people in aggregate but not individually. The emphasis is on “seem” because these aggregates are often vague, self-fulfilling, or ignore vital ceteris paribus problems. Vox recently suggested that there are 16 plausible explanations for the plummeting crime rate, all but a few of which are not only outside of my power to effect, but most of which are even outside of the power of the police department to effect.

There are similar stories to tell about the difficulty in identifying the causes of economic growth and the levers of macroeconomic success and stability. Yet at the same time pollsters can seemingly predict elections with frightening accuracy on the basis of comparatively small samples, and the Federal Reserve can seemingly nudge growth and inflation. Most of the explanations I know, as a scholar, are systematic explanations. Systems and generalizable knowledge go hand-in-hand: experts produce this knowledge and thereby prove their worth. Scientific progress becomes the model of social and political progress.

Civic renewal proposes a radically different view of progress.  On the civic view, developments that exclude us–that render us passive in our own well-being–are not progressive ones. “We” must work together to achieve our hoped for goals, or else, first, they won’t be progressive, and, second, they won’t be sustainable. Policies that are made without engaging citizens threaten to be corrupted by those exclusions either in the first instance or over time as citizens assume that the matter is settled and begin to ignore it. “Nothing for us without us” becomes a democratic slogan, with the understanding that we don’t believe it’s enough for policies to be made and enforced in our interest if they don’t engage us.

The new movements around race and police brutality that began in Ferguson have skillfully combined systematic analysis with personal action, digital mobilization on social media and protest organization. Yet this is not a generalizable lesson: these same techniques have failed to mobilize citizen engagement on a mass scale on environmental issues, finance-sector malfeasance, economic inequality, or free and fair trade.

I worry that other successes, like participatory budgeting or community-led efforts at school integration, are too small-scale and bound up with state institutions and the logic of bureaucracy and governmentality to supply the foundational insights of civics.

This kind of “progressivism” encompasses even conservative civics: front porch conservatives and Sam’s Club conservatives. Modernity is just as much a threat to their ideal lives, and not just because of the way that the modern scientific worldview undermines their metaphysical and moral commitments. Still, civics has a lot to learn from conservatives in this respect: symbolic commitments are at the heart of the solidarity required for co-creation. Here also we see a human-scale politics, around the question of the display of Confederate flags, the naming of streets and respresentation of our community’s heroes and villains.

Instead of a general science of action, it is seems to me that civics can—at best—offer a unified set of participatory values alongside subject-specific and regional knowledge, and case studies of sometimes-viable strategies.

Finally, we should hope that the civic renewal movement grows large enough to encompass lively debate, disagreement, and faction on issues of focus, strategy, and the push-and-pull of partisan identity. This is how the unity of our values will become a foundation for a living community.

my opening remarks at Frontiers of Democracy 2015

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These were my remarks at the opening of Frontiers (#Demfront) last evening:

Welcome to the United States if you come from overseas, and to Massachusetts if you come from out of state.

Welcome to Boston, and specifically to Boston’s Chinatown, which is our host community tonight.

Welcome to Tufts University. We also have a leafy campus about seven miles from here in Medford, Mass.. You are always welcome in Medford, but we’re pleased to meet tonight in Tufts’ Boston campus.

Welcome to the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service. Tisch College is your host and a co-convenor of this conference. Our dean, Alan Solomont, will talk in a little while about Tisch College, so I will leave the substance to him.

One very close and partner in co-organizing this event is the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, led by Matt Leighninger. Matt’s work is wide-ranging, but an important focus is public engagement in local governance.

Another essential partner is The Democracy Imperative, led by Nancy Thomas, who now also works full-time with us at Tisch College. TDI focuses on democracy in higher education.

Matt and Nancy organized a fantastic conference in 2008 called No Better Time. Frontiers 2014 is the direct descendent of No Better Time. Some version of the conference has occurred every year without a break since ’08. I see many faces from No Better Time here seven years later.

Added to the mix since 2009 has been our colleague Karol Soltan, a political scientist from the University of Maryland, who co-founded and co-teaches the Summer Institute of Civic Studies with me at Tisch College. Twenty-two of the people present here tonight form the 2014 Summer Institute. We have been spending six-and-a half hours every day for the past two weeks discussing advanced theoretical work on citizenship. This year’s group comprises scholars and practitioners from Chile, Mexico, Liberia, Zimbabwe, China, the Netherlands, and Singapore. More than 120 others have taken the Summer Institute in past years, and about a dozen of those alumni are also here tonight. Tisch College’s Sarah Shugars, Summer Institute class of 2013, played an important role in organizing alumni to design some of the sessions for this conference.

Last but not least—in fact, last and most, is Tisch College’s Kathy O’Connor, who organized all the logistics and practicalities of this conference and also helped shape the substance. Special thanks to Kathy.

A few words about Civic Studies, since that is a phrase that may be new to you—but it is rapidly spreading.

Civic Studies originated with a 2007 manifesto that was written by Harry Boyte, Karol Soltan, and several other distinguished scholars. It called for an emerging discipline or intellectual community that would reorient the social sciences and humanities.

Civic Studies is already producing a stream of publications and events. The editor of the chief Civic Studies journal, The Good Society, is here—Josh Miller. The Summer Institute at Tufts now has a sister institute in Ukraine and a developing partnership with Tecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico.

We like to say that Civic Studies is the intellectual component of civic renewal, which is the movement to improve societies by engaging their citizens.

The goal of civic studies is to develop ideas and ways of thinking helpful to citizens, understood as co-creators of their worlds. We do not define “citizens” as official members of nation-states or other political jurisdictions. Nor does this formula invoke the word “democracy.” One can be a co-creator in many settings, ranging from loose social networks and religious congregations to the globe. Not all of these venues are, or could be, democracies.

Civic studies asks “What should we do?” It is thus inevitably about ethics (what is right and good?), about facts (what is actually going on?), about strategies (what would work?), and about the institutions that we co-create. Good strategies may take many forms and use many instruments, but if a strategy addresses the question “What should we do?”, then it must guide our own actions–it cannot simply be about how other people ought to act.
Civic Studies emphasizes agency, which Harry and colleagues have defined “as effective and intentional action that is conducted in diverse and open settings in order to shape the world around us.”

Thanks to the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and the broader networks around it, the students and alumni of the Civic Studies Institute are joined here this evening by many practitioners of “dialogue and deliberation,” meetings and processes that bring people together to talk about public issues.

Thanks to the Democracy Imperative and Tisch College itself, we are joined by many civic educators who work in elementary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, and community settings.

A substantial subset of our participants today are primarily concerned with media—both traditional and new—and how they can support or frustrate civic life.

By the time the conference is over, we will have heard from at least four current office-holders who are working to make government more engaging and responsive.

And we are delighted to welcome others of diverse backgrounds and views, including people who will make explicit critiques of dialogue and deliberation, of civic education of various kinds, of media, and of theoretical scholarship.

Critique is good. Our problems are much too serious for us to be complacent or to settle into intellectual conformity. I, for one, am deeply dissatisfied with the strategies and moral frameworks available today and eagerly looking forward to alternatives.

I think we are pretty good at creating little spaces where voluntary participants can have rewarding political experiences, but we have very weak ideas about how to transform large systems or how to engage people who are not raising their hands to join civic life.

I think we are increasingly thoughtful about the people who are excluded from conventional politics, and we are getting better at including some of those individuals in concrete activities, but we have few ideas about how to transform politics so that it is really better for all.

I think we have reasonably impressive theories of civic engagement—how and why people participate—but very weak theories about how and why societies change for the better.

I think we have powerful diagnoses and critiques of government, of the mass media, of education, and of global markets, but we are very short on solutions that involve ordinary people as agents of change.

We know, for instance, that human beings are dangerously heating the world by burning carbon. We understand the social causes of that behavior. We know that if governments taxed carbon, they would solve the problem. We also know that if people experienced the kinds of spiritual changes that Pope Francis eloquently invited, they would solve the problem. But we have a much harder time explaining how we—the people actually gathered together in a space like this one—can achieve changes of policy or transformations of the spirit at large scales.

The framing statement of the conference acknowledges our difficult circumstances. It begins, “While powerful forces work against justice and civil society around the world. …” But then the good news: “committed and innovative people strive to understand and improve citizens’ engagement with government, with community, and with each other. Every year, Frontiers of Democracy convenes some of these practitioners and scholars for organized discussions and informal interactions. … Devoted to new issues and innovative solutions, this conference is truly at the frontiers of democracy.” …

Not that many other spaces gather as much talent and passion in the cause of civic renewal. The group gathered here is an asset. This gathering is an opportunity. We must make the most of it. We have about 14 hours together. Let’s move the frontiers of democracy.

The post my opening remarks at Frontiers of Democracy 2015 appeared first on Peter Levine.

Internal vs External Infrastructure

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After my post from earlier this week, I got into a fascinating conversation about whether social justice work should focus more externally – on shared projects and improving institutions – or internally – on checking your own biases and privilege.

I may have just left it there, but yesterday someone else raised the same point in a conversation about building civic infrastructure to confront racial bias.

There’s nothing in the police manual that says officers need to treat people of color more aggressively than white people, one person argued, so the real need is for police officers to work on removing their own internal biases.

Someone else countered with excellent examples of how the external system really does increase and perpetuate racial bias among officers – they are trained as paramilitary, trained to expect the worse case scenario, and, yes, even trained to treat low-income neighborhoods as more dangerous.

Of course, the external v. internal debate is not really a zero-sum game, though there is an important question as to where we should collectively focus our resources and attention.

Focusing too much on either has its dangers: too internally focused becomes little more than navel-gazing without any real action or systemic change; too externally focused provides policy bandaids which do little to mitigate the day to day biases and microaggressions which people of color experience constantly.

But if the best path lies somewhere in between, it still raises an interesting challenge as to how to navigate that journey.

I imagine creating more spaces for shared work, with more spaces for self-reflection and improvement. I imagine creating structures and institutions which encourage us to improve ourselves by working together for the express purpose of working better together.

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Participatory Budgeting in Araçatuba

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Case: Participatory Budgeting in Araçatuba

Jun 25 '15
Author: 
paolo spada
Preparing a write-up of this case will require knowledge of Portuguese and calling the city to complete the missing information (PBcensus 2 - requires phone call). Although there are no existing case studies in English on Araçatuba, the city was surveyed in the Participatory Budgeting Census 2012 (Spada et al...

The European Parliament Focuses on Commons

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The European Parliament is formally focusing on the commons paradigm through a new “Intergroup on common goods,” which is part of a larger group known as the "European Parliamentary Intergroup on Common Goods and Public Services."  The group met for the first time on May 26 in Brussels, at the European Parliament.  At this early stage, it’s hard to tell if it will be influential either within the European Parliament or with the public, but it certainly represents a significant new threshold for commons activism. 

Intergroups are official forums of the Parliament at which members, political organizations and movements can air their views and try to rally attention to a given topic. As Sophie Bloemen of the Commons Network writes:

Even though the intergroups have no legislative power, they can be valuable having such a representation in the European Parliament. At the minimum, it is a multiparty forum where one can exchange views and propose ideas on particular subjects in an informal way. Those who choose to work with such an intergroup, its Members of Parliament, and civil society or lobbyists, share the notion that a certain topic is important and can focus on how to get things done.

Now there will also be a Commons Intergroup. This particular group will allow for discussions on policy from a shared perspective: the idea that “the commons” – is an important and helpful way of framing the important themes of present times. As there can only be so many Intergroups, inevitably the group is the result of a political compromise. It has been formed by Members of the European Parliament from the Greens, the left group GUE, the large Social Democrat party (S&D) and the group EFDD which now includes Beppe Grillo with his Cinque Stelle party. The movement on water as a commons has been instrumental for the mobilization of the intergroup. 

For political reasons, the Commons Intergroup is one of two subgroups of the European Parliamentary intergroup on Common Goods and Public Services. MEP Marisa Matias from GUE is the president of the Commons Intergroup.

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