Peer2Politics

“Historically, cooperatives have been primarily focused around providing support and service to the members. Cooperatives, which are basically a democratic and collective form of enterprise where members have control rights and democratically direct the operations of the co-op, have been the primary stakeholders in any given co-op – whether it’s a consumer co-op, or a credit union, or a worker co-op. That has been the traditional form of cooperatives for a long time now. Primarily, the co-op is in the service of its immediate members. That has changed over the last 15 years or so, particularly in the field of the provision of social care.

We seek to stir these conversations and create situations where dialogue is emergent, in the absence of abject evasion. To this end, we will seek to publicize demonstrations, events, and talks that contribute to bridging these worlds, not only for the sake of conceptual clarity and enhanced analyses but for the transformative manifestation of emancipatory commons potentialities.

1. We believe the most import­ant divi­sion in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk polit­ics of loc­al­ism, dir­ect action, and relent­less hori­zont­al­ism, and those that out­line what must become called an accel­er­a­tion­ist polit­ics at ease with a mod­ern­ity of abstrac­tion, com­plex­ity, glob­al­ity, and tech­no­logy. The former remains con­tent with estab­lish­ing small and tem­por­ary spaces of non-?capitalist social rela­tions, eschew­ing the real prob­lems entailed in facing foes which are intrins­ic­ally non-?local, abstract, and rooted deep in our every­day infra­struc­ture. The fail­ure of such polit­ics has been built-?in from the very begin­ning. By con­trast, an accel­er­a­tion­ist polit­ics seeks to pre­serve the gains of late cap­it­al­ism while going fur­ther than its value sys­tem, gov­ernance struc­tures, and mass patho­lo­gies will allow.

“First of all we talk about radical transparency – because, like we said before, we believe in ‘social by open.’ See the potential disruptive genius of Fairphone – co-invested in by our friends at BGV – who are attacking the socially unjust & environmentally destructive dirty secrets of the smartphone industry by making their own smartphone. By being absolutely transparent about where their raw materials come from, they aim to force better working practices right across the industry. A great social-by-open start-up story – but equally, radical transparency applies to tax behaviour, remuneration, ownership, political lobbying – as Indy Johar explained in his draft for an Open Limited Sector. 

“Regardless, the biggest difference between the new Net parties and the old is something else: their open program. Both the Pirate Party and Partido de Internet have very specific objectives regarding Internet freedom, free licenses and participatory democracy. And Equo doesn’t try to hide its green face. The Candidatura d´Unitat Popular (CUP) – a Net-born Catalonian Party – defines itself as “Anticapitalist, Separatist Left”. Despite this, Net parties are, above all, open processes. They are also, by choice, unfinished mechanisms. The aim is to create platforms, protocols and tools that can employed by others. Anyone can use the mechanism, regardless of the content created with it.”

“a network of Worker-Owned Tech Collectives: “worker cooperatives (businesses owned and democratically controlled by our workers) offering a wide range of media, communications, and computer technology goods and services.”

 

“We are a Chilean group called “Red de Evolución Colaborativa” (Collaborative Evolution Network), RedEC. We work in the study, analysis, implementation and promotion of alternative production models.

“Just beneath the surface of traditional media attention, something vital has been gathering force and is about to explode into public consciousness. The “New Economy Movement” is a far-ranging coming together of organizations, projects, activists, theorists and ordinary citizens committed to rebuilding the American political-economic system from the ground up.

“The International Simultaneous Policy Organisation (ISPO) is a growing association of citizens worldwide who use their votes in a coordinated, effective way to drive all nations to co-operate in solving our planetary crisis. ISPO goes beyond merely demanding greater political accountability by offering citizens a new way of restoring genuine democracy lawfully and peacefully, one vote at a time.”

“Despite the fall of actually-existing socialism, the idea of computerized economic planning continued to be developed by small groups of theorists, who have advanced its conceptual scope further than anything attempted by Soviet cyberneticians. Two schools have been of particular importance: the ‘New Socialism’ of Scottish computer scientists Paul Cockshott and Alan Cottrell (1993); and the German ‘Bremen School’, which includes Peter Arno (2002) and Heinz Dieterich (2006), the latter an advocate of Venezuelan-style ‘Twenty First Century Socialism’. These tendencies have recently converged (Cockshott, Cottrell & Dieterich, 2010). However, because little of the Bremen group’s work is translated, the focus here will be on the New Socialism of Cockshott and Cottrell.