• Translated by Stacco Troncoso, edited by Jane Loes Lipton - Guerrilla Translation!
• Image by ABCNT
• Original article, published at Soy Pública

Lately, we’ve been talking about the techniques of manipulation used by the government and mass media, regarding the privatization of public education, and all public benefits.

In these first months of legislature, the better part of this manipulation has been aimed at rendering us into a state of shock, after which, intimidated and paralyzed, we would not react against the losses of rights brutally imposed on us. The measures, announcements and declarations of the autonomic and central governments are meted out to us day by day, gradually, like a poisonous drip of constant anxiety.  Relentlessly, the media – in some cases, better to say “propagandists” – continues their tireless preaching, like a disheartening echo of bad news from on high (from the council of ministers or the rating agencies).

Naomi Klein explains in her book, “The Shock Doctrine”, how neo-liberalism, unable to convince people by means of argument (since these neo-liberal measures are essentially anti-people), has only been able to impose itself via coups d’etat, declarations of war, situations of catastrophic natural disaster, or other traumatic phenomena, leaving the public in the grip of anxiety and fear.

And what, if not fear, are they trying to inoculate us with in this country? Fear of losing our jobs, for example, or of never again being able to find work, or of being offered nothing more than exploitation, plain and simple; fear of losing the right to healthcare,l or being unable to provide adequate education for children; fear of ending up foreclosure victims, sleeping on the street; fear, finally, of being unjustly arrested for peacefully protesting at a demonstration.

In this article, we examine how the shock doctrine takes effect on us under the name “learned helplessness”. But also, how we can escape this state of despondency if we learn to correctly attribute the causes of our malaise.

Learned Helplessness, a weapon of mass destruction

It’s true enough that the powers that be treat us like dogs, or at least like the dogs in Seligman’s experiment.

At the end of the Sixties, psychologist Martin Seligman carried out the following experiment. Inside a lab cage, a dog was exposed to a series of unavoidable electric shocks. Meanwhile, in a different cage, another dog would be able to interrupt these shocks by pressing a lever. Later, both dogs would be situated over an electrified surface from which they could escape by simply jumping over a barrier. The dog that had been able to control the electric shocks would jump the barrier, while the other dog, instead of looking for a successful exit from an adverse situation, stayed, passively bearing the shocks. This dog had “learned” his helplessness. Why waste the energy trying to escape from the negative stimuli when you know (really, more like believe) that you can’t?

Learned helplessness leads to depression. Not doing anything, because you think it’s all useless.

In the following video, we see a teacher inducing learned helplessness on a group of students through a simple activity.

From this we can infer that, given the current power of media propaganda, it’s feasible to induce a state of depression in large sectors of the population. Thanks to this video, it’s easier to understand why the victims of Nazi Germany accepted their deaths with little resistance, in much the same way that abused women often accept their fate with resignation:

To activate English subtitles, press captions button at the lower right

It’s terrible, isn’t it? But not as terrible as realizing that this inoculation by way of learned helplessness is, precisely, what’s being done to us. Right now. They’re trying to convince us to passively accept the loss of our rights and the privatization of public services with no resistance or protest. The slogan is: it’s useless no matter what we do.

We, like the dogs in Seligman’s experiments, are submitted to shocks, better known by their euphemisms “adjustments” or “cuts”. These shocks are apparently unavoidable, no matter how many times we go on strike, take part in informative actions or protests. Furthermore, many protesters become victims of unjustified arrests and preemptive prison sentences, hardly compatible with fundamental human rights.

Greece, which has suffered this commons-stripping for far longer, has seen depression spread like wildfire among the people. The suicide rate has skyrocketed. In his article entitled “¿Y si no hiciésemos nada?” (And what if we didn’t do anything?), philosopher Amador Fernández-Savater echoes this desperation that has taken hold of the Greeks.

More than 10 general strikes in Greece, but has anything been achieved? Alexandra-Odette Kypriotaki has taken part in the movement since 2008, only to move to London with that very question in mind. “In my country, you can’t even find a job as a waitress”, she told me. I met her in a meeting organised by thinker-activist Franco Berardi (Bifo) in Barcelona. Her presentation there was as evocative as it was challenging.

Reflecting on the underlying logic of conflict and protest, both impotent in preventing social devastation, repression and destruction, Alexandra proposed a new start from a different angle. “Neither fighting nor confronting, but deserting; neither demanding nor pleading, but unfolding, here and now, the world we want to live in. Neither taking action nor mobilising, but giving ourselves over to abandon. Turning our weakness into strength.”

Capitalism demands from us a constant disposition towards desire, contact, production. Where time is permanently occupied and under pressure to deliver results. Nowadays, being happy, optimistic and positive is obligatory. We must constantly project the image of knowing what’s up, that everything is going fine, it’s all under control, and we’re strong. But, doesn’t political activism often demand the same? Struggle, results, a ready answer for everything, constant high morale, rejection of the meek, doubtful and melancholic…

Couldn’t we muster up an army of the weak, the clumsy, the ignorant? The rallying cry could be, “Yes, we’re depressed, so what?” The program: “I don’t know”. The strike, doing absolutely nothing, not even mobilising ourselves. Do nothing day… Wednesday, then Thursday and so on.”

The figure of the helpless punisher

Arbitrary electric shocks, administered at regular intervals and beyond our control. Shocks, or the looting they call “cuts” or “deficit control”. Psychological abuse, bordering on the limits of, what just a few months ago, would have seemed like dystopian fiction: “IMF Requests That Pensions be Lowered Because of “The Risk That People Will Live Longer Than Expected”.

Rating agencies, international organisms (IMF, WB, OECD, WTO) in service to the financial elite, the European commission and the ECB… they all subject us to a series of demands and adjustments, gradual though inexorable. Of course, we are assured there is nothing we can do. On the other hand, cases like Iceland are silenced in the mass media.

What is the role of our leaders in this situation? Simply, to be efficient executors of this pillage ordered “from above”. “We have to do what we have to do”; “The European Union demands it from us”; “We must increase confidence in the markets”, etc.

There’s no point labelling the politicians who carry out these tasks as “evil” or “sadistic”, although it’s often tempting, given some of their statements. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt expressed her concept of the banality of evil: a mediocre Nazi civil servant like Adolf Eichmann was perfectly able to perform mass murders, not out of cruelty, but simply because he acted from within the rules of the system he belonged to, without reflecting on his acts. What Eichmann did was expertly carry out orders given from superiors, just as politicians in government do with the mandates of those representing the interests of financial capital. And they are unable to question the rules they follow, having been blinded by the tenets of the dominant ideology, neo-liberalism, which additionally legitimises the fact that these same leaders – or their friends and family – profit from it in ways which we would consider immoral, thanks to the loss of social rights of the citizenry and the privatization of the public sector.

Adding insult to injury, the government can even present itself to public opinion as mere victims of learned helplessness. This is typified by phrases like “I’d like to do something else, but I can’t do anything; the orders come from above. If I acted differently, the consequences would be much worse”. These selfsame heads of state become public models for learned helplessness. And, as we well know, the best way to lead is by example. This was the case when former Spanish president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was called by Barack Obama. But now, with our current president, Mariano Rajoy, this phenomenon has been so exacerbated that he himself has become a living example of helplessness and weakness, with his cheat sheets at public appearances, his absences, his gestures and actions. Here we see him in the Senate, running away from journalists eager to ask him about the latest budget cuts in education and healthcare:

In conclusion, what these politicians are showing us by “playing helpless” is that our country is no longer sovereign, but subject to the orders of those truly in charge: the famous “markets”. So why not be honest and consistent, and simply resign, and let Spain become a protectorate of financial capital just like Italy and Greece? Perhaps our role within the shock doctrine has not yet been totally fulfilled. We’re still not fully subject to learned helplessness. But how can we prevent it from defeating us completely?

Better living through attribution

To fend off learned helplessness, Seligman applies Fritz Heider’s attribution theory. In Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, he studies three dimensions or characteristics of the attributional style, also called causal attribution:

1. Personalisation: whereby internal or external causes are attributed to good or bad events. Either I feel guilty when I do something wrong “because that’s the way I am”, or I’m able to externalise the problem and hold myself responsible for making changes. This dimension is related to self-esteem. Attributing bad events to external causes increases immunity to learned helplessness.
2. Permanence: the duration, stability or instability in time which we attribute the causes underlying good or bad events. Extreme examples are expressed through discourse in the always – never poles. Thinking that the causes behind bad events are stable, permanent or even definitive, makes us more vulnerable to learned helplessness.
3. Penetration: how many areas in our lives are affected by our good or bad luck, whether these causes affect us globally or specifically. Expressed through discourse in the all-nothing extremes.

On the other hand, in their paper on learned helplessness and its immunisation in human subjects, José Ramón Yela Bernabé and José Luis Marcos Malmierca also refer to the importance of our controllability of events.

1) Depersonalisation: the problem lies in the situation, not within us

Another strategy used by the powers that be to trigger learned helplessness is encouraging us to blame ourselves for what is happening. We’re told that we’ve “lived beyond our means”, when in reality, the means allowed to those at the bottom were well below the standards of a decent life, as evidenced by low wages and the lack of basic resources such as housing.

Geographer David Harvey offers his systemic explanation for what is happening. According to him, we’re living through a process of accumulation by dispossession. With the fall in wages since the 70s, increases in profits are being absorbed by the capitalist class due to the privatization of common goods, the financialization of the economy, the management and manipulation of the crisis, and the uneven redistribution of resources. The author gives an overview of the current crisis in the following video:

Authors such as Vicenç Navarro have pointed out that the lack of resources amongst popular classes has provoked rising debt levels, and not the other way around. Had we enjoyed a public policy defending universal access to decent housing, people wouldn’t have gone into such levels of debt, and the housing and credit bubbles that led to the crisis never would have occurred.

So, we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that the blame for this “crisis” (accumulation by dispossession) is ours. We must get beyond the mass media information overload, and analyse the underlying causes of the current social, economic and cultural model so we can help mitigate the harmful effects, and even propose new and different alternative models.

2) The crisis is also a crisis of the dominant economic paradigm

Regarding the stability of the source of our problem, we must ask ourselves: can this accumulation by dispossession go on forever? Are we now at the endpoint of history? Far from it. Many have pointed out that we are living through a global crisis in capitalism owing to ecological limits which impede the model of infinite accumulation and growth. The late Spanish ecologist Ramón Fernández Durán has, like many others, indicated that the predictable depletion of fossil fuels will lead to the collapse of our civilisation.

The documentary “The Story of Stuff” does a fine job of describing the human and ecological limits of the current mode of production:

So, instead of worrying about what’s happening, shouldn’t we be looking for alternatives already?

3) Opportunities for emancipation

Regarding the penetration of the problem; is our entire being negatively affected by this pillaging of the Commons?

While the crisis/scam is undoubtedly affecting a good portion of our lives, due to unemployment, ever worsening public services and the loss of human rights, it’s also worth remembering that there is life – a lot of life – beyond the crisis.

Now is the time to explore new ways of relating to ourselves, to others and to our environment. The time to look for new modes of life.

This economic model, even at its peak, was still the cause of dissatisfaction. Beneath the surface of consumerism, mutated into a pyramid scheme thanks to the abundance of easy credit, lurked a modern version of King Midas. Everything touched by the model was converted into goods, right down to our lives and the most intimate corners of our minds.

Alienation has never reached such extremes. While in the times of Fordism and mass production, the worker was alienated during his or her work time; nowadays, capital extracts profits from the totality of our lives.

The Commons, that which we all share, is what’s being “expropriated” by some, the 1% of the population, to keep on accumulating capital. Advertising appropriates our common culture to invade our brains with consumer programming. We relate to others under the criteria informed by rentability, and we ourselves become merchandise to be sold off in the labour market or when we try to draw benefits in our personal lives.

The part of our lives affected by the crisis is, therefore, miniscule compared with everything that this crisis of the system can offer us:

The best way to increase happiness is through interpersonal relationships. Fostering cooperative relationships instead of those based on competition. All that’s given shall not be lost.

Not allowing cognitive creation (our thoughts, arts, and knowledge) to be expropriated from the common intellect by means of so-called intellectual property; an illegitimate appropriation that answers to the interests of big corporations dedicated to the production and distribution of cultural and technological products.

The promotion of commons-based economy, where instead of rentability, value resides in a model of cooperative enterprises dedicated to improving both society and the environment.

Ending the predominance of financial economy over productive economy. Overcoming the scam that is the private issue of money as debt which enslaves persons and peoples through its mechanisms.

Rallying for initiatives such as basic income, so that people may work freely, and not be forced to work for subsistence. Natural resources are a common good.

And, to complement this basic income, why not propose — as F.D. Roosevelt did in his day —  a wage ceiling, to be taxed at a rate of 100% once surpassed? As J.J Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract, “…in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.”

Value ecological proposals such as degrowth: consuming less, manufacturing less, designing totally recyclable objects and using less energy. Developing local economies.

Constructing autonomous distribution channels independent from the large-scale distributors that control practically all commercial activity, from production to retail.

Reconstruct the public sphere in a truly democratic manner, with the participation of everyone and as equals.

The future is, partly, in our hands

Finally, what is our capacity for control of our situation? In the previously cited article, Yela Bernabé and José Luis Marcos Malmierca argue that, in order to immunize ourselves from learned helplessness, the best thing is to have encountered neither success nor failure exclusively. Be conscious that there are things which we can control, and things which we cannot. As Epicurus remarked: “We must remember that the future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours, so that neither must we count upon it as quite certain to come nor despair of it as quite certain not to come.”

There are many examples of resistance to accumulation by dispossession that have triumphed in the world, such as the water in Bolivia or the insurrection in Chiapas. Never forget that history is mostly written by those above, who are happy to remind us only of the defeats suffered by those who struggled for emancipation.

Here in Spain, despite the clumsy first steps of a child learning to walk, the 15 M movement has obtained some notable successes as well as international projection. It has raised awareness about the root of our problems among a large sector of the population, it has put together very diverse social movements and it represents an excellent starting point for the development of cooperatives and solidarity networks.

Of course, we will make mistakes, but errors are what make us wiser.

Acting to open possibilities

In summary, faced with the fear that surrounds us, we must always remember that what is happening is not our fault, that the crisis is a crisis of the current economic model –  which is not stable, it is anything but stable – and that this change can be an opportunity for a new, more humane world, free from the tyranny of money and other goods.

And, above all, let us never forget Alain Badiou’s teaching: we must act. Our actions do not have to fall within what’s possible; instead, the action itself can open up a new space of possibility. “A subject is a point of conversion of the possible into the possible. The fundamental operation of the subject is to be at the point where something impossible becomes a possibility”.

Guerrilla Translation/Related:Unity sans Convergence/ Madrilonia/@PinkNoise RevDisneyland: An Immunized Utopia/ Juan Domingo Sánchez EstopStrength and Power: Reimagining Revolution/ Amador Fernández-Savater

Cooperativism, Peer Production and community venture funds for the Commons. 

• Transcripted from the original audio by Jane Loes Lipton for Guerrilla Translation!
• Main image by Stacco Troncoso
• This transcript is also available as a Spanish translation

Can commons-oriented peer production be applied to material production? Will activists and contributors to the commons always be forced to work within capitalist structures to subsist while investing their available free time in volunteer activities? How can we create socially-oriented companies without the start-up capital to fund them? Is there a model that will allow us to make a living, produce goods and services and even compete with the dominant hegemony?

In this fascinating conversation hosted by KMO from the C-Realm Podcast, Michel Bauwens, Dmytri Kleiner and John Restakis tackle these questions, and arrive at a series of proposals combining new models of social co-ops with commons-oriented peer production and systems for collective financing.

Michel Bauwens, John Restakis, Dmytri Kleiner

KMO: You are listening to the C-Realm Podcast, I am your host, KMO, and I am joined from Quito, Ecuador, by Dmytri Kleiner, Michel Bauwens, and John Restakis, so I’ll introduce you each individually. Dmytri Kleiner, this is our second conversation, although his first appearance on the C-Realm Podcast. He is a venture communist and the author of the Telekommunist Manifesto. Dmytri, welcome to the C-Realm Podcast.

Dmytri: Thank you, KMO.

KMO: Say just a little bit more about yourself. Don’t say anything about what brings you to Ecuador, though, I’ll ask you about that in a moment.

Dmytri: I’m a member of the collective called Telekommunisten. We make artworks that investigate the political economy of information, and especially the ways the Internet and social media has developed. As part of doing that, there’s a lot of writing that goes along with it, including the Telekommunist Manifesto, which looks at the history of copyright, and the history of networks and communication platforms from a materialist perspective.

KMO: And Michel Bauwens, you are back on the C-Realm Podcast, you are the founder of the P2P Foundation, and you’re working to achieve the commons-based society that can operate within a reformed market and state. Welcome back to the C-Realm Podcast.

Michel Bauwens: Thanks, it’s an honor.

KMO: And also John Restakis, the author of Humanizing the Economy, Cooperatives in the Age of Capital. John welcome to the C-Realm podcast, and please tell us a bit more about yourself.

John: Right, I have been involved with the cooperative movement, primarily in Canada, over the last 18, 19 years or so.  Up until this summer I was executive director for the BC Cooperative Association, and I have been involved with writing and lecturing around cooperative economies and globalization. I’ve done a lot of work around co-op development, both in Canada and internationally, paying a lot of attention to the evolution of the cooperative model, for the creation of a new kind of market as a response to the failed neoliberal paradigm that we’re living through at the moment.

KMO: Michel, let’s start with you. You are all three in Quito, Ecuador, as invited speakers for a conference there. If you would, say a little bit about the conference, and why the conference organizers invited you in particular, what you bring to the table for this discussion.

Michel: John and I are working on something called the FLOKSociety Project. FLOK means free, libre, open knowledge society. It’s based on a speech that Pres. Rafael Correa gave some months ago where he asked young people to work and fight for open, commons knowledge-based society. Three official organisms signed an agreement, the Ministry of Knowledge, and the SENESCYT which is like an open innovation in science secretariat, and the postgraduate University of the state, called EIAN. These three asked us to provide a transition program to move Ecuador towards a commons-based model. I’m the research director and John Restakis is a research stream coordinator about institutional innovation. The other thing is the conference which you asked about, called Minga. It’s about technological sovereignty. Now that we know that everything we do is monitored and surveilled, especially by British and American intelligence, the questions are, is there anything we can do about it, is there anything we can do to preserve our privacy, protect our communications from systematic spying? And both Dmytri and I are speaking in the conference. I’m introducing the FLOK society to this public of quite committed free software activists here in Ecuador. Dmytri, do you want to add something about the conference?

FLOKSociety website

Dmytri: Sure. I’m here as a member of the free software community. I’m a developer, and have been for a long time. I introduced a critical analysis within the community which often feels that technology can solve all our problems. There is a very common attitude of the free software community that all we need to do is code better software and we can overcome things. So the reason we can’t defeat Facebook is that we simply haven’t coded a better thing. I don’t understand the problem in those ways, I understand the problem politically and economically, in that the modes of communication we use are very tightly coupled with the modes of production that finance them, so I was invited here to express that opinion in this group.

Michel: John do you want to add anything?

John: Just to say that, I’m part of the research team that Michel just outlined for the FLOK society project. I’m not actually participating in this conference, I’m not a techie by any means and I’m having a hard time just following the conversation when I go to one of those things. I’m focused on the policy formation around this transition to a new, open knowledge and commons-based economy, and that’s the research work I’m doing here. Perhaps I can pitch this back to Michel, and ask if you can provide the framework for the conversation we’re going to have, kind of an echo of what we talked about the other day.

Michel: I’d like to start with outlining the issue, the problem around the emergence of peer production within the current neoliberal capitalist form of society and economy that we have. We now have a technology which allows us to globally scale small group dynamics, and to create huge productive communities, self-organized around the collaborative production of knowledge, code, and design. But the key issue is that we are not able to live from that, right?

Michel Bauwens

The situation is that we have created communities consisting of people who are sometimes paid, sometimes volunteers, and by using open licenses, we are actually creating commonses – think about Linux, Wikipedia, Arduino, those kinds of things. But what is the problem? The problem is I can only make a living by still working for capital. So, there is an accumulation of the commons on the one side, we are effectively producing a commons, but we don’t have what Marx used to call social reproduction. We cannot create our own livelihood within that sphere. The solution that I propose is related to the work of Dmytri Kleiner – Dmytri proposed some years ago to create a peer production license. I’ll give you my interpretation of it; you can only use our commons if you reciprocate to some degree. So, instead of having a totally open commons, which allows multinationals to use our commons and reinforce the system of capital, the idea is to keep the accumulation within the sphere of the commons. Imagine that you have a community of producers, and around that you have an entrepreneurial coalition of cooperative, ethical, social, solidarity enterprise.

The idea is that you would have an immaterial commons of codes and knowledge, but then the material work, the work of working for clients and making a livelihood, would be done through co-ops. The result would be a type of open cooperative-ism, a kind of synthesis or convergence between peer production and cooperative modes of production. That’s the basic idea. I think that a number of things are happening around that, like solidarity co-ops, and other new forms of cooperative-ism. I would like John to briefly explain what that means.

John: First I should just mention that as I said earlier, I’ve been involved in the co-op movement, both in Canada and internationally for the last 17 or 18 years or so, but I’m relatively new to what I am calling the new commons movement. It’s largely through the interaction with Michel and others from that sphere that I’m becoming aware now of how extensive and vibrant this new commons movement is. So, the question for me has always been how to reimagine and reinterpret the cooperative model as a response to the current crisis, and beyond, that we’re living in at the moment.

John Restakis

Historically, the cooperative movement goes back long way, and it’s achieved enormous successes all around the world, both in the North and South. But it hasn’t had much of a direct connection to this emerging commons movement, which shares so many of the values and  principles of the traditional cooperative movement. One of the issues I’m interested in addressing is how to bridge this gap between the cooperative movement internationally, and the international commons movement. There is very little dialogue between those two. I think there is a need for convergence between the traditional historical cooperative movement in this new form of commons, which is finding its voice now as a new way of thinking about social relationships, production relationships, developing new kinds of economies, as Michel just outlined.

This reinterpretation of the cooperative model as a particular form can add a lot of stability and strength and power to the commons movement. As far as I can see, it’s still largely a technology movement. There’s also a lot of peer-to-peer work going on, but it’s not very well versed around issues like cooperative organization, formal or legal forms of ownership, which are based on reciprocity and cooperation, and how to interpret the commons vision with a structure, an organizational structure and a legal structure that actually gives it economic power, market influence, and a means of connecting it to organizational forms that have durability over the long-term.

Michel: I’d like to add something. I experience this on a human level almost daily. The young people, the developers in open source or free software, the people who are in co-working centers, hacker spaces, maker spaces. When they are thinking of making a living, they think startups. They have been very influenced by this neoliberal atmosphere that has been dominant in their generation. They have a kind of generic reaction, “oh, let’s do a startup”, and then they look for venture funds. But this is a very dangerous path to take. Typically, the venture capital will ask for a controlling stake, they have the right to close down your start up whenever they feel like it, when they feel that they’re not going to make enough money. They forbid you to continue to work in the same sector after your company has failed, and you have a gag order, so you don’t even have free speech to talk about your negative experience. This is a very common experience. Don’t forget that with venture capital, only 1 out of 10 companies will actually make it, and they may be very rich, but it’s a winner-take-all system.

There is a real lack of knowledge within the young generation that there are other forms of enterprise possible. I think that the other way is also true. A lot of co-ops have been neo-liberalizing, as it were, have become competitive enterprises competing against other companies but also against other co-ops, and they don’t share their knowledge. They don’t have a commons of design or code, they privatize and patent, just like private competitive enterprise, their knowledge. They’re also not aware that there’s a new way of becoming more competitive through increased cooperation of open knowledge commons. This is the human side of it, and we need to work on the knowledge and mutual experience of these two sectors. Both are growing at the same time; after the crisis of 2008, we’ve had an explosion of the sharing economy and the peer production economy on the one side, but also a revitalization of the cooperative sector. Before Dmytri intervenes, I would like John to talk about the solidarity co-ops, and how that integrates the notion of the commons or the common good in the very structure of the co-op.

John: 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.

Cadiai Socil Coop, Bologna

Social co-ops emerged in the late 70s in Italy as a response to a market failure within public services in Italy. Groups of families or users of social services, primarily originally from within a community of people with disabilities, decided to organize cooperatives as a better way of designing and providing services to themselves. This is a very different model from the state-delivered services to these people. What was really fascinating about the social co-ops was that, although they had members, their mission was not only to serve the members but also to provide service to the broader community. And so, they were communitarian, community service organizations that had a membership base of primary users of that service, whether it was healthcare, or help for people with drug addictions, or whatever.

These social co-ops have now exploded in Italy. I think they have taken over, in a sense, the provision of social care services in many communities under contracts to local municipalities. In the city of Bologna, for example, over 87% of the social services provided in that city are provided through contract with social co-ops. These are democratically run organizations, which is a very different model, much more participatory, and a much more engaged model of designing social care than the traditional state delivered services. The idea of co-ops as being primarily of interest in serving their own immediate membership has been expanded to include a mandate for the provision of service to the community as a whole. This is an expansion of this notion of cooperatives into a more commons-based kind of mission, which overlaps with the philosophy and values of commons movement. The difference, however, is that the structure of social co-ops is still very much around control rights, in other words, members have rights of control and decision-making within how that organization operates. And it is an incorporated legal structure that has formal recognition by the legislation of government of the state, and it has the power, through this incorporated power, to negotiate with and contract with government for the provision of these public services. One of the real strengths of the cooperative form is that it not only provides a democratic structure for the enterprise – be it a commercial or social enterprise – but it also has a legal form that allows it to enter into contract and negotiate legal agreements with the state for the provision of public services. This model of co-op for social care has been growing in Europe. In Québec they’re called Solidarity co-ops, and they are generating an increasing portion of market share for the provision of services like home care and healthcare, and it’s also growing in Europe.

Sollievo social-healthcare coop, Bologna

So, the social economy, meaning organizations that have a mutual aim in their purpose, based on the principles of reciprocity, collective benefit, social benefit, is emerging as an important player for the design and delivery of public services. This, too, is in reaction to the failure of the public market for provision of services like affordable housing or health care or education services. This is a crisis in the role of the state as a provider of public services. So the question has emerged: what happens when the state fails to provide or fulfill its mandate as a provider or steward of public goods and services, and what’s the role of civil society and the social economy in response? Social co-ops have been part of this tide of reaction and reinvention, in terms of civic solutions to what were previously state-designed and delivered public goods and services. So I’ll leave it at that for the moment, but it’s just an indicator of the very interesting ways in which the co-op form is being reimagined and reinvented to respond to this crisis of public services and the changing role of the state.

Michel: Before introducing Dmytri, I’d like to reiterate one of the key problems that maybe Dmytri’s proposals will be able to solve. John has been explaining public services, but what about material production? This is where the issue arises: we have commonses of knowledge, code and design. They’re more easily created, because as a knowledge worker, if you have access to the network and some means, however meager, of subsistence, through effort and connection you can actually create knowledge. However, this is not the case if you move to direct physical production, like the open hardware movement.

What we see in the free software movement is that there are democratic foundations like the Apache foundation or the Gnu foundation, which means that the community has its own organization. In hardware, we don’t see that, because you need to buy material, machines, plastic, metal. Some people have called the open hardware community a “candy” economy, because if you’re not part of these open hardware startups, you’re basically not getting anything for your efforts. Dmytri’s offering us a vision of a commons of material means of production which I’d like him now to explain. He uses what I think is a bit provocative as a concept, the concept of “venture communism”. You think about venture, you think about venture capital, right?  Dmytri, can you tell us what you mean?

Dmytri: In the 90s, I was part of the anarchist-communist, anti-globalization movement. At the same time I was also making a living as an IT consultant in a very dotcom-fueled environment. I was a really big believer in what we now call peer production. We didn’t have these terms back then, but what we now call peer production, which attempts to describe the ways that people cooperate on networks, or within free software. I envisioned this transforming our social relationships worldwide, and achieving the age-old dreams of anarchist-communism. But that all came crashing down in the early 2000s, with the dotcom bust, and the George Bush administration’s massive crackdown on protests, from Seattle, Québec City, Miami. All of a sudden, the unstoppable-ness of our movement seemed to be stopped, it seemed to be something that I couldn’t believe in anymore.

I quickly realized that this network that we were building – the Internet and the free software community – was largely enabled by our jobs for the dotcom bubble, for capitalism.  It was being funded by venture capital. Realizing that venture capital wouldn’t fund the anarchist-communist social relationships that we believed were embedded in these platforms, it became clear that we needed something else. So I called that something else “venture communism”, with the intention to study what that might look like, and how we might achieve it. I originally encountered Michel after seeing some talks by Benkler and Lessig at the Wizard of OS 4, in 2006, and I wrote an essay criticizing that from a materialist perspective, it was called “The creative anti-commons and the poverty of networks”, playing on the terms that both those people used.

Lawrence Lessig y Yochai Benkler

The basis of the criticism in both cases was that they were describing peer production in a way that was very different from our conception. We didn’t have this term, this term came from Benkler, but we were talking about what we thought was the same thing. They conceive of peer production, especially Benkler, as being something inherently immaterial, a form of production that can only exist in the production of immaterial wealth. From my materialist point of view, that’s not a mode of production, because a mode of production must, in the first place, reproduce its productive inputs, its capital, its labor, and whatever natural wealth it consumes.

From a materialist point of view, it becomes  obvious that the entire exchange value produced in these immaterial forms would be captured by the same old owners of materialist wealth that existed before, after, and during. This was the beginning of my dialogue with Michel. I argued for a different definition of peer production, rather than as something that is inherently immaterial, I defined it as independent producers collectively sharing a commons of productive assets. That definition of peer production is much more compatible with anarchist-communist, anarchist-syndicalist roots, and also better describes the peer-to-peer technologies that inspired the term “peer production”.

So, to try to explain what “venture communism” is, which is my own project, predating the term “peer production”, but very relevant to it. I think we’re talking about the same thing, even if I was using different terms. As a technologist, I was also inspired by the functioning of peer networks and the organization of free software projects. These were also the inspiration for venture communism. I wanted to create something like a protocol for the formation and allocation of physical goods, the same way we have TCP/IP and so forth, as a way to allocate immaterial goods. The Internet gives us a very efficient platform on which we can share and distribute and collectively create immaterial wealth, and become independent producers based on this collective commons.

Henry George

Venture communism seeks to tackle the issue of how we can do the same thing with material wealth. I drew on lots of sources in the creation of this model, not exclusively anarchist-communist sources. One was the Georgist idea of using rent, economic rent, as a fundamental mutualizing source of wealth. Mutualizing unearned income is essentially what that means in layman’s terms. The idea is that people earn income not only by producing things, but by owning the means of production, owning productive assets, and our society is unequal because the distribution of productive assets is unequal.

Even within the cooperative movement, which I’ve always admired and held up as an example, it’s clear that the distribution of productive assets is also unequal. The same with other kinds of production; for example, if you look at the social power of IT workers versus agricultural workers, it becomes very clear that the social power of a collective of IT workers is much stronger than the social power of a collective agricultural workers. There is inequality in human and capital available for these cooperatives. This protocol would seek to normalize that, but in a way that doesn’t require administration. The typical statist communist reaction to the cooperative movement is saying that cooperatives can exclude and exploit one another, and that solution is either creating giant cooperatives like Mondragon, or socialist states.

Silvio Gessell

But then, as we’ve seen in history, there’s something that develops called an administrative class,  which governs over the collective of cooperatives or the socialist state, and can become just as counterproductive and often exploitive as capitalist class. So, how do we create cooperation among cooperatives, and distribution of wealth among cooperatives, without creating this administrative class? This is why I borrowed from the work of Henry George and Silvio Gesell in created this idea of rent sharing.

The idea is that the cooperatives are still very much independent just as cooperatives are now. The producers are independent, but instead of owning their productive assets themselves, each member of the cooperative owns these together with each member of every other cooperative in the Federation, and the cooperatives rent the property from the commune collectively. This is not done administratively, this is simply done as a protocol. The idea is that if a cooperative wants an asset, like, an example is if one of the communes would like to have a tractor, then essentially the central commune is like a bond market. They float a bond, they say I want a tractor, I am willing to pay $200 a month for this tractor in rent, and other members of the cooperative can say, hey, yeah, that’s a good idea,we think that’s a really good allocation of these productive assets, so we are going to buy these bonds. The bond sale clears, the person gets the tractor, the money from the rent of the tractor goes back to clear the bonds, and  after that, whatever further money is collected through the rent on this tractor – and I don’t only mean tractors, same would be applied to buildings, to land, to any other productive assets – all this rent that’s collected is then distributed equally among all of the workers.

So, the unearned income, the portion of income derived from ownership of productive assets is evenly distributed among all the cooperatives and all the stakeholders among those cooperatives, and that’s the basic protocol of venture communism.

Michel: Okay, Dmytri, just to make sure I understand it right, it’s like a basic income, right? In the sense that you have your wage, because you work, and then in addition you get this rent from all the productive forces held together by all the members of this economic unified cooperative production?

Dmytri: Exactly. Whatever productive assets you consume, you pay rent for, and that rent is divided equally among all members of the commune. Not the individual cooperatives, but the commune itself. This means that if you use your exact per capita share of property, no more no less than what you pay in rent and what you received in social dividend, will be equal. So if you are a regular person, then you are kind of moving evenly, right? But if you’re not working at that time, because you’re old, or otherwise unemployed, then obviously the the productive assets that you will be using will be much less than the mean and the median, so what you’ll receive as dividend will be much more than what you pay in rent, essentially providing a basic income. And conversely, if you’re a super motivated producer, and you’re greatly expanding your productive capacity, then what you pay for productive assets will be much higher than what you get in dividend, presumably, because you’re also earning income from the application of that property to production. So, venture communism doesn’t seek to control the product of the cooperatives. The product of the cooperatives is fully theirs to dispose of as they like. It doesn’t seek to limit, control, or even tell them how they should distribute it, or under what means; what they produce is entirely theirs, it’s only the collective management of the commons of productive assets.

Michel: Dmyitri, I think your theory has three constitutive elements, one is the venture communism, what are the two others? Can you briefly recall your idea of the peer production license, which I mentioned at the beginning?

Dmytri: Yes, first part is related to my critique of Benkler, and the peer production license comes, well, it predates it, but it enters this conversation between us through my critique of Lessig. The three constituent parts of venture communism were developed in speaking  to a lot of people involved in cooperatives and economists. On paper this would seem to work, but the problem is that this assumes that we have capital to allocate in this way, and that is not the case for most of the world workers. So, how do we get to that stage? And that’s where venture communism becomes an umbrella, venture communism being only one constituent element, the other two being counter politics and insurrectionary finance. The idea of counter politics is that there is a long-running feud in the communist community and socialist community and, actually, the activist community generally: do we express our activism through the state, or do we try to achieve our goals by creating the alternative society outside…

Michel: …pre-figurative politics…

Dmytri Kleiner

Dmytri: …pre-figurative politics, versus statist politics. And with the idea of counter politics, I’m trying to show that this is actually a false dilemma, because the idea of pre-figurative politics presupposes that we have the wealth in order to create these pre-figurative enterprises, these pre-figurative startups or co-ops or whatever. My materialist background tells me that when you sell your labor on the market, you have nothing more than your subsistence costs at the end of it, so where is this wealth meant to come from?  I believe that the only reason that we have any extra wealth beyond subsistence is because of organized social political struggle; because we have organized in labor movements, in the co-op movement, and in other social forms. We have fought for this, so that we now have more than our subsistence. And this is the reason that we can’t even consider pre-figurative solutions. To create the space for prefiguring presupposes engagement with the state, and struggle within parliaments, and struggle within the public social forum.

What I propose in counter politics is that we don’t think of engaging in party politics, as in the sort of classic Leninist party idea, that we will take the state, that we will impose new social relationships from the top down, and we will go through an intermediary stage of socialism, and we will finally achieve communism. This is a very problematic conception, and I’m not very hopeful that that kind of solution would work. Instead, we should think that no, we must engage in the state in order to protect our ability to have alternative societies, in order to protect the benefits that we have now, in order to protect the public services and the public goods, and the public benefits. We have to acknowledge that there are certain social functions that the state provides that are socially necessary, and we cannot do without them. We can only get rid of the state in these areas once we have alternative, distributed, cooperative means to provide those same functions. Just because we can imagine that they can exist doesn’t make them exist. We can only eliminate the state from these areas once they actually exist, which means we actually have to build them. We  have to create alternative ways to provision healthcare, childcare, education, to deal with human frailty and economic cycles, all these kinds of social functions the state provides that are socially necessary.

Michel: Okay, so what about insurrectionary finance, that’s your third…

Dmytri: There’s a strange corner of the activist community that’s called alternative economics, and this is almost held in the same disdain as conspiracy theory by most activist groups. Everybody thinks, oh, yes, alternative currencies and alternative kinds of things are kind of irrelevant to the social thing. What I mean by insurrectionary finance is that we have to acknowledge that it’s not only forming capital and distributing capital, it’s also important how intensively we use capital. We have to understand the role of money, the role of debt, the role of economic interactions, and how to model them in order to create a more intensive use of capital.

If you understand the capitalist economy, everybody knows that the amount of money in the economy is greatly expanded through economic things like loans,  securities, and various economic means where capital, especially finance capital, is used more intensively than it otherwise would, sometimes dangerously so. I’m not proposing that the cooperative movement needs to engage in the kind of derivative speculative madness that led to the financial crisis, but at the same time we can’t… it can’t be earn a dollar, spend a dollar. We have to find ways to create liquidity, to deal with economic cycles, and so we have to look at alternative economics in order to do that. And sometimes even not-so-alternative economics, as we’ve talked about before.

Paradoxically, I’m rather inspired by Michael Milken and the corporate raiders of the 80s that are famous for making junk bonds. They were sort of the financial side of the industrialization of the West, and their mechanisms were to issue junk bonds, low rated bonds, use these funds to buy corporations that work undervalued, and then basically strip the assets -   the land, the capital, just strip them down, close them, sell of the assets, repay the bonds, keep their huge profits, and rinse and repeat, as it were, over and over again.

The Junk Bond King, Michael Milken

And this to me is really interesting, because, on one hand, it’s horrible what they did, and the legacy of the damage that the corporate raiders had is pretty large. But on the other hand, it’s kind of inspiring because they did things the organized left hasn’t been able to do, which is takeover industrial means of production, right? So it seems to me that we should be inspired by that, and we should think, well, if they can take over these industrial facilities, just in order to shut them down and asset strip them, why can’t we take them over and mutualize them? It becomes even more ironic once you understand that the source of investment that Milken and his colleagues were working with were largely workers pension funds. It was actually the savings of workers -  achieved through social struggle as we’ve talked about before. Unions got together and struggled against the bosses to allow workers to save, which was already struggle one, then they put these savings into pension funds -  and then Milken and his followers sold their bonds to these pension funds and used this money to destroy the factories that the workers were working in.

Michel: I think it’s maybe time for John to make some comments on Dmytri’s ideas.

John: A couple of thoughts come to mind around the idea of venture communism – it’s great term by the way – and a new model for pooling, based on the capture of unearned income. It’s a very suggestive model, there are close models to this that are already being used by cooperatives to share machinery. For example, I know for example in Québec, there is a particular form of co-op that’s been developed that allows small or medium producers to pool their capital to purchase machinery and to use it jointly. It doesn’t have exactly the form that you’re talking about, which is this kind of bond issue, which is a very interesting idea, I’d love to see that applied.  The other idea I liked was trying to minimize a management class, within these systems. I know this varies from co-op to co-op and federation to federation, but I do know that in these kinds of shared pool systems of both capital and equipment, that the organizations that are put in place for the management of these systems are, by comparison to other forms of control, much more lean and accountable because they are accountable to boards of directors that represent the interests of the members. But I take your point around that. So, very interesting idea.

The second point that comes to my mind is around this tension that you described within the left, and among activists. It’s a tension around their relationship to the idea of the market, and to capital for that matter. I’ve run into this repeatedly among social change activists who immediately recoil at the notion of thinking about markets and capital, as part of their change agenda.

I think what was most revelatory to me around the cooperative movement was that I used to think of the same way. The most important lesson I took from my contact with the cooperative movement was a complete rethinking of economics. I had thought previously, like so many, that economics is basically a bought discipline, and that it serves the interests of existing elites. I really had a kind of reaction against that. When I saw and understood that cooperatives were another form of economics, a popular form of economics, it completely shifted my perception around what social change entails, with respect to the market. One of the things I think we really have to do is to recapture the initiative around vocabulary, and vision, with respect to economics.

Dmytri: Absolutely.

John: And a key part of that is reimagining and reinterpreting, for a popular and common good, the notion of market and capital. And that’s what cooperatives, among other kinds of systems, do. They reclaim the market. I think that’s a fundamental task, in terms of educating and advocating for a vision of social change that isn’t just about politics, and isn’t just about protest, it has to be around how do we reimagine and reclaim economics, and how do we develop forms where markets actually belong to communities and people, not just to corporations. Traditionally markets were not just a property of corporations and companies, and capital wasn’t just an accumulated wealth for the rich. Capital can be commons capital, it can be a commons market, and we need to come up with forms and models that actually realize that in practice, and that’s what the peer-to-peer movement is, that’s what the cooperative movement is, and we need to find ways of conjoining those two.

Dmytri: I agree.

FLOKSociety invertigator, Janice Figueredo

Michel: I agree too, and I think this is a really nice way to start our conclusion, just to make another reference to the project here in Ecuador. I think in many countries now, there are ministries of the social economy, of the solidarity economy, but they’re always seen as kind of marginal add-ons. I think what we’re potentially  talking about here is to make the social economy hyper-productive, hyper-competitive, hyper-cooperative. The paradox is that capital already knows this. Capital is investing in these peer production projects, and cooperatives are not yet massively turning that way, so this is what we have to achieve. Part of the proposal of the FLOK society project in Ecuador will be to get that strategic reorganization to make the social economy strategic, not just as an add-on to an existing neoliberal format. I think we’ve pretty much finished, but I just wanted to mention that the end of our discussion in the bar, I proposed that the P2P foundation, which has a co-op, would also try to create a seed form for what Dmytri proposes. I hope that they weren’t drunk when they were saying that, but John and Dmitri actually said they would cooperate (laughter). So, KMO, maybe you have a last question? I think that we’re nearly at the end of the allotted time.

KMO, host of the C-Realm Podcast

KMO: Well, we are at the end of the allotted time, I have been taking notes and I have a lot of questions (laughter). What I’ll have to do is get each of you on Skype individually in the coming weeks, and put my questions to you one-on-one, because I think that there’s at least three episodes worth of questions that I have here.

Michel: Yes, it’s very dense and I apologize to your listeners, l hope it wasn’t sleep inducing! but this is strategic, we’re talking about the DNA of the system, and I think that’s why it’s so important that we had this occasion to actually talk together and compare our perspectives.

KMO:  Well, I’m very happy to of been a party to it, and I’m looking forward to re-listening, because I know I’ll be taking a lot more information from the recording that you’ve made as as I listen to it and edit it for a one-hour podcast. Dmytri Kleiner, Michel Bauwens, and John Restakis, thank you very much for all the work you’re doing, and for participating on the C-Realm Podcast.

Michel: I also want to thank Bethany Horne, for facilitating this encounter, and Clara Robayo from Radialistas.net

This interview with Dmytri Kleiner, conducted by KMO for his C-Realm Podcast, was transcripted by Guerrilla Translation at KMO’s request. The audio was, unfortunately, unusable for the podcast because of background noise, but the resulting interview was too good to not to share. The following is re-posted from the C-Realm blog. 

KMO: You are listening to the C-Realm Podcast, I am your host, KMO, and I’m speaking with Dmytri Kleiner, venture capitalist and miscommunications technologist. Dmytri, welcome to the C-Realm Podcast.

Dmytri: Thank you, but that’s “venture communist.”

KMO: Did I say “capitalist?”

Dmytri: [chuckles] It’s an easy mistake.

KMO: You know, I’ve read the phrase “venture communist” several times in the past few hours in preparing for this interview, and yeah… it just rolled out “venture capitalist,” didn’t it?

Dmytri: [chuckles]

KMO: So, Dmytri Kleiner, “Venture Communist” – what does that mean?

Dmytri: Well, it’s sort of the name of a research project I started awhile ago. My background comes from the social justice movement of the 90s. I was part of some of the kinds of hacker groups that eventually became things like Indymedia, and stuff that we called technology affinity groups. At that time there was something going on called the dotcom boom, that you probably remember. A lot of us who were part of these hacker affinity groups supporting activist projects were working for these dotcoms.

Dmytri Kleiner

As the social justice movement began to fade, along with the dotcom boom itself going into bust, it became very clear to me that this was very problematic. These truly liberating and revolutionary communication platforms were not going to be funded by capital. And so, if venture capital wasn’t going to fund them, then we needed some other way to fund them. This is where the term originates from. It originates from the simple aversion to venture capital. If venture capital won’t fund what we need to do, then we have to create venture communism. And so, venture communism itself began as a research project. And over time, there has been some development of the concept, but I usually mean the term in the very broad sense. I have my own proposals that you’ll find in the manifesto and other texts for what approaches to venture communism might look like, or what a venture communism may be like, but I also use the term in a very broad sense that could include other ways of collectively forming the communication capital that we need.

KMO: I’ll just tell you a little bit about my relationship to capitalism and the dotcom period. I worked in customer service for Amazon.com from 1996 to 1998 and got some pretty decent stock options. When I sold them, I made more money with one phone call than I did in all the rest of my life selling my labor by the hour. I made that one call to the brokerage and said, “Exercise all of my options and sell the shares,” and I got about $660,000 with that call.

Dmytri: Wow…

KMO: Had I waited and made the call six weeks later, I would have made about $3 million.

Dmytri: Oh, wow.

KMO: And in hindsight, I’m so glad I didn’t wait. The money let me do what I wanted to do for many years, but then it ran out. By then I had moved to Arkansas where I was trying to start a homestead farm. That’s where I was living when I ran out of money and had to go back to work in my mid-30s, with a nearly decade-sized gap in my resume. There was not a lot of opportunity, really, in Berryville, Arkansas, in the early aughts. Well, I had a big change of heart, because, before that, I had been very much libertarian, politically. I had been a techno-utopian, a trans-humanist, and a Singularitarian. Those are meme complexes that tend to attract one another.

Dmytri: Sure.

KMO

KMO: Rarely are trans-humanists particularly critical of capitalism, or even cognizant that there might be something to criticize. And so, having to basically start again in my mid-30s, working really horrible jobs in sales – I started selling cell phones, and then I got into insurance, which is a really, really ugly business – my political views changed, and eventually my techno-utopian views gave way as well.

Now, I’m actively critical of capitalism. But I’m trying to articulate that criticism in such a way that it does not trigger an automatic ideological, reflexive rejection of what I have to say. Because, for so many people in this country, particularly in the middle of the country, the word “capitalism” just means “our side.” It represents everything that is right and good. Capitalism is synonymous with prosperity, and communism means totalitarian, evil dictatorship that brings austerity, and slavery. So, I’m trying to be very careful with my terms, but let me encourage you to say as much good as you can about the concepts of communism and peer to peer networks.

Dmytri: Well, I never imagined myself to be speaking to the masses or making an argument to the masses. From the beginning, I always considered myself to be an artist and to be somebody who had technological skills that could be of use to activist movements. So, I was never particularly concerned with the words that I used, and actually, I’ve always been rather attracted to strong or provocative language from “pirate” to “hacker” to “communist.” But, actually, now that I have, over the years, taken on a more “contributing to theory” kind of a role, I think that it’s quite important to continue using the word “communism”.

When I had my post-social justice, post-dotcom disillusionment, I started really engaging on a lot of forums where actual economists and political theorists participate. A little bit outside of the hacker community, in this sort of infoshop politics of “reclaim the streets,” and one thing that really frustrated the people that I was communicating with was that I wasn’t using any kind of language they recognized.

When you work in any kind of technical field, whether it’s computers, whether it’s politics, whether it’s economics, there is an established dialogue going on, and if you use the language that everybody else is using, that makes it a lot easier to communicate, to share ideas, and to really be very precise about what arguments you’re making. And so, I learned that I should understand the classical language, and that I should be able to use it.

A lot of people who like my work over the years that come from similar backgrounds as yourself, and they were reluctant to use the word “communism.” They would say, “Ah, this sounds really interesting, I like what you’re saying, but do we have to use that word? That word is so horrible and off-putting”. But, actually, that word connects you to hundreds of years of research and struggle and theory that goes far deeper and far broader than my own work does. So, by not just making up some random word – like what was it, “venture community-ism” was one of them, and other kinds of things – and by sticking to the word “communism,” it might connect you to that theory as well.

Another thing I think is really important is to understand that anything can go wrong. Anything can go badly. So even if we make up new words, it doesn’t mean that we will somehow protect ourselves from possible negative outcomes. By using the word “communism,” it is implicitly understood that negative outcomes are possible, because we have actually seen them. In using that word, we do it without naïveté. We use it with the understanding that it’s not necessarily problem-free.

KMO: I heard you say in a presentation, that when you use the word “communism,” you are talking about a theoretical society; one that has no historical example.

Dmytri: That’s true, but there are historical examples of people who tried to achieve it.

KMO: But there has never been a nation-state that embodied communism in the way that you’re describing it.

Dmytri: Well, there’s never been a nation-state that claimed to have achieved communism.

KMO: I think that’s an important point that American audiences in particular would find unfamiliar. Here, the Soviet Union is held up as the archetypal example of communism.

Dmytri: Right, but not a single leader of the Soviet Union would ever have claimed to have achieved communism.

KMO: I have been reading your “Telekommunist Manifesto,” and there’s one sentence from early in the manifesto that I think we could probably spend the rest of our time together just unpacking. So, let me read that, I’ll even read it twice, and then I’ll ask that you explain it piece by piece. You wrote, “The Internet started as a network that embodied the relations of peer-to-peer communism. However, it has been reshaped by capitalist finance into an inefficient and unfree client-server topology”.

So, let’s start with just the first part. “The Internet started as a network that embodied the relations of peer to peer communism”. Say more about that.

Dmytri: Well, for many of us in activist circles, in hacker circles in the 90s and some even before (that had access), the Internet didn’t just represent a new technology. It represented something that could have very broad social and political implications, in that, when you use the technology, especially the classic platforms of the Internet, – email, IRC, USENET, and the original classic platforms of the Internet – they didn’t mediate between users. All communication between users was based on mutual configurations. So therefore, if your computer and my computer agreed to exchange information with each other, we could do that without the mediation. Every intermediary node operated under the end-to-end principle, and just allowed us to communicate as if we were talking directly to each other. So this was very much a society of equals.

The “classic Internet” had this kind of ethos of sharing, like we really believed at that time that the Internet was uncensorable. We had this idea because of the topology, and because of the peer-to-peer nature of the communication tools we were using. But of course, what we didn’t fully realize back then, is that this Internet was very tiny.

The “classic Internet” had this kind of ethos of sharing, like we really believed at that time that the Internet was uncensorable. We had this idea because of the topology, and because of the peer-to-peer nature of the communication tools we were using. But of course, what we didn’t fully realize back then, is that this Internet was very tiny. It felt big to us, but it was really very tiny. It was mostly developed by universities, by NGOs, by the military, and other organizations, and the people developing it were developing it for use value, which is an important distinction in economics.

The people who were making things like email, make USENET, like IRC and Finger, were not making them so they could sell them for exchange. They were making them in order to use them. So it really embodied a communist ethic of “from each to each.” The people creating technology wanted to use and share it with everyone that needed it.

But of course, this can’t scale very much, in order for a communication system to be used by the billions of people on the planet, it can’t be entirely made by university students, NGOs and some military contractors. When the Internet became commercialized, it became commercialized by venture capital, and venture capital invests money not for use value but for exchange value. This means that when a venture capitalist provides money, he or she does so under the pretext that they will make more money in return. This is different from a use value Internet. It becomes an exchange value Internet. In order to capture exchange value, the network had to become less free. An internet that allows users to do whatever they want presents very limited opportunities for capitalists to earn profit.

In order to charge prices, communications could be centralized through areas where prices can be charged. And so, there you have the re-architecture of the Internet from what it was back then, based on peer-to-peer software like e-mail, IRC, USENET, Finger, and so forth, to what eventually became called social media, or, briefly, Web 2.0, which is where web applications were developed to mimic the kinds of interactions people were having on the real peer-topeer social media platforms of the early Internet, but in a client-server fashion reminiscent of the original capitalist online platforms like CompuServe, and the original AOL, where all users connected through a central point. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and other sorts of things used this same model, and by doing so, they were able to make a profit model based on the capture of user data and control of user interaction.

Dmytri Kleiner

KMO: This will be a little bit of an aside, but just for my own personal curiosity, when I first started using the Internet, I was a graduate student at the University of Missouri in the early 1990s, and I used IRC, email and USENET, and I also got into listserv discussion groups, but I’m not familiar with Finger, what is Finger?

Dmytri: Finger is like status updates, you have a text file in your home directory, two text files actually, .project and .plan, and you could put your status updates in there, like you might do on Twitter now and then people could check what you are doing.

KMO: Hm, I wonder how I missed it?

Dmytri: You probably had one. People could Finger you.

KMO: Would you say what you mean when you describe the current state of the Internet as being, “an unfree, client-server topology”?

Dmytri: Yes. That is because the current state of the Internet is based on big, centralized services like Facebook, but that’s not all that’s possible. You can still use Finger on the modern Internet as long as you still have TCP/IP to the house, which is, of course, not guaranteed. For one of Telekommunisten’s artworks in 2010 we made a clone of Twitter. It was a microblog based on Finger to show that these ideas have been around since the beginning of the Internet and that the kinds of things being made by modern social media platforms aren’t new in the sense of what kind of use of media they are proposing. The only thing that’s new about them is how they want to capture profits. Finger has existed since the 70s in a distributed fashion that nobody could make a profit on because nobody could control it. Twitter is, of course, very central. It requires millions and millions of dollars in funding. Because it can capture lots of data it can make a business model around monetizing that data and selling it to advertisers and other parties.

KMO: And later in your manifesto, you wrote, “No social order, no matter how entrenched and ruthlessly imposed, can resist transformation when new ways of producing and sharing emerge”.

Dmytri: Right.

KMO: And yet, new ways of producing and sharing did emerge with the early Internet, tools which you described as being very peer-to-peer and communist in structure. And yet it was resisted. That transformation was seemingly hijacked and redirected toward things that are very favorable to the preservation of inequality, a class system and commoditized art, and all the distasteful aspects of the modern Internet.

Dmytri: Well, that’s because, as I elaborate more in the section that talks about peer production, Benkler and stuff like that, is that we haven’t actually achieved peer production on any kind of massive level. If you look at what happens with the early Internet and free software, you see that what was going on was not a new mode of production, but just a very unique kind of distribution of an existing form of production at its core. The problem with free software and free networks is that they can’t capture any exchange value as we discussed already. And so because they can’t capture any exchange value, they cannot finance their own material cost of the upkeep of the people that take care of them. The networks and the programmers and the engineers, and all the people that contribute to the development of free software and free networks need sustenance. And that sustenance, then and now, still comes from capitalism. That, I think, is the point. A true mode of production can’t be resisted, but we haven’t actually seen peer production emerge as a real, significant form of production. For that to happen, we have to have material assets in the commons as well as immaterial assets. So long as the composition of the commons is entirely immaterial, they will not be able to sustain its material upkeep.

The networks and the programmers and the engineers, and all the people that contribute to the development of free software and free networks need sustenance. And that sustenance, then and now, still comes from capitalism. That, I think, is the point. A true mode of production can’t be resisted, but we haven’t actually seen peer production emerge as a real, significant form of production.

KMO: Is there any point in trying to request that the state serve the ends of a peer-to-peer society, or is the state completely at odds with that by definition?

Dmytri: There are a number of threads in the overall strategy that I think are necessary. On one hand, we need venture communism, which means independent, federated entrepreneurship along communist principles. But on the other hand, the state does exist, and I believe that we can’t just imagine that we live in a future state-less society. We have to understand what the state provides now, and we have to struggle within the state as a theater of struggle as well, to get what we can out of it. So I would say yes, but that it really depends on where you are.

In principle, if you look at public funding for other kinds of media, like film, television, and movies, in many cases there’s been quite significant public involvement in the development of those media. So, do I think that there is the prospect for public involvement in funding of social media for a positive impact? Certainly, but, in an era where we’re still not out of the neoliberal phase of history, in an era where governments don’t even want to pay for schools and housing and education and roads, the idea that they will suddenly become interested in paying for social media seems unlikely. So, it doesn’t seem to be a prospect that I have a lot of confidence will actually come about, though it could come about, and if it did, it could be positive. Perhaps, especially in areas that are trying to assert their independence from global neoliberalism, like South and Central America for instance, perhaps they will understand the public need to finance social media in the same way that they finance their broadcast media and their film media.

Sousveillance. The Art of Inverse Surveillance February 8th – 9th, 2009, Aarhus University, Denmark.

KMO: Just last night, I was reading an essay by David Byrne, of the Talking Heads, about Spotify, streaming music, and the emerging situation in which all the money changing hands for streaming music is basically going to record labels. Not only are they selling the songs of their artists to the streaming services, but they are also in exchange, for the listing the music companies catalogs, they are getting a stake in services like Spotify, but that artists get very little, even though it is the creativity and passion of the artists whih create value of the end users. The contribution of the artists is absolutely vital and integral, but they get very little of the proceeds.

For example, this past summer, Daft Punk had a song that was so popular that even people who don’t pay follow the music business or make any effort to seek out new music would recognize it – “Get Lucky” is the song – and their Spotify revenues for this, which had been downloaded or streamed hundreds of millions of times, was $13,000 each. They are the megastars of streaming media right now, and the amount of money that they received was less than one would make flipping burgers at McDonald’s. And so, we’ve got this emerging structure where the assumption is that the artists themselves are expected to work a day job somewhere, and then, in their spare time, struggle and produce art which enriches corporations. I’m just wondering what way forward you can envision, and what’s actually worth the time and effort trying to bring it about, because I’m largely of the opinion that trying to request that corporations and governments stop their current collusion and help artists is probably a silly way to invest one’s energy, and I’m wondering about a viable way forward.

Dmytri: I think, in most places, I would agree. Though, as I said, I think in some places it’s more viable than others, but here in the Western world, I think that it wouldn’t be the best use of energy. You had John McChesney on the program, and I’m sure that my view is not so different than his.

The answer, as it’s always been, has been the organization of workers towards ownership of the means of production. It’s no surprise to me that artists are being squeezed out of the profits made by Spotify and other online streaming corporations, because, you understand that artists are paid for their labor value, not the value of what they produce. The value of what is produced is captured by the people that own the means of production and distribution. They are the ones who are going to capture the value, so, unless artists own their own means of distribution and production, they can’t hope to capture the value that is so produced. So the only real way forward is to have not Spotify and iTunes, but organizations made up of the people who actually make the music involved in the production and distribution of media, and to have those owned by the workers themselves.

KMO: I understand that, but I find it an unsatisfying answer. (laughter)

Dmytri: Yeah, I know, it’s the same answer we’ve had for a couple of hundred years.

KMO: Yeah…

Dmytri: It’s not a sexy new answer, but, unfortunately the basic economics makes it so.

KMO: Well, the very central point of McChesney’s message is that we are approaching or perhaps in the midst of what he calls a “critical juncture,” which is a convergence of crises in which a disruptive new technology, a legitimacy crisis around current institutions and economic turmoil all come together. When that happens, we get a moment where there is a possibility to make institutional changes which are sweeping and long-lasting, and it seems that our side, so to speak, is not as focused on capturing the opportunity of that moment, that critical juncture, as the capitalists are. They seem quite poised to take advantage whenever these opportunities open up.

Dmytri: Of course. And, you know, that’s very difficult to combat, because they have the accumulated wealth to be able to weather the storms. So, in a way, crisis serves a role in capitalism as well. It allows the stronger capitalists to squeeze out the weaker capitalists, because capitalism is competition even among the capitalists. The capitalists aren’t only struggling against us, but also struggling against each other.

KMO: And so, it’s no good to try to become a sort of minor, beneficent capitalist, because the larger and sociopathic capitalists will just outcompete you and reduce you back to the worker who is paid not for the value of what he creates before his time, basically.

Dmytri: Absolutely, that’s right. And I think it’s important to understand that capitalism is not a choice for capitalists either, because if you’re capitalist and you invest your capital in such a way that it fails to create more capital, you cease to be a capitalist, right? So, capitalists are just as much trapped within the capitalist system as everybody else.

KMO: But it’s a much more well-appointed cage that they inhabit than most everybody else inhabits (laughter).

Dmytri: Certainly, but it’s not that even if any individual or bunch of individual capitalists suddenly had an epiphany and decided to abandon their exploitive ways, that that would be a threat to the system itself. That would only be the opportunity for other capitalists to squeeze them out.

KMO: Although it seems that the capitalists who had this emerging sense of consciousness and esprit de corps and identification with people and other classes of society, if they had this awakening moment, but they also realized what will happen if they act on it overtly, they might, if they were clever (and they must be clever to be where they are), continue to use the language which pacifies the other capitalists, while working subtly and behind the scenes to implement improvements and some movement toward social justice.

Dmytri: I don’t think language actually has much to do with it. I think the only people that are queasy about radical language are people who position themselves on the left, because they feel that being portrayed as a radical will weaken their position. I think that the people in power are not particularly concerned with language, and you can see that very often if you look at media campaigns. We’ve seen all kinds of revolutionary language, and even revolutionary figures from historical events used in advertising, used to promote and describe capitalist products. So, of course the film industry uses these themes and figures quite liberally, and it’s funded by capitalists.

I don’t think that the capitalist has to make a semantic argument to his peers, I think they have to be successful. I think, in the end, they have to capture profit. And it doesn’t matter how they capture the profit. If they do capture it, they become successful. And that’s also very interesting.

I don’t know if you’ve read any of the work that I’ve done on macroeconomics, which is much more recent than the manifesto. It still consists of just random blog articles rather than a more substantial text, but there are a couple of ideas that I’m fleshing out, and they don’t have names as catchy as “venture communism,” but I think that they’re interesting ideas. The great Polish economist, Michał Kalecki, created an equation to separate profit and consumption by class, which is to say, by workers profit and by capitalist profit. This equation allows you to see the relationship between capital and labor within the profit model. Using Kalecki’s equation as inspiration, I tried to take an approach where I look at modes.

One major problem that I have with a lot of progressive theories that you hear casually within the anarchist community and the communist community is this idea that communism is something that happens in the future, that it suddenly happens as an epiphany, where societies are transformed magically from the old society to the new society, and everything is completely different. I don’t think that this is the case. I think we have communism right now, as well as capitalism right now. If you look at the kinds of relationships we have in our day-to-day lives, we have relationships that are ruled or dominated by exchange value, but we also have relationships that approach the communist relationships of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” “From each, to each”, as I like to summarize it. And we experience these relationships among our friends, within our families, within intentional communities, and also within some of the emerging peer-production forms, like free software and information sharing, and things like that.

What we have is multimodal environment, and I think we need to look at the economy as having multiple modes of production happening at all given times. I don’t think it should be our objective to try to figure out how we can flip from one to the other, but how we can increase the kinds of producing and sharing that we think are beneficial and want more of and decrease the amount of producing and sharing that happens at ways that we think are destructive and not beneficial, and that we want less of. We need value to flow from one mode to another, this is what I’m thinking of, inter-modal value flows.

What we have is multimodal environment, and I think we need to look at the economy as having multiple modes of production happening at all given times. I don’t think it should be our objective to try to figure out how we can flip from one to the other, but how we can increase the kinds of producing and sharing that we think are beneficial and want more of and decrease the amount of producing and sharing that happens at ways that we think are destructive and not beneficial, and that we want less of. 

One kind of these flows is something that I’m calling “substantiation”, which I’ve already been told is a horrible term. The idea of “substantiation” is that there are certain forms of investment that benefit individual members of a class, while hurting the class as a whole.

One example of substantiation is workers supporting capitalists when they buy capitalist securities in their pension funds. Individual workers that buy the securities could very well benefit, but the class doesn’t, because, overall, it cedes more power to capital. The capitalists take that investment and use it to expand capitalist control of the means of production and their own political strength. So, even though funds may benefit the individual workers who invested in them, they hurt workers as a class.

Now, I think that we can also find examples of things that are going the other way. I think free software for instance is a good example of that. If you are capitalist whose business depends on software as an input — in other words, you don’t sell software but you need software in order to produce whatever it is you produce — and you capture your profit elsewhere in the circulation of that final product, so capital is an input to your production, you therefore invest in free software, and by doing so you may yourself benefit, because you get help from the community and cheaper and better software to use in your own production. But, the capitalist class loses, because the sale of software licenses is broadly damaged, is lost as a way to make profit for the capitalist class. So, even though in both cases the individual members of the class are benefiting, this kind of value flow hurts the class in general. These are just a couple of examples of the kind of thinking we need to develop further. We need to figure out how value flows between the different modes that are existing at the same time within the contemporary economy, and what kinds of methods and institutions and practices can we introduce and promote that will cause value to flow from exploitive means to liberating means.

KMO: I think I follow you, but would you summarize your last line of reasoning?

Dmytri: I think that it’s helpful to think of the society that we live in as not being either capitalist or communist, in essence, that it’s helpful to think that within our society we have many modes of production going on at the same time. We have capitalism. We have communism. We have all kinds of hybrid and alternative forms going on. But we have a lot of different kinds of social relations. So, what we need to do is think about that in a compositional way. We need to think about what kinds of ways of producing and sharing are already going on right now, that we could develop more broadly, and how can we move and make value flow from the more exploitive modes to the more liberating modes.

This is what I was trying to get at with the idea of substantiation. These modes are coexisting and drawing off each other, and so just as much as we are benefiting the capitalists with our production, because everything that happens within commons-based production right now as being captured by capital, because the commons is still largely an immaterial commons. But likewise, by contributing to that immaterial commons, the capitalists are also helping us. So, value is flowing. We need to think strategically and ask how can we reduce the loss and maximize the gain. We need to conceptualize how to structure the kinds of productive forms which enable a sustained and positive long-term exchange away from capitalism.

KMO: Well, Dmytri Kleiner, it has been a pleasure talking to you, I look forward to future conversations, and thank you very much for participating on the C-Realm Podcast.

Dmytri: Very nice talking to you as well.

Image adapted from an original at Nómada Blog

It seems that “lab” is the word making the rounds amongst innovation buffs these days . Maybe the term “laboratory” isn’t the most appropriate analog, given that its dictionary definition, “a facility that provides controlled conditions in which scientific research, experiments, and measurement may be performed”, falls short in describing the present day use of “lab”, and what these spaces are about.

This divergence of terms originated with the foundation of the first Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in 1985, a space characterized by its convergence of technology, multimedia art and design. However, in recent years, MIT’s model seems obsolete and at a standstill, especially when compared to a newer and more relevant generations of labs. Madrid’s MediaLab Prado, currently celebrating its tenth anniversary at a new location -la Serrería Belga- stands out as the premier reference points for labs worldwide.

So, what is a lab, exactly? A technical laboratory? A multidisciplinary space open to the public? Rather than nailing down one definition, it may be better to observe some of these labs worldwide, and notice the local idiosyncrasies. Any city eager to reinvent itself and adapt to the networked society invests in an urban lab, such as the Laboratorio Procomún in Rosario, Argentina. Cultural centers like, for example, Ljudmila Media Lab (Liubliana, Slovenia) are currently mutating into places where the artistic paradigm goes beyond art objects.  Digital art spaces, such as the prestigious Eyebeam in New York, are recycling themselves following collaborative models. All of the above share a common source of inspiration: Medialab Prado Madrid.

This could likely be said about many other institutions, labs, universities and cultural centres around the world. Any city would be proud to host something like a Medialab Prado. What is it about this media lab’s DNA that makes it so desirable in areas as diverse as technological innovation, culture and civic participation?

The key to MediaLab Prado’s success may be held in a definition first proposed by José Luis de Vicente: “it’s a community incubator”. In fact, both words, “community” and “incubator”, have been the trend amongst Silicon Valley circles and community managers alike. It’s also worth noting that, as terms, they are seldom seen together. And, as Juan Freire and Antoni Gutiérrez Rubí express in their book “Manifiesto Crowd”, in the age of networks, innovation walks a different path. “The factories that were churning out companies in the 20th century are dead. The 21st century is witness to the birth of spaces for collective innovation”. An incubator lacking a community will never be enough. This is the reason why a lab – both in its physical and digital realms – needs to be an open platform. And that is precisely why MediaLab Prado has become such a a relevant space for coexistence, innovation and mutual co-creation.

MediaLab Prado is both a physical and a digital platform. Physically, it’s a space where anyone can walk in, while online it functions as a laboratory for connecting ideas. MediaLab Prado is an interdisciplinary workspace for creation and innovation. And here’s an important detail: its strength doesn’t reside in its own programming, put together by stewards and specialists. It lies instead in the various working groups, projects and encounters collectively cooked up by the citizen communities who frequent Medialab’s headquarters, or participate in its digital channels. Every Friday, for example, there’s an open lab where anyone can collaborate with anyone else in the creation of new projects.

Another defining feature is its focus on prototyping – another digital culture and IT term. Prototyping culture doesn’t seek definitive or finished products; instead, it prefers to function in a transparent and collective  manner, employing open projects in a constant, citizen-fueled process of improvement. All in all, MediaLab Prado has become a catalyst for culture, technology, networks, science, education, and innovation.

Evidently, MediaLab Prado’s official areas of competence are both necessary and relevant. Interactivos? (a laboratory for creative and educative technological applications) Visualizar (data and citizenship visualization) or its Commons Lab (transversal investigation centered on the Commons) are clear international reference points. Additionally, self managed working groups, such as “Funcionamientos: Diseños abiertos y remezcla social” (Functioning: Open design and social remixes) or “Género y Tecnología” (Genre and Tech) are just as influential. MediaLab Prado cannot simply be described as a  ”Cultural Centre”, as it is so much more than a building populated with works of art or technological infrastructures. It’s a connector, a hub, a platform for the collective intelligence that is transforming industry, economics, technology, education and art throughout the whole planet.

In fact, it’s been one of the citizen hubs where civic activism slowly forged the 15-M/ Indignado movement that heralded Occupy Wall Street and the global revolution. To give an example, in early 2011, while Spanish mass-media ignored collectives such as Democracia Real Ya or Juventud sin Futuro, the Redada Encounters in MediaLab Prado transformed an incumbent and collective -as opposed to hierarchical- form of web activism into a palpable phenomenon. Open code practices, now essential to modern activism, have always been central to MediaLab Prado.

The challenges in this new chapter in MediaLab Prado’s history are undoubtedly many. One of the most important will be channeling corporate innovation and navigating new economic paradigms. At a time in which The Economist, no less, dedicates its front page to the sharing economy, MediaLab Prado is in a better position than many. By developing its own trajectory, it could well become a great catalyst for the future networks of innovation, open culture and citizen intelligence that will soon be needed in Europe. In fact, connections established within MediaLab Prado in these last few years have given rise to projects and citizen start-ups such as MLP, Play the Magic, Open Materials, Hackteria, Lummo, Muimota, Máster DIWO, Ultralab and Data Citizen Driven City, amongst many others. Certain working groups, like IoT Madrid (Internet de las Cosas) or exhibitory projects such as Impresoras 3D: Makerbot y Reprap clearly lead the way to the future.

Living at a time when most of the world’s population is concentrated in cities, urban innovation may well be MediaLab Prado’s greatest challenge. It’s no coincidence that some of the most influential labs in the world, such as CityLab in Cornellà, Barcelona or the BMW Guggenheimlab in New York, are focusing their efforts on urban innovation. This is the reason why Medialab Prado’s new location at the heart of historic Madrid is so essential. Its urban vocation is most evident in working groups such as Ciudad y Procomún, the new Ciencia Ciudadana (Citizen Science) station or projects like Hacer barrio or Quality Eggs.

The history of Barrio de las Letras -or “writer’s district”- where Medialab Prado is currently located, is another key facet. The scientific institutions of the 18th Century were responsible for the first major developmental push in Madrid, which then led to the expansion of Barrio de las Letras. During this time, the city witnessed the construction of the Botanical Garden, the Astronomical Observatory, the Academy of the Sciences (which now houses the Prado Museum) and the General Hospital (currently housing the Reina Sofía Museum) and the “Gabinet de Máquinas” a demolished Industrial Engineering museum from that era and situated quite close to the old Army Museum. All of this frantic building activity took place in less than 3 decades. MediaLab Prado´s new location in the Serrería Belga, an old abandoned industrial building, is another telling metaphor of an industrial era that left so many urban carcasses in its wake.

In summary, the conversion of an old,  abandoned, industrial space into an citizen innovation lab in the same area where literature and science flourished in centuries past, is a promising metaphor indeed. MediaLab Prado is one of the closest examples of the new Partner State proposed by Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation. A State which guarantees the necessary space and resources to activate a P2P society’s collective intelligence for the improvement of the Commons.

@Ciudadano_Zer0

• Translated by Stacco Troncoso, edited by Jane Loes Lipton– Guerrilla Translation! Images by Seb Perez-Duarte & DatAnalysis15m
  
• Original article at Informa’t! BCN

“World War III will be a global information war with no division between civilian and military participation.” (Marshall McLuhan, 1970)

My associates at Informa’t! BCN have proposed that I write about the War and the Internet. How online communication is changing offline politics and, specifically, how social media is structuring new forms of social conflict in the wake of the #15M Movement. In other words, they’re asking me how these “get-a-job you dirty hippie!” types go about waging their digital war. How, lacking any means, you can conquer, hold and make use of the political hegemony these social movements, the opponents to the Spanish regime and pro-democracy activists, have on the Internet.

Enthusiasts of the Internet as both political tool and battlefield, and I count myself among them, are fond of making grand statements such as: “this will change everything”, “it’s tyranny’s greatest nightmare”, or “the Internet is not just a tool, it is an epoch in history”, convinced that it’s the greatest weapon that we — those at the bottom — have ever had to defend democracy and defeat the enemy. The Internet is what Lawrence of Arabia must have been dreaming about all along. But observing the effects, day after day, isn’t enough. There’s a parallel struggle wherein we, day after day, have yet to convince our analogue colleagues and sceptics alike that these effects are not only real, but that what happens on the Internet doesn’t just stay on the Internet.

In daily practice, or at least in my daily practice, this is the digital divide that worries activists to no end, and this is what the debate is all about. There are two spaces: Internet and the RealWorld™, and many perceive them as discrete, separate compartments. Dividing them, they must imagine an unbridgeable chasm “while not everyone has Internet access”. In my opinion, this argument is the equivalent of what, in an old-style conflict, would have been expressed as: “stop using radio communications, not everyone has a radio receiver”.

I suspect that “Taking our fight to the streets and away from the keyboard” or “Forget about Twitter, come out to the streets” are just slogans. Are you telling me these people don’t know that there’s Internet on the streets too? How do they think anyone’s going to know about what’s going on at street level if there’s no one to tweet about it?

Then there’s those who say that people tend to stay at home because they can watch the protests streamed directly to the comfort of their living rooms. Do you think they’ve noticed that their argument is suspiciously similar to the one often repeated by the musical industry? That every time you download a song, that’s a song you haven’t paid for?

Me, I think that the Internet is an unbeatable way to get to people who don’t have Internet. That’s the way it’s always been, from the origins of marketing and in two-step flow of communication theory, and that’s how it should be in guerrilla marketing. Fashion campaigns aren’t geared to influence boys and girls, but to influence boys and girls who influence boys and girls. Political marketing campaigns don’t seek to convince voters, but to convince voters who convince voters.

Pizarro ¹ didn’t know how to read. But Cortés’ strategy was read to him, he cloned it and that was his grand tactical advantage. In the same manner, parents keeping their offspring away from the influence of television by disallowing them to watch television don’t realise that TV’s influence on the child originates with his peers, not the TV set. That’s how culture and human social behaviour work, and that’s how they’ve always worked. We live within networks because we’ve evolved within networks. Regardless of whether you’re connected to the Internet or not, the culture you live in is connected to the Internet, as a fish is connected to water.

Ideas change the world. I know this because I’m monitoring it in real time, day in, day out: Some ideas are born on a Saturday at 5 a.m. in that seedy, but authentic, dive that is 4chan. The following day, a few discuss the idea in the skyscrapers of Reddit as they work in their offices. Someone who’s seen it hoists it up to the cover of Menéame ². Once past the bottleneck of Menéame’s shantytown filters, it automatically spreads over the vast fields of Twitter. That same night, it will be all over the walls of the suburbs of Facebook, where more people will see it than in any of the previous stops. Staying there is not the objective, though. If you only make it up to here, you’re not achieving true virility, just a very broad type of endogamy, but endogamy all the same. You still have to get to the RealWorld™, because that’s where the rest of the world is.

When you see the idea has spread to WhatsApp ³ groups, you’ll know it’s just about made it. There’s one last stop: the old and eternal email chain letters that serve as the gateway to the Internet. Everybody who’s on the Internet has an email account. Congratulations! You’ve now arrived at the RealWorld™ by making the reverse journey from the Internet. The idea you’ve fought for has triumphed over its enemies. People are talking about it in the street and down at the bar.

There’s shortcuts. For example, we can take an aspect of our agenda via Twitter (whether its healthcare, education, housing, rights, democracy…) and make it leap from the Internet to paper media in one step. We’re obviously not using Twitter just to spread memes amongst Twitter users. Getting a Trending Topic has never been the objective, the objective is to rewrite the agenda. That’s a shortcut we take every day. There’s another shortcut between Menéame and TV newsrooms. I’d like to write about all of this in another occasion.

Depending on the idea and the strategy, traversing this route can take anywhere from a couple of hours to a few years, but I’ve always observed a marked constancy along the way. If there’s a divide between the Internet and RealWorld™ it isn’t more insurmountable than the divide between Twitter or Facebook, or the English speaking or Latino blogospheres, to give a couple of examples.

It was all over in Barcelona on the #15J, 2011, at 1600 hours ⁴. We had fallen into the trap. Mass media had criminalised the protest in Parlament and public opinion had shunned our action. By 1500 we had been wiped from the streets and were at the keyboards, desperately deploying for a last ditch computer counterattack. By 1900, this video was out. Just minutes after making the front page of Menéame, it spread over Twitter and, within the hour, started getting plastered all over the walls of Facebook. The next morning I overheard two old people talking about the video at the entrance to the supermarket. I don’t know how it happened, but I can guess: Not every person in the world is on the Internet, but every person on the Internet is out in the world. Simply put, those pensioners live with people who are connected, and that’s more than enough. Not only did we make it through that day but, since then, and going through #QueSoyCompañeroCoño ⁵, the concept of the provocateur has gone beyond protest circles and is now part of global political culture. It’s an example of an idea that made it.

In my opinion, the RealWorld™ is just another layer. But, out of all the interfaces, it’s the one with most users, more bandwidth, better graphics, and it’s the only one in which you can have a beer.

Map of the descent to the RealWorld™ as imagined by @toret Source: DatAnalysis15m

^{1. [Francisco Pizarro, 16th century Spanish conquistador best known for his conquest of Perú, and for initiating the decline of Inca culture. See here for more.]↩}

^{2. [Basically, a Spanish take on Reddit’s system of upvoting stories and links. Here’s their site.]↩}

^{3. [Whatsapp is an instant messaging smartphone application that’s insanely popular in Spain. See here for more.]↩}

^{4. [On June 15th, 2011, thousands of protesters in Barcelona physically blocked access to the Catalonian Parliament where a series of austerity cuts were about to be voted on. See here for more.
]↩}

^{5. [Hashtag which, translated, means, “I’m one of yours”. It refers to a viral video of an infiltrating policeman, dressed up as a violent protestor and getting arrested during the 25th September 2012 protests in Madrid while he pleads his allegiance. See this article for more.]↩}

• Translated by Stacco Troncoso, edited by Jane Loes Lipton– Guerrilla Translation!
• Original article

Collaboration, networking, transversality, openness, free licenses, remixing, transnationality. On March 20, the hashtag #GlobalP2P suddenly vaulted up among Twitter’s most globally used. One detail: it had never before been a TT(Trending Topic) in any country. Afterwards, it took place as the most watched among many. #GlobalP2P was a choral cry. #GlobalP2P was an insistent echo raising the visibility of the P2P Foundation ‘s Wikisprint event (a mapping of experiences happening around the commons and peer-to-peer) taking place that day in Latin America and Southern Europe. The explosion of #GlobalP2P as a global trend was no accident. There was strategy behind it. The hashtag #P2PWikisprint had had a few weeks to gear up. It came about in a decentralized way, hence its big leap to the global TT. Above all, there was a very intensive process already in place, common among hundreds of groups, networks, activists, foundations, thinkers, universities … and even some governments, both local and supranational.

This spectacular graphic visualization of #GlobalP2P, 24 hours of transnational P2P, produced by Outliers studio, highlights the incredible web of connections that appeared during that day. Some links had already existed. Others emerged. In just one day, 235 projects were mapped in the P2P Foundation wiki. And most importantly: as projects connected, new ones were born. In the upper-left corner, we can see how concepts intermingled, in spite of the normal tendency towards inbreeding. At 13:00 (GMT+1), free and open culture, government, network, and people were discussed. At the bottom left, you can see the accounts talking with one another, showing high rates of transnationality, regardless of borders.

The most interesting thing about #P2PWikisprint is its survival as a process. As an expanded community. As a transnational network. The coming months may bring more wikisprints. But without a doubt, there will be unplanned and unexpected things developing around the #GlobalP2P. The Open Latin America (working title) campaign has already launched. And one idea in the works is to create ​​distributed hackatones, to build a mobile app to find a way to geolocate, in every city, the networks, communities and/or people who work for the common good.

This text has a goal: to share the methodology. I’ll reveal a few details about the process, which may not be obvious at first glance, so that anyone can replicate the experience. These 13 keys summarize the essence of this process. They could be applied to many other fields.

—  ❦ Mario Tascón (@mtascon) March 20, 2013

1. Circle of friends networks. The process would not have been possible without networks of confidence. A personal message sent to a hundred people at the end of 2012 wouldn’t have worked without an established network of trust. Mindmapping which networks, groups and individuals that one could get involved with in #P2PWikisprint was a vital step. The cross connection of different profiles generated a new network, also based on mutual trust, information sharing and personal connections and affections.

2. Open process. The second step was to create a Spanish-language mailing list for the P2P project called “Our Project”. Anyone can subscribe to this open list, without invitation. It wasn’t public at first. We used a personal referral strategy: each person was involved in building the community. This is how we created the network. Transparency – we even created an open document in order to add new members to the list – boosted confidence in the process. However, the list maintains the ethics of netiquette. Good online manners, with minimal static. It wasn’t always necessary to write to the entire list (as a centralized network would encourage). Better to send personal emails to a specific people, to strengthen the autonomy of the nodes.

3. Produ-communication. Production processes must be intimately tied to communication processes. Launching a campaign with a D-Day-like concrete objective may not be as effective in the network age. Communication as nothing more than marketing just doesn’t hold up anymore. We kept the procedure for #P2PWikisprint totally open from the get-go. To do this, we made use of the TitanPad platform. Every document we created – like this one, listing all the cities involved in the summons- was left open for anyone in the world to see. Documentation becomes communication, and communication is a form of action. Action-communication joined as a unit, acting as one.

4. Collaboratory Economy. The whole #P2PWikisprint process lacked financial resources. Every person, collective or institution involved, came together voluntarily and unpaid. Collective enthusiasm served as the (intangible) fuel for the whole process. #P2PWikisprint reinforced the commons-based peer production thesis as proposed by Yochai Benkler. Collaboration amongst great numbers of non-hierarchically organised individuals can be more effective than vertical organization. Besides, Benkler defends that money isn’t the sole motivator for human activity. It’s possible that, given a budget, #P2PWikisprint could have had a wider impact, but a centralized communication agency endowed with a large budget wouldn’t have produced the same outcome.

5. Ethical Framework. “Intense regulation allows for great liberty, and said liberty favours proliferation”. Guillermo Zapata, in his Spanish language article, “Más libertad… más regulación” (More liberty… more regulation), reflects on how a minimal set of very rigid rules can generate a great amount of freedom. We see this in Open Software where we find “..great freedom of usage, as long as…” the four basic freedoms are respected. The criteria for inclusion in Wikisprint – open input, participatory production and governance process and commons-oriented output – were rigid, but I’d rather define them as “freeing”. Or as a solid ethical framework. Whoever doesn’t adjust to the ethical framework is automatically excluded from the Wikisprint.

6. Maximum Common Multiplier. “Rather than searching for a minimum common denominator, it’s about a maximum common multiplier that extols particular qualities.” This sentence, part of the brilliant study made by Wu Ming Collective on T.E. Lawrence’s Guerrilla Theory, could be used to describe the essence of #P2PWikisprint. That which binds us, the minimum common denominator, is the rigid ethical framework. It isn’t enough. The maximum common multiplier represents what we could achieve by multiplying skills, resources and/or enthusiasm. We will not conform to the Minimum That Unites Us. We aspire to a maximum common multiplier.

7. Expanded Communication. Distributed Action. “All change means disorganization of the old and organization of the new.” Extracted from Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”, the above quote permeates the whole of the #P2Pwikisprint – #GlobalP2P process. A centralised process would have been a mistake. That’s why we created a communication strategy that was open, expanded and P2P. Any organization could adapt a P2P press release by adding their name and sending it to their contacts in the media. Any action-communication concordant with the ethics code was valid. In Bueno Aires they produced an animation video. In Bilbao they illustrated text with drawings. In Mexico they celebrated a week’s worth of activities. In disorder we found our equilibrium.

Final session of the #P2PWikisprint special on the ThinkCommons.org platform

8. Hybrid Spaces. The Wikisprint also featured an important physical dimension. Meeting on the ground and speaking in the analogue realm was essential to the process. Many cities held face-to-face sessions. We simultaneously held a video-streaming Google hangout, hosted by the ThinkCommons.org platform featuring guests from across the globe. The video stream aired for nearly 14 hours. Some of these were held, face to face, at MediaLab Prado (Madrid, Spain) and Tabakalera (San Sebastian, Spain), tying in virtual and analogue spaces. Every single session from the special P2PWikisprint remains freely accessible on the Internet.

9. This is not a Trending Topic. The #GlobalP2P hashtag was chosen to encourage a global Trending Topic via Twitter. #P2PWikisprint wouldn’t do, given that Twitter penalises previously used hashtags. This action was collaboratively planned through the use of a Pad featuring general guidelines, following the same template found in the 15M and #GlobalRevolution milieu. Soon after its release, it became the 6th ranking global TT. Afterwards, it remained a TT in some countries. #GlobalP2P managed to hold its ground very strongly, especially in Spain. Achieving a TT should never be an objective in and of itself. Visualization, setting an agenda, feeding a process, building a network and creating community will always have more importance.

10. DIffuse Objective. “…but suppose they were an influence, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas?” T.E: Lawrence, writing in 1929 what would become his essay on Guerrilla Warfare, studied the conditions that allowed the victory of the Arabs over the Turks in 1916, and forever changed the logic of campaign and confrontations (not exclusively military ones). The lack of a clear, unique, visible objective can be advantageous. Best to become like vapour, drift about like gas. Fighting against a concrete enemy can be a tactical error. Guerrilla Communication has to be like the wind. Tactics are lateral, transversal, peripheral. Curtailing those initiatives in #P2PWikisprint that looked to go beyond mapping P2P initiatives (the initial objective) would have been an error. But vying to determine a common, unique objective could have led to a failure.

Everything was possible during #P2PWikisprint. It was all fair game within the ethical code. The new #GlobalP2P could hardly be described as a united force. #GlobalP2P, to paraphrase T.E. Lawrence, was like a dispersed vapour carried by the wind.

11. Imagery. How might the maximum number of people visualise “Wikisprint” or “P2P”, two words altogether outside of everyday vocabulary? By creating imagery. Mass media likes to link P2P to piracy. Exchanging music = piracy. In truth, sharing, generosity and collaboration are the more characteristic traits of peer-to-peer dynamics. P2P logic goes beyond merely cultural considerations. It’s scalable to economics, politics, ecology…. would it make sense to take advantage of #P2PWikisprint to declare war against the content industry? #No. It’s best to create new imagery. Give shape to a collective wish. Create an indestructible narrative. Because, in much the same way the Turks expelled the Arabs with lesser numbers, for us “the contest was not physical, but moral”. There’s nothing better than a new narrative to tear down the sharing = piracy cliché. Nothing more solid than intangible imagery. The exchange of toys amongst children that took place at the Museo del Juguete Antiguo (Antique Toy Museum) in Mexico DF represents a scene capable of demolishing the arguments of any lobby: P2P= children sharing affection.

12. Transverse connections, transnational connections. Outliers used a new type of indicator for visualizations: a transnational index of tweets. International information exchange was a constant during #P2PWIkisprint. Transnational exchange was over 40% for most of the day. On March 21st, at 05:00 GMT, it rose to 100%. Transnationality was much higher than the median for other global initiatives. Outliers, for example, calculated the transnational percentage of tweets for #15oct (the global mobilization held on the 15th of October of 2011) at around 5%. #GlobalP2P was characterised by dialogue, connection and the empathy of many peers, transcending all national considerations, nation states and political frontiers. Additionally, we witnessed the creation of múltiple, unprecedented spaces for asymmetrical dialogue. During #P2PWikisprint both regional governments – Rio Grande do Sul (Brasil), for example- and supranational organizations, such as The Iberoamerican General Secretariat (SEGIB), spoke on a one-to-one basis with activists from 15M, Occupy Wall Street and #YoSoy132.

13. Liquid Membership. Participation in the #GlobalP2P process, even at the mailing list member level, has some interesting quirks. You don’t take part in #GlobalP2P with a sense of absolutely belonging to a community. There is, however, a sense of community spirit. Association with the #GlobalP2P process is a lot more flexible than the militancy of a political party or collective, or following a religion or supporting a football team. Flexibility lies at the heart of #GlobalP2P’s strength, a functioning process much like the swarms described in Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control. Allowing for escape from the swarm, the possibility of dispersion, guarantees its strength. You can fly with #GlobalP2P for a while, like a bird in a flock. You can leave the flock at any stage, and join another. The ethical framework and moral commitment will incite a return to the flock for specific actions. The wind that was #GlobalP2P shall shake up the net once again.

This translation has been republished on:

• #CódigoAbierto_CC
• The P2P Foundation blog
• Shareable

]]> http://guerrillatranslation.com/2013/09/12/globalp2p-the-wind-that-shook-the-net/feed/ 0 guerrillatranslation GLobalp2p http://guerrillatranslation.com/2013/06/23/the-interruption-of-the-dominant-narrative-an-interview-with-colectivo-enmedio/ http://guerrillatranslation.com/2013/06/23/the-interruption-of-the-dominant-narrative-an-interview-with-colectivo-enmedio/#comments Sun, 23 Jun 2013 01:52:32 +0000 http://guerrillatranslation.com/?p=1145 ]]> “The interruption of the dominant narrative to create our own is the sort of politics we’re interested in”

Amador Fernández-Savater interviews colectivo EnmedioMembers and collaborators of Enmedio, taking part on the “Paro Monumental” (Monumental Unemployment” action. The text on the balloon reads: “Spain, champions in unemployment”

Amador Fernández-Savater/Colectivo Enmedio

Translated by Stacco Troncoso, edited by Jane Loes Lipton -Guerrilla Translation!

Frustrated by the lack of connection between art and political action, Campa, Leo, Mario y Oriana created, among others, the colectivo Enmedio (“InBetween collective”) (Barcelona)  to explore the transformative potential of images and tales. They recently hacked the statue of Columbus in Barcelona and, amongst many other initiatives, they are also responsible for the striking visual campaign used by Spain’s anti-foreclosure movement, the PAH, to highlight and publicly shame corrupt politicians responsible for maintaining Spain’s draconian foreclosure laws. We talk to them about art’s power to politically intervene, both practically and potentially, in the crisis.

A space in Barcelona, an art collective, an action group, what exactly is Enmedio?

Leo: The name says a lot about us. Enmedio is born of heartbreak. We’re all image professionals (designers, filmmakers, artists, etc.) who’ve left our usual work behind. We found no meaning in the spaces we were assigned: the art academy, the advertising agency, the production company. So we got out of that and came up with a new space where can do what we want, a bit of an uncomfortable and difficult space in a no-man’s-land.

Campa: There’s no politics in the established spaces for art (though there’s no lack of politicking!) nor will you find a whole lot of concern about aesthetics in political spaces. This is what pushed us to create a third space, to be in-between art and politics.

Mario: Visual work can be very powerful and that’s something that we want to keep exploring. It’s our thing, it’s what we do best and the way we relate to the world. But we need to take that to other places and mix it up with other things. “Enmedio” makes reference to that unknown space we want to occupy, that has something to do with photography or vídeo, but it isn’t just that, although it has that too, I don’t know if I’ve made myself clear….

Oriana: We’ve been exploring this edge for some ten or twelve years. Some of us come from collectives like Las Agencias, Yomango, V de Vivienda, etc. There are  people who’ve been involved in squats, or the anti-globalization protests, or Latin American movements, like Zapatismo, and people with no political history, or otherwise informed by today’s movements: V de Vivienda, 15-M, etc. This mix of different creative and political backgrounds breaks our individual roles when working together and produces some surprising effects; that may be our strongest suit.

Does symbolic political intervention make a difference during a crisis like this, which touches and affects the most material and real sides of our lives (housing, salaries, etc.)?

Campa: Capitalism drives us to this sort of misery, to these foreclosures and this suffering, through images and tales. It’s a master storyteller with an impressive capacity to fascinate. Lots of people got mortgaged because they bought the story, built on words and images, that we got from banks and advertising on a daily basis. Advertising creates images of desirable worlds, and that collective image generates economic paradigms and social situations.

Leo: It’s not like on the one hand we have this fiction, and on the other, reality. Fiction is the hard nucleus of reality. From a protest (an act of street-theatre) to the writing of a political speech (which deals with images and popular imagery), it’s all fiction. What’s important is the effect of these fictions, whether we can re-appropriate them or not, whether we believe in them or not, whether they generate confidence or impotence in ourselves. The basis for social change is cultural: the stories through which we make sense of our lives and the world we live in.

Mario. That’s the reason why we work in two directions. First, to interfere with the dominant narrative, the official explanation for the world, through guerrilla communication, with signs, catchphrases, messages, etc. Second, contributing to the production of an autonomous imagery. Not as much breaking down a narrative as bringing in a new one. This is what’s most important and most difficult: to represent ourselves, create our own story, our own explanation of what’s happening. A narrative we can inhabit.

Let’s explore all this in more detail, by way of your own actions. If you want, we can start with the party at the unemployment agency INEM [1] that you organised in 2009

Fiesta en INEM. Press the close-caption button to activate English subtitles.

Oriana: Maybe the most interesting thing was the moment: the crisis erupts, but there’s no reaction in the street. There’s fear and paralysis. Our idea was to find a place that condensed and represented that fear. We chose the unemployment office, and what better solution to fear than throwing a party?

Campa: Enmedio functions through self-representation. What I mean is, it wasn’t a party for the unemployed. We’re also unemployed, we live precariously, etc. We’re not lecturing anybody. We start by looking at ourselves, and then we invite everyone else to join. In the vid you can see people smiling, participating, cheering or telling us “you’ve cheered up my day”. We look for that empathy by starting with our own worries, problems and woes.

Leo: That video got an amazing amount of views. I think we touched on something that vibed with a shared feeling: if you start with what’s bothering you personally, you can communicate it to others. What’s most intimate is, at the same time, most common.

Mario: We want our actions to be inspiring and contagious. We plan and design them as seeds that can take root elsewhere. Once the 15-M movement got started, we saw parties thrown at an INEM office in the Canary Islands, and other similar actions.

Tell us about the Reflectors.

The Reflectors, ready for action.

Leo: The Reflectantes (Reflectors) is an action group that sprang from a series of creative activism workshops we called “Como acabar con el Mal” (How to end Evil) where we tried to pass on creative activism experiences and practices to younger people who got into politics after 15-M and whatnot. It’s linked to a long tradition of character creation which acts in protest spaces, from Prêt a Revolter to the New Kids on the Black Block, proposing new ways of taking to the street, filled with joy, colour and creativity.

Mario: The Reflectors have a lot to do with the moment they came out, around the first anniversary of 15-M. The powers that be had, by then, gone full thrust with acts of repression and criminalization, in order to end street protest. Bringing in that kind of dynamic leeches the natural plurality from the street, “de-democritising” protest until only small and very homogenous groups remain, easily identified and codified. That’s where the Reflectors come in, saying, “We’re not gonna play this game, let’s break the rules”.

Campa: The Reflectors play with the imagery of superheroes and fan culture. They’re normal people, but armed with a set of tools which allows them to combat Evil: inflatable cubes to deflect the police if they decide to charge, mirrors to blind surveillance ‘copters, disguises to break the codification, etc. They both dramatise and de-dramatise protest by using humour and generating new feelings, making street presence desirable again, while, at the same time, putting elements into play that help to channel moments of tension and violence.

Oriana: A lot of people joined the Reflective Block on the 15-M anniversary march. We also met people we didn’t know who had seen the costumes on the Internet. Nowadays, the Reflectors are an autonomous group, very close to Enmedio, but independent. That’s quite interesting too.

What can you tell me about the Party at Bankia? [2]

Fiesta en Bankia. Press the close-caption button to activate English subtitles.

Mario: The same week the government announced cuts of 20 billion Euros in healthcare and education, we found out that they were going to bail out Bankia with 23 billion Euros in public funds. Like most people, we were furious, so we decided to do something about it.

Leo: We got together with like-minded people and started thinking about what we could do to damage Bankia’s image. We thought that the only way we could affect a bank, and show our rejection of the bailout, was by encouraging people to close their accounts. And the best way to do that would be…throwing a party (as you can see, we just love to throw parties).

Campa: So, one day, a group of people went to a Bankia office, and patiently crouched and waited for a client to close her account. Then we went in and threw a party for her. She couldn’t believe it. We were in there for four minutes at the most, that’s how long the song lasted. We lifted her up and carried her out over our heads, and got out of there the same way we came in. We then cut a video out of all this and it got more than 100.000 visits in 24 hours and hasn’t stopped since. The YouTube page is full of comments. The vid was shown on various TV channels, and other “Cierra Bankia” parties took place in cities all across Spain.

Oriana: The idea was to show that something as intimate and private as your bank account can be used as a political statement; that closing an account can be a public act, and, above all, a lot of fun!

What was the Discongreso (De-congress)?

Photocall 25-S

Mario: Enmedio joined the 25-S campaign: “Ocupa el congreso” (Occupy Congress). It was a call to action that coincided with our own internal debates: We felt that 15-M had fallen into some repetitive inertias and that 25-S could be a good occasion to break out of them. The problem was that it was a very insular call to action, both exclusive and codified. Our work there was to use communication as a way of opening it up. WIth the posters, a graphic campaign and a proposal to occupy the space in a different way, we wanted to come up with a different story, reappropriate the event, and make it both open and desirable.

Oriana: Design-wise, it was a very simple campaign. We replaced “Occupy Congress” for “Surround Congress”, because for us it was never about taking power but a removal of power. Then we added. “On 25-S we’ll surround Congress until they resign. Period”. In the poster we had a series of different coloured dots, representing a plural society, surrounding a centre.

Campa: Those dots actually become pictures later on. We put out a photocall inviting people to take pics showing their own reasons for going to an event like 25-S. We took the photocall out to the street, and we put the word out on social media so people could take their own pics and add their reasons. We wanted to highlight diversity and open up an event that, at first, had felt very exclusive.

Leo: And finally, the dots were turned into frisbees on which people wrote their demands. We then sent these on to Congress, flying over police barricades during the actual protest on September 25th. Since, by land, there was no way to get into Congress so they’d listen to us, the only option we had was by air!

Tell me about the “We are Not Numbers” Action Photography Workshop.

Pasting bills at Caixa Catalunya

Oriana: Working with photographs and, in collaboration with PAH, we wanted to reverse the dehumanised and victim-like portrayals of people affected by foreclosure that the media puts out. We portrayed people about to be foreclosed, or who had already been kicked out, and we pasted those portraits, all blown up, on the banks that had led to their situations, showing that the foreclosed have faces and eyes, that they’re not just statistics. And from those pictures, we’ve also designed a series of postcards where we tell these people’s stories. These were directed, first of all, to the banks, and later (during the escraches), to politicians.

Campa: These photographic interventions work in two ways. On the one hand, they empower the affected. They come to the workshop, they pose, see their photographs, then they’re pasted up on the banks, and like this we break the wall of shame, they create a presence in public space. On the other, it’s guerrilla imagery in the struggle between different depictions of the crisis, the day-to-day battle held on the walls of the cites, associating a face with the organization responsible for the foreclosure (foreclosures are often talked about in the media, but they never mention the names of the banks).  The interruption of the dominant narrative to create our own is the sort of politics we’re interested in.

Leo: For us, the real key isn’t the quality of the portraits or videos, but their coordination with social processes as powerful as PAH. But we’re also quite careful and exacting about form. We don’t share the sloppiness of those that think that “the content” of the picture or poster is the only worthwhile thing. We’re concerned about aesthetics, not out a love for aestheticism itself, but because of the very politics of aesthetics: the “how” of relating these things, the “what” we’re given to see, the “what” we’re led to feel”. Lacking form, there’s only naked rage and no communication.

You’ve also designed the popular red and green signs used by the PAH in their escraches[3]. A friend, after being in a escrache, told me “Those simple signs are so important; without them we’d just seem to be a furious mass, and little else”

.

PAH’s colours read: Green: “Yes, we can” (Stop foreclosures. retroactive nonrecourse debt, social rent). Red: “But no, they don’t want to”.

Leo: The problem with housing has always been central to us. Some of us took part in the graphic commission of V de Vivienda-Barcelona [4], where we came up with the famous slogan: “You’ll never own a house in your whole fucking life.” So, during the “No somos números” (We’re not numbers) workshop we formed a direct relationship with the PAH, and they asked us to take care of the visual side of the escraches. It was a very important proposal for us and, at the same time, a very delicate one.

Mario: The idea was to lay out the conflict with a very simple visual statement. On one side we have the “Yes we can” from the PAH (the million signatures, the social support, etc). On the other side, the “But they don’t want to”, coming from the political elite, totally deaf to society. Green and red: walk and stop. A lot of green signs against a lone red one: 99% and 1%. The signs and stickers weren’t so much designed to point to any specific politicians but, more than anything, to gather and serve the outpouring of social support the PAH has had.

Oriana: In the original Argentinian escraches, the neighborhood played a crucial role. In this case, it was very much the same idea. being able to surround your representative with green buttons on your own neighborhood. That shopkeepers (the baker, the hardware guy, the newspaper vendor) could put the sticker up on their shops. In other words, so that the whole neighborhood would be denouncing the representative, inviting him or her to push the green button. The important thing about the escraches is to pile on people, people from the neighborhood, people who walk by, so that anyone can be part of the “green tide” as represented by the PAH. That’s the effect we wanted to have with the signs.

Campa: Again, the production side of this has been very important, how you put this to work. The materials are simple and cheap, the design is up for grabs in PAH’s website, so anyone with a printer, some paper and a bit of cellotape can go and make their own signs. We’re just as concerned with the concept (the “what”) as with the production (the “how”).

How about wrapping up by going through some of the main influences or reference points for your work, between images and social concerns, between art and politics?

Oriana: Zapatismo, due to having lived though it myself and because of its meaning. To come from the frivolity and disenchantment of the 90s, to suddenly finding a new way of doing politics and communication. The importance of words and symbols, in the harshest living conditions. Working within and working from the true imagination of the people you work with and the people you want to reach. How central processes, not just results, are.

Mario: Pop music. I see my work as being very related to that, pop culture, what’s popular. This desire to get in touch with the whole of society, the will to push emotions and desires, the yearning to come up with juicy representations where you see yourself reflected, wherever you want to participate, so you can get moving…

Leo: The Yippies, a group created and active in the midst of 60s American counterculture, whose aim was to politically radicalise the hippie movement. Yippies understood social change as a struggle between symbols, and flexed most of their activist muscle creating myths, rumours and fictions to shortcircuit the dominant narrative, and to put in circulation autonomous images. Coming from a very different context, I pretty much think the same way.

Campa: Regarding what I’m concerned with, and given that Zapatismo has already been mentioned, I’d say punk. Not so much in a musical or aesthetic sense, but having to do with sheer attitude, that nerve, freshness, immediacy, nonconformity, DIY culture, the intensity of a 3-minute song. I think that ties in rather well with what we do at Enmedio.

• All you ever wanted to know about Enmedio’s actions.

[1] INEM: “Instituto Nacional de Empleo” is Spain’s National Institute for Employment: “Administrative body coming under the Ministry of Labour , set up in 1978 to develop and follow up employment policy , to co-ordinate and run public employment offices and to administer the unemployment benefit system.”

[2] Bankia is Spain´s own big-bank-bailout debacle, going from public bank to private entity, subsequently bankrupting itself and then controversially being rescued with public funds, concurrent with the imposition of austerity measures.

[3] “Escrache”, an Argentinian term, describes a mode of protest wherein people go take their concerns directly to their representative’s homes and neighborhoods to condemn and publicly humiliate decision makers on their unethical choices. Read more here.

[4] Or “H is for Housing” a wordplay on V for Vendetta. Read more here

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