[P2P-F] Fwd: Alternative Economic Strategies - How to frame these?

Sun Mar 18 23:34:23 CET 2018

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: pat commonfutures <pat.commonfutures at phonecoop.coop>
Date: Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 6:24 PM
Subject: Re: Alternative Economic Strategies - How to frame these?

Big exclusive story today in the Observer/Guardian about Facebook security
breach and Cambridge Analytica.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-
analytica-facebook-influence-us-election

The Canadian whistleblower in this short video tells it all about the Trump
and Brexit vote psych-ops!

Pat

On 10 March 2018 at 22:04 Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net> wrote:

I think it is a very good first initiative myself, but have not looked in
details to the accounting nor the book myself,
do you have a link to Re=Valuation ?

Michel

On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 4:59 PM, pat commonfutures <
pat.commonfutures at phonecoop.coop> wrote:

Hi Michel

A false rumour. I spoke on a panel with Christian Felber at the Ripess
conference in Berlin in 2015 and I was very impressed with his case. But I
have not found the time to read his book. So I have not formed an informed
view.

What is your view? Some other colleagues of mine here are developing a
model called Re-Valuation that has huge potential.

Pat

On 07 March 2018 at 15:25 Michel Bauwens < michel at p2pfoundation.net> wrote:

dear Pat,

a little finger told me you or some UK colleagues were not so happy with
the Common Good Economy accounting scheme, because it was
"christian-inspired"

or perhaps there is a more fundamental critique,

they are expanding in substantial ways, and I think myself this is a good
thing,

Michel

On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 8:26 PM, pat commonfutures <
pat.commonfutures at phonecoop.coop> wrote:

Mike and John

So glad you liked Mike the P2P Foundation piece I shared by Jon Walker on a
Jazz  rock fusion of Co-ops and Commons that integrate Ostrom's and the 7
Co-op principles through the radical interpretation of Beer and the VSM.
John this is really helpful for your partner state implementation.

But to be clearer indeed on the application potential among a federation of
co-ops locally see also Jon's analysis of how Mondragon and VSM combined
analysis shows the incredible power of network governance that Mondragon
has uniquely developed. This is Jon's treatment of the problems with lack
of co-ordination among food co-ops in the UK. Jon wrote this in the 1990s
but really so relevant indeed today to the commons, co-op and solidarity
economy convergence work in Barcelona, Ghent and in other cities.

http://www.esrad.org.uk/resources/vsmg_3/screen.php?page=10appfed

Suma is still going strong in the UK as a worker co-op with over 200 worker
owners and they are all on equal pay - they pay double the  rate for rank
and file workers in the food wholesale sector and they are a Union Co-op
and have been since 1985 with Bakers Union.

What you get with Mondragon is local density in a territory so if we are
thinking about public-co-op-commons partnerships in cities and towns we
need the VSM tool for moving from chaotic competition to aligned democratic
governance.

I have added in Michel, Stacco and David as well as Margie. Jon's two
papers are very relevant also to GSEF work on solidarity economy
development in cities.

We need to involve Jon Walker to teach on Synergia as he is so good at
teaching. He and Angela Espinosa have been working in Cuba to advance co-op
development with the University of Havana.

Pat

On 06 March 2018 at 18:13 Michael Lewis < Lewiscccr at shaw.ca> wrote:

Jon is such a good writer….  I found this very helpful Pat….  the
cross-comparison between Commons Principles and the systems in VSM is
edifying.
Certainly what is presented here is much more understandable than the VSM
introduction provided by our dear friend John Waters.  I will never forget
the contrast between us all being together in the wonderful craziness of
the village festival in Wales, and John dragging me up to his upstairs
living space above the tiny office of the credit union on the main floor,
where he proceeded for an hour to try and introduce me to VSM.  I thought I
was going to die…. Brilliant beyond measure, so much so, I left feeling
blinded…. lol

On Mar 6, 2018, at 6:22 AM, pat commonfutures <
pat.commonfutures at phonecoop.coop> wrote:

Hi Mike, John and Mike

Not sure you three have seen this article by Jon Walker on ways and means
to align Ostrom's governance system with that of the socialist Stafford
Beer who pioneered the Cybernetics of Governance from the 1950s.

http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Cybernetics_of_the_Commons

Given the work by De Angelis to align Marx and Ostrom, this is a different
take and I think deeper in lots of ways. Very relevant to an intermediate
level course for Synergia.

All the best

Pat

On 04 March 2018 at 19:23 pat commonfutures < pat.commonfutures at phonecoop.co
op> wrote:

Hi Michel, Alex and colleagues

Michel I had not read before your January review of the new book by Alex on
the General Theory of the Precariat.

Your book looks fabulous Alex. I must get a copy.

Mike, John and colleagues, have area of Michel's review below. It is really
solid and sound. Highly relevant John to contextualising the work on
Synergia and the Mooc.

https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/p2p-review-alex-fotis-general
-theory-precariat/2018/01/30

My comments below about Rowthorn and updating the AES for today would
enable us more clearly to flesh out what you argue for Michel. Ditto your
ideas and arguments Alex. The need to build an alliance against National
Populists is more needed than ever with the outcome of the Italian
elections later today set to highlight this.

Pat

On 04 March 2018 at 09:44 pat commonfutures < pat.commonfutures at phonecoop.co
op> wrote:

Hi Michel and Alex

Thanks Michel and Alex. I would love to hear your latest perspective Alex.
With Co-operatives UK, the Co-perative College and the Wales Co-op Center
we are to launch on 20 March in Cardiff our third policy report on Trade
union and co-op innovations for precarious work. Report is all done and we
are working on the press release and summary articles for the media.

Interesting to me about the Rowthorn chapter here is his SWOT analysis of
the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES).

http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/mt/pdf/81_01_04.pdf

AES for its time was strong on a macro-analyis but only for the UK. It did
not include an appraisal of the emerging social, ecological and feminist
movements and demands/innovations at that time. Though the Lucas
Alternative Corporate Plan picked up on this as did the Greater London
Council Industrial Strategy that was in touch with Emilia Romagna
activists.

Italy passed enabling legislation to advance economic democracy and
multi-stakeholder co-ops like the Marcora Law in 1985 and the Social Co-op
law in 1991.

But Kondratiev analysis shows that an undercurrent of previous innovations
(the counter movement of Polanyi) in the preceding K-wave are developed to
potentially align with the next K-wave for a root and branch paradigm
shift. The mixed economy welfare state post 1945 was one of these.

So as we can see looking back to the last major conjuncture that renewable
energy, organic farming, social co-ops, community land trusts were all
embryonic and emerging in the 1970s, denied scope since then to scale up or
spread, but they are all now proven systems.

An updated AES could map out the potential with a shift in policy focus
away from industrial methods of production to co-op commons modes of social
reproduction as Massimo De Angelis shows in his blending of Ostrom with
Marx. De Angelis is very weak on co-op economics and is silent on
public-co-op commons partnership but we can fill all those gaps in. We need
this for Synergia and for the Commons Transition Plan.

Pat

On 03 March 2018 at 19:02 Michel Bauwens < michel at p2pfoundation.net> wrote:

dear all,

I want to introduce here Alex FOTI, who in his latest book , General Theory
of the Precariat, has a very interesting insight into the social and
political dynamics of the kondratieff cycle,

the way I understand it, in the first high wave, which includes social
redistribution, a supply crisis is created (profit too low for capital),
which is inflationary, socially revolutionary, think about the seventies;
at the systemic crisis at the end of the cycle, after 30 years of
redistribution towards capital, a demand crisis occurs for lack of income
in the producer classes, which leads to deflation, and it is socially
reformist.

Certainly feels right to me, as, even though we need deep structural
change, the general mood of the population remains very reform oriented.

Alex, perhaps you could explain this, or excerpt the passages from your
book ?

Michel

On Sat, Mar 3, 2018 at 7:11 PM, pat commonfutures <
pat.commonfutures at phonecoop.coop> wrote:

Hi Mike, John, Michel, Mike and David

A PS to my comments further below. Thinking about Synergia and how to frame
the pedagogy, as I said in my previous email further below, the present
capital accumulation crisis needs to be seen viz. Kondratiev technological
shifts. The stagflation crisis created major political challenges from the
left in the 1970s in Chile, Portugal, Italy, Spain and the UK. Tony Benn
moved left in 1971 and joined the Institute for Workers Control and backed
the Factory Occupation by the Clydeside Ship Builders trade unions when the
Tories tried to close down the works.

After the OPEC Oil Crisis and the Three Day week in 1974 the Tories lost to
Labour and Benn was appointed Industry Minister and pushed through the
Industrial Common Ownership Act in 1976. This was a big step to put
economic democracy and common ownership solutions on the policy and action
agenda. Emilia Romagna and Berlinguer were moving in the same direction
then.

Schumacher had written about economic democracy and regional funds for
industry transfers in his last chapter in Small is Beautiful just before
then.

When the IMF and US  bankers put the squeeze on the new Labour government
to throttle this, Benn developed the Alternative Economic Strategy in 1976.
It was published but not backed by Callaghan but very popular with trade
union shop stewards and grassroots Labour members like Corbyn is today.

This analysis by Bob Rowthorn in 1981 of the AES is really  profound and
relevant to our time with all the work on Next Systems ideas and plans -
not fully cohesive though yet as it needs to become. This essay can help us.

http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/mt/pdf/81_01_04.pdf

Rowthorn is a Cambridge U economist (highly respected by other economists
and business schools) and analyses well the weaknesses of the AES, the
problems with the Marxist left (oppositional not propositional) for the
most part and also the strengths of the AES for pedagogical, confidence
building purposes and for laying down a set of practical paradigm shifting
plans to meet real needs and to rally heads, hearts and minds for a future
opportunity ahead. Given that Corbyn was in the Benn group this is a
relevant essay. It is only half a dozen pages. A real Gramscian quality to
this analysis.

I think John this essay could be useful to us viz. planning the Synergia
articles for New Internationalists and how to contextualise
public-co-op-commons partnerships and build links with trade unions and
other movements. You will like this Mike L, note the critique of Rowthorn
that AES is flawed as it did not address the women's movement, ecological
and energy questions at all. Also as he shows it did not embrace the
radical work of Mike Cooley and the Lucas Aerospace Alternative Corporate
Plan. However Benn was supportive of Cooley's efforts.

But also do note that shortly after this article was produced, the work of
Robin Murray at the GLC developed Popular Planning and Technology Networks
that through the hefty 600 page plus London Industrial Strategy addressed
all the weaknesses Rowthorn highlights.

Pat

On 02 March 2018 at 08:38 pat commonfutures < pat.commonfutures at phonecoop.co
op> wrote:

Hi Mike and Mike

Great paper indeed Mike G. Thanks for sharing this. It is so well written
and argued. I love the way you layer your argument. It makes your final
section so powerful and well contextualised. Excellent crafted work. It
resonates also with my paper for Henry Tam.

I love your use Mike G. of revisionist history (EP Thompson, Hobsbawm,
Christopher Hill and others) and the French Annales School. Interesting to
note that RH Tawney was an Oxford historian and so was GDH Cole. Thus guild
socialism has this bottom up history roots but also a connection to the
trade union and co-op movements and the militancy leading up to the 1926
General Strike.

You raise a key question for us Mike L.  Mike's citation of the French
historian Braudel is helpful and his three frames of examing how difference
systems change over time. There is the slow change of say 250- 500 years of
the longue duree of climate shifts but also mentality shifts as we saw in
the voyages of Colombus/Reformation, then 250 years or so later the
Industrial Revolution and today with the second Machine Age. Hobsbawm's
book on the Age of Revolution 1789 to 1848 is a classic and such
craftsmanship as over this period across Europe he follows in separate
chapters the technical shifts, the changing ideas in resistance to
industrial society, the counter movement of class struggle, the political
clashes, the changes in culture, in literature in philosophy and in science.

>From this book you can see Braudel's Moyen, medium term, shifts of 40-60
years and this is where the analysis by first Kondratiev and then shortly
later Schumpeter looked more analytically at the long term business cycles
of capitalism (K-waves named afer Kondratiev) when the conjunctures occur.
To consider here Marx who informed Kondratiev and Schumpeter, these are the
periods in my paper and linked to changes in what Marx called the
accumulation crisis of capitalism when the system is breaking down and out
of gas. You then have a contest of Way Forward being expressed and
contested. The counter movement of Polanyi rises to the surface. The fight
is on over the mix of productive forces (technical methods, technological
infrastructure, science, financial methods, sources of energy, etc). As
Mike G shows so well, these are also tied up by shifts in policy, power
elite decisions etc that are responding to class struggle.

In the 1920s Italian ruling class backed fascism and authoritarian
planning, German ruling class follows in 1933 while US elite back FDR then
and ideas from Keynes.

So to take my paper, Bertrand Russell and RH Tawney pushed for Guild
Socialism as a deeper form of democracy, ownership and control but also
against the hire purchase, consumer culture emerging in the 1920s. They
lost out to the centralising and controlling forces of Fordism.

Shift forward 50 years and you have the end of a colossal expensive war for
the USA, Vietnam, a revolt like in the post 1918 period from 1968, and also
an accumulation crisis of capital. Trade unions are two strong and want to
maintain and extend their equitable share. Working class and middle class
women are not so much in the workplace.Then the Opec oil crisis hits in
1974, the accumulation of Arab petrodollars in London and Wall Street banks
become a rising wall of money and Kissenger does a deal with the King of
Saudi Arabia to buy arms for oil to recycle them and the concept of
Financialisation is hatched with the help of Hayek and Friedman's
deregulation policies to open widely the debt driven consumer, credit card,
homeownership and privatisation of public industries boom. The miners had
to be defeated and Thatcher did this and after 1989 trade unionism and
democratic socialism and more radical post Keynesian ideas are all
repressed until they begin to resurface from 2010.

Thatcherism also shuts down a reviving form of guild socialism and the work
of Robin Murray and the GLC. All highly inspired by Ivan Illich, Schumacher
mixed up with an updated cultural Marxism - aka Stuart Hall and his
cultural studies work at the University of Birmingham in the 1970s and
1980s.

All the above for contextualisation is highly relevant to Synergia. In the
past five years before he died, Robin Murray was teaching at the LSE with
Carlota Perez (a Schumpeterian) on how to analyse the present by using
K-Wave theory. Kondratiev is really important for us. He was not a
Bolshevik but a Socialist Revolutionary and more of a Russian equivalent of
a guild socialist. The Bolsheviks brought back ideas like Kondratiev's to
develop their New Economic Policy and Lenin had to revive the co-ops to get
the Russian economy going again after War Communism strangled any economic
democracy ideas.

My further two cents as you asked for Mike L.

Pat

On 01 March 2018 at 05:27 Michael Lewis < Lewiscccr at shaw.ca> wrote:

Hi Mike G  - Your paper prompted some reflections.  Take a look.  A
question at the end for you.
I think your raising of the usefulness of  history to transition planning
and my note below are
reflective of why we need to keep working at the reframing issues.

I would be interested to hear your perspective Pat and John on how the
thinking and writing of
Polanyi and Schumpeter relates to my point in the reflection below and the
question I pose re:
the role of physics and energy in the arc of recent history and transition
in the decades ahead.

Nice paper Mike - and very well written.  Thanks for sharing it.

Feb 28, 2018, at 3:46 PM, Dr. Mike Gismondi <mikeg at athabas

cau.ca> wrote:

Hi Guys
This may be of interest...
I wrote it for some academics to encourage them to read history.
I enjoyed your chapter today Pat...

Best
Mikeg

Mike Gismondi
Centre for Social Sciences
mikeg at athabascau.ca
Phone: 1-800-788-9041, ext. 6218 (Canada/U.S.) or 780-675-6218
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