[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: [WSF-Discuss] Movement theory: seeking unity in diversity

Fri Jun 13 02:43:35 CEST 2014

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From: Orsan Senalp <orsan1234 at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 8:53 AM
Subject: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: [WSF-Discuss] Movement theory: seeking
unity in diversity
To: networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org, squares <
squares at lists.takethesquare.net>

Very nice article from Helene Findori on the commons network movement:

*From:* "Brian K. Murphy" <brian at radicalroad.com>
*Date:* 5 Jun 2014 17:15:57 GMT+2
*To:* <worldsocialforum-discuss at openspaceforum.net>
*Subject:* *[WSF-Discuss] Movement theory: seeking unity in diversity*
*Reply-To:* Discussion list about the WSF <
worldsocialforum-discuss at openspaceforum.net>

*http://www.kosmosjournal.org/news/recognizing-each-other-in-the-comm
<http://www.kosmosjournal.org/news/recognizing-each-other-in-the-comm>ons-the-basis-for-an-alternative-political-philosophy-of-systemic-change/*
*Recognizing Each Other in the Commons: The Basis for an Alternative
Political Philosophy of Systemic Change?*

By Helene Finidori

Time is running short for a paradigm shift. When it comes to our individual
and collective engagement in making the world a better place, we often talk
about uniting in diversity: uniting in harmony to multiply outcomes and
uniting in diversity for multiple focus and resilience. But how can this
concretely be achieved?

We all acknowledge the critical need for systemic change and for collective
intelligence, but we all have different opinions about the challenges our
world is facing and the ways to address these challenges. We each try to
convince others that we hold the best solutions and methodologies, which
often prevents us from coordinating or communing in effective ways. But is
this possible? What type of unity or communion are we talking about?

As agents of change, we gather around the social objects that our
engagement and action logics attract us to, those that resonate the most
with the way we see the world and that determine our priorities and the
pathways we envision.

These social objects are the nodes around which emerging social movements
converge and common visions and praxis are formed. That's where meaning is
created and shared through languages that help us understand each other,
where conversations and repeated interactions are initiated, and where peer
learning allows us to explore new territories.

The action frameworks that we build or are shaped from practice to serve
our movements and communities provide a context for our co-individuation:
the processes by which our identities as individual and collective change
agents are formed, transformed and differentiated in relation to each other
and to the forces that hold us together and fuel our capacity to act in
cohesive ways.

At the same time, however, as these frameworks create natural boundaries
around our niches of action, they become exclusive of alternative
frameworks. This hinders relational dynamics and our capacity to
collaborate across groups outside of our domains of action. Our territory
of action as a whole is actually composed of islands.

We are facing a paradox. What seems to make us effective as agents focusing
on our respective domains of engagement is specifically what prevents us
from uniting and being effective as a whole. This is one of the greatest
challenges for systemic change-something Occupy and other self-organized
movements have worked to overcome, with some success but also shortcomings.

In practice, attempts to organize global responses and unite 'across
islands' often result in diluted focus and the possibilities
of all parties weakened and in delusion. Alternatively, such attempts can
foster the adoption of unifying ideologies, reductionist both in thinking
and action in ways that can ultimately put systems at risk and lead to
totalitarianism. Eventually, contradictions get crystallized and conflicts
perpetuated.

Developmental approaches to systemic change that require that we transcend
our levels of consciousness and the order of complexity from which we
'interconnectedly' or 'dialectically' develop and apply solutions are
insufficient to bring about systemic change because they are prescriptive
and not naturally generative and interconnectable.

Agency is distributed across islands and produces independent outcomes at
various levels and scales. What needs to converge and unite or interconnect
for systemic effects are outcomes, not necessarily the processes generative
of these outcomes, or the people involved locally in these processes and
the collective will that mobilizes them.

Think of an ecology for transformative action with a huge potential ready
to be activated, where the various logics of engagement complement each
other systemically and epistemically, interconnected by the invisible hand
of common logic that underlies them.

There is a universal aspect to what drives social movements across the
globe, even if we cannot clearly translate it in comparable terms across
practices and languages. Much of what these movements are currently engaged
in is dedicated in one form or another to protecting the environment,
people and resources from enclosure, over-exploitation and abuse, and to
generating thrivability in its various forms.

The commons as the timeless generative systems that humanity shares in
common is such an archetype: "a collectively inherited unconscious idea,
pattern of thought, image, etc., universally present in individual
psyches," a logic that, if discovered, has potential for further enactment
in each domain of engagement. If recognized and manifested in each of these
domains, the commons logic could act as a transition image for systemic
change or as scaffold for the new paradigm to emerge so that disparate
efforts for change can all together generate more significant impacts in
their own territories of influence and coalesce to create greater outcomes,
with no prescriptive orchestration.

So what if, in the end, unity is about recognizing our mutual niches of
engagement and the many streams of commons logic that underlie them as
bridges between our islands? What if unity is about acknowledging the
health of the commons as the measure against which to assess progress?

By discovering each other in a Common World, suggests Spanish philosopher
Marina Garcés, we get the world between us to emerge, helping us draw the
coordinates for a common dimension.

*Helene Finidori* is the Coordinator of the* Commons Abundance Network*.
*www.commonsabundance.net <http://www.commonsabundance.net>*

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