Category:P2P Solidarity

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= this section is dedicated to the development of Commonfare, "a participatory form of welfare provision based on collaboration among people".

Introduction

[1]. How do we evolve towars "relations of open reciprocity, communal sharing, gift-giving and voluntary collaboration allowed value to circulate in its unalienated forms, including labor power, political expression and interspecies ecological exchanges". [2]

  • Key document from the P2P Foundation: Value in the Commons Economy, our report on the transition in value regime, by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Niaros.

[6]


Towards a Social Insurance Based on the Commons

Peter Barnes:

"The present financial base of social insurance — payroll contributions by workers and employers — has essentially maxed out. Nor is it possible to supplement existing labor income by taxing it. So a 21st century system of economic security will have to be built on a new financing model, which I have proposed to be income from common wealth, in the manner of Thomas Paine and the Alaska Permanent Fund (see With Liberty and Dividends For All). Picture, then, a giant “common pot” into which flows money from multiple forms of common wealth and out of which flow monthly dividends to every American with a Social Security account. Such a pot could begin, as Social Security did, with a relatively small inflow and outflow, and grow over time as Americans become comfortable with it. Its funding sources could include fees on pollution of shared ecosystems and use of socially constructed financial infrastructure, as well as new money created in the manner Mellor proposes.

This system, anchored by the common pot, would serve three functions simultaneously. First, it would address the pressing need for lifetime economic security, a need that will only increase as automation and artificial intelligence replace more jobs. Second, it would create demand for more revenue sources which, if properly designed, would advance one of the key goals of the Great Transformation: internalizing the costs of destabilizing nature. Third and perhaps most importantly, it would supply the political juice for the first two functions. To paraphrase Mary Poppins, rising dividends from the common pot would become the sugar that helps the less palatable transformational pills go down." (comments to: http://www.greattransition.org/publication/money-for-the-people)

Worthy of attention and support

  • The P2P Foundation supports the emergence of Commonfare practices of social solidarity for networked workers who co-created commons and shared resources (see our special section http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:P2P_Solidarity), as well as their integration with a strengthened welfare system. In particular we support the creation of 'labor mutuals', i.e. freelance coops which already exist in the French-speaking world (Coopaname in France ; SMart in Belgium, Bigre, etc ..; see the project of AltGen in the UK). Read up here at Business and Employment Cooperatives, they are a "legal form (in Belgium, France ?) that allows self-employed to be salaried by their own joint cooperative, thereby obtaining the social protections of the salaried workers".

Quotes

Can Cosmo-Local Credit replace the Salariat ?

"What if everyday access to resources didn’t need an employer or lending interest at all? What if it were as simple as neighbors and organizations offering what they already do best, tapping a shared line of credit today, and settling up in-kind tomorrow?

That’s the heart of cosmo-local credit. You create a physical or digital voucher (a gift card for your goods or services) and stake it in a community commitment pool. That voucher is your collateral. Against it’s value, you draw what you need now, like money or supplies, without paying interest. Your outstanding obligation is just the value of your vouchers the pool holds. To settle, you can return what you drew and pull your voucher back. Or (and this is the magic) someone else can swap in their own voucher of equal value, take yours out, and spend it with you for your goods or services. In that moment the claim glides from you to them. Later, another neighbor can take their voucher, and so on. Because vouchers can pass hand to hand, the credit simply keeps rotating. It’s salary-like cash flow, but community-backed and recyclable."

- Will Ruddick [7]


We Are Not Meant To Be Rescued in Isolation

"But after so many years of trying to help the victim, the individual .. the one in need, the isolated figure on a registration form… we’ve lost sight of the murmuration. Do we even see it anymore?

In Kalobeyei and elsewhere, we are witnessing a quiet tragedy unfold. Humanitarian differentiated assistance models, designed to stretch shrinking aid budgets, has become a system that rewards isolation and penalizes cooperation. The logic is simple: those in greatest visible need get prioritized. But the consequences are f*ing devastating.

People are now hiding their mutual aid practices. Women are dismantling their chamas(support groups) just to qualify for aid. Grandmothers who have cared for entire households through Mweria …rotational labor … are told they seem “too organized” to be in need. Young men are told their Goob groups are disqualifying them from food support.

So what do they do? 

They lie.

They cheat.

They erase parts of themselves.

They destroy the networks that have helped them survive drought, displacement, and death.

A man in Kakuma told us he “broke” his chama on paper … pretending it no longer exists … because he needed to prove he had no support system. A woman in Kalobeyei dissolved her rotational savings group so she could be counted as an isolated household. "I had to pretend I was alone," she said. "Even though I never have been."

And still … there are victims. Yes, there are people in deep suffering. But can we really help them alone?

Of course not.

We are not meant to be rescued in isolation."

- Will Ruddick [8]


Scaled-Up Welfare Systems are rooted in grassroots community experimentation

Ted Howard:

"Solutions start where all fundamental change comes from—which is in communities and from the bottom up. This has been the case with large order change in both the UK and in my own country, the United States. Back home, we call it the laboratories of democracy. As the Great Depression took hold in America in 1929, the levels of pain across the country grew. But the ideology of the then federal government was that the government should do nothing to address the growing depression, that the market would correct itself. And so, in community after community people took history into their own hands and began to address their problems themselves. New approaches were devised that could eventually be lifted up and scaled. America’s primary social safety net, the Social Security System, began in small Alaska and California communities as people grappled with their challenges. When the politics changed nationally, when the Roosevelt administration came into power, and the New Deal began, these small models were lifted up into a comprehensive system of national support. Here in Britain there is a similar experience. When Bevan launched the NHS in 1948, he drew his inspiration from the Tredegar Medical Aid Society, a community based model in South Wales that began in 1890. This small Welsh experiment was scaled up into one of the great health systems of the world."

(https://democracycollaborative.org/content/democracy-collaborative-joins-jeremy-corbyns-new-community-wealth-building-unit-advisors)


Peter Kropotkin (et al.) on State Welfare vs Mutual Aid

1.


The absorption of all social functions by the State necessarily favoured the development of an unbridled, narrow-minded individualism. In proportion as the obligations towards the State grew in numbers the citizens were evidently relieved from their obligations towards each other.

— Peter Kropotkin [9]


2.

The ever-growing power of a soulless political bureaucracy which supervises and safeguards the life of man from the cradle to the grave is pitting ever greater obstacles in the way of the solidaric co-operation of human beings and crushing out every possibility of new development.

— Rudolf Rocker [10]


Benjamin Life on the Emergence of Cosmo-Local Approaches

"The old systems — the ones we’ve depended on for decades — are straining under their own contradictions. Institutions that once felt permanent are revealing themselves as brittle, disconnected from the lived realities of the people they claim to serve. Meanwhile, at the edges, something else is taking root: experiments in community-led support, neighbors organizing mutual aid networks, bioregional experiments in self-governance finding their footing, local economies reconnecting producers with communities, people designing new civc systems of community care, because the old ones have stopped working.

This isn’t collapse. It’s emergence. The two happening simultaneously.

The future of civilization doesn’t depend on better technology or smarter policy from above. It depends on whether communities can recover — or rediscover — their capacity to coordinate, govern, and care for themselves. 

The tools matter, but only insofar as they strengthen relationships rather than replace them. 

Infrastructure means nothing if it doesn’t serve real people in real places doing the patient work of sustaining life together."

- Benjamin Life [11]


Sovereignty and solidarity are not opposites at all. They are mutually co-arising

"There is an unspoken argument that runs beneath the surface of nearly all of our political disagreements. On one side stands the self-interested individual, the figure we tend to associate with libertarians, the one primarily concerned with liberty, choice, and freedom. On the other side stands the relational self, primarily concerned with care work and mutual aid, animated by the sense that we are responsible for one another. We have learned to treat these as opposites, as the two poles of a spectrum we are forever being asked to choose between. You are either for the sovereign self or for the solidarity of the collective. You cannot, it seems, be for both.

I want to suggest that this is not only false but backward. Sovereignty and solidarity are not opposites at all. They are mutually co-arising: two faces of a single phenomenon, each calling the other into being. We cannot have either one in any durable form without the other. The kind of sovereignty worth wanting is a sovereignty that requires solidarity to be real, and the kind of solidarity worth wanting is a solidarity that requires sovereign, healthy individuals and communities to make it possible. The tension between them is not a contradiction to be resolved. It is the structure that holds everything up."

- Benjamin Life [12]


The Solidaristic-Libertarian, Relational, Critique of the Welfare State Model

"For most of the twentieth century, we made a bargain. As communities and corporations grew larger and more complex, we agreed to trade participation in civic life for bureaucratic efficiency, to let trained experts and bureaucratic institutions handle the messy work of caring for one another. The citizen became a client, receiving services from a theoretically benevolent administration. For a while it seemed to work. Then, beginning roughly in the Reagan era and continuing with bipartisan enthusiasm for the next four to five decades, those same functions were steadily privatized and hollowed out, until the state retained the forms of care, child care, food and housing assistance, while evacuating their substance. We are left with an arrangement that is, in many ways, the worst of both worlds: a society that has neither the thick local bonds of mutual obligation nor a state that actually delivers on its promises.

The deeper damage is harder to see, because it is ontological rather than merely fiscal. When we made care the responsibility of bureaucratic institutions, we made it the responsibility of bodies that are structurally incapable of caring, because they are concerned only with the collective, and yet the collective is made up of individuals. A bureaucracy cannot see the web of particular relationships in which a person is actually held; it can only see the category. And so it treats homeless human beings as a “homelessness problem” rather than as particular people, each with their own trauma, their own economic and social and cultural circumstances, their own specific path into and potentially out of crisis. From this vantage the solutions are always imposed from above, never gripped into actual relationship. They cannot be. The institution has no hands with which to hold anyone, because hands belong to individual people, and the bureaucracy operates as an impersonal institution.

This is the point at which the libertarian critique, so often caricatured, deserves a fairer hearing. We tend to imagine libertarians as people who simply do not care, who have rationalized their indifference into a philosophy. But many libertarians are in fact deeply committed to care work. They simply do not believe that care belongs within the purview of the state. This is not because they are heartless. It is because they have seen the consequences of handing care to faceless institutions: it removes the responsibility of the individual to actually show up for their community. When care becomes the government’s job, it stops being mine.

But the polarity between individualism and collectivism cuts both ways. Yes, there are intensely self-motivated people who hide behind libertarian language to justify keeping what they have. But the existence of the selfish libertarian does not let the compassionate liberal off the hook. The liberal who insists that the government must solve the problem of care is very often outsourcing a responsibility they are themselves unwilling to carry. It is easy to vote for a program that will feed the hungry with someone else’s hands; it is hard to learn your unhoused neighbor’s name. The bureaucratic solution can be, in practice, a way of purchasing distance from the very people we claim to care about, a moral indulgence that lets us feel compassionate while remaining personally uninvolved. The libertarian’s error is imagining we can do without infrastructure for care. The liberal’s error is imagining that infrastructure can be made of paperwork rather than relationship. Neither is willing to pay the real price, which is presence."

- Benjamin Life [13]


Real Solidarity Requires Membranes

"On Membranes, Thresholds, and the Scales of Solidarity: If care is relational and cannot scale to infinity, then real solidarity requires membranes. It requires relational thresholds, boundaries that define who is inside a given circle of care and who, for now, is not. This sounds harsh until you realize that the alternative is to care for no one in particular, which is the same as caring for no one at all. We are not trying to care for everyone simultaneously. We are trying to care for specific people with whom we have actual bonds of reciprocity, trust, and intimacy.

A boundary of belonging is not a wall built to keep people out. It is the specific, relational act by which someone actually chooses to be in solidarity with someone else. This is the difference that makes everything work. Forced solidarity is not solidarity at all; it is conscription, and it breeds the resentment we feel toward jury duty rather than the devotion we feel toward our own people. Real solidarity has to be entered, consciously, by a self that knows itself well enough to mean it. The membrane is what makes the choice legible, what lets us say, with our whole selves, I am choosing to be inside this circle with you, to bear the real costs of intimacy because of what is ultimately gained from mutual care.

For that choice to stay genuine, the membrane has to hold two properties. It has to be real: an actual threshold, with an inside and an outside, or there is nothing to choose and nothing to consent to. And it has to be fluid and adaptive and self-regulating: porous enough that people can enter and leave, mutually accountable enough that the circle can enforce its own agreements as we do the messy work of caring for each other. A boundary that cannot move becomes a prison; a boundary that will not hold becomes a site of extraction. What we are after is exactly the living membrane we began with, the cell wall, firm enough to maintain integrity, permeable enough to stay alive, crossed only by consent. Here the image we planted at the level of the single self reappears at the level of the community, because it is the same pattern: bounded openness, the throne resting on a web that it neither dissolves into nor seals itself against. This is what keeps belonging from curdling into either tyranny or the tyranny of structurelessness. The boundary is what makes the belonging consensual, and the consent is what keeps the boundary humane.

And here it helps to notice that you already belong to many such circles, each defined by a different kind of shared stake.

I am in economic solidarity with the other members of my cooperative: we share a material fate tied to the same enterprise. I am in social and cultural solidarity with the people I do community organizing with: we share a project and a set of relationships. And I am in ecological solidarity with the people who share my bioregion: because we all have a vested interest in the same healthy water, the same healthy air, the same healthy soil. Notice that these are not abstractions. They are not “the environment” in general. They are this watershed, this foodshed, this soil, this community. The specificity is what grounds the solidarity and makes it material. You are in solidarity with your watershed-mates whether you like them or not, because you will all drink the same water.

When we form networked commons with relational membranes around these different common-pool assets, we are not building some kind of global solidarity. We are building pockets of material solidarity: dense, particular, and real. And then, crucially, from within those membranes we can begin to compose larger structures: nested, federated networks that allow us to be in broader solidarity where it is appropriate, consensual, and bounded.

The trick is to design the scale of each solidarity membrane proportional to the nature of the shared stake. Another bioregional group on the far side of the continent does not share my watershed. We are not in ecological solidarity around the same water. But we do share solidarity around information, around the hard-won knowledge of how to steward a watershed, which we can exchange freely across the distance between us. That is an appropriate, real, and genuinely interdependent form of solidarity, scaled correctly to what we actually have in common. This is the difference between solidarity that is grounded and solidarity that is performative: the grounded kind always knows exactly what it is grounded in."

- Benjamin Life [14]

Key Resources

Key Articles

Key Books

  • Radical Help. By Hillary Cottam. (strongly recommended by Kate Raworth)
  • Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare and Labour. The Commonfare Hypothesis. By Andrea Fumagalli, Alfonso Giuliani, Stefano Lucarelli, Carlo Vercellone. Routledge, 2020

[15]

  • Guy Standing. Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. Bloomsbury, 2014 [16]: discusses how rights - political, civil, social and economic - have been denied to the Precariat, and argues for the importance of redefining our social contract around notions of associational freedom, agency and the commons."
  • ebook: The Response: Building Collective Resilience in the Wake of Disasters. By Tom Llewellyn et al. Shareable, 2019 [17] ; interviews, articles, guides, and personal stories of community led disaster response
  • Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid during the Covid-19 Crisis. Edited by Marina Sitrin and Colectiva Sembrar. Pluto Books, 2021 [18]


Background:

  • Hauke Brunkhorst, Solidarity: From Civic Friendship to a Global Legal Community, trans. Jeffrey Flynn (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2005): " a comprehensive intellectual history of solidarity from Aristotle to the present, with a chapter devoted the related concept of fraternité in post-revolutionary French thought"


  • Esping-Andersen, G. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.


In French:

  • Marie-Claude Blais, La solidarité: Histoire d’une idée (Paris: Gallimard, 2007).


History

* Eric Hopkins' Working-class Self-Help in nineteenth century England.

Pat Conaty: "We need to be aware that public services as we know them had their origins in pioneering class struggles by commoners that developed the fundamental social economic innovations."

Key Policy Documents

[20] ; proposes 3 simple principles.

Key Practices

(Neo)Traditional Gifting/Sharing/Cooperative Practices:


Via Co-Creative Recipes:

  1. Ayni: a term with a meaning that’s closely related to minga. It describes a system of work and family reciprocity among members
  2. Bayanihan: in the Philippines,'communal unity'
  3. Córima: The Rarámuri people of Mexico’s Chihuahua mountains use the word “córima” to describe an act of solidarity with someone who’s having trouble.
  4. Gadugi: a term used in the Cherokee language which means “working together” or “cooperative labor” within a community
  5. Gotong-Royong: in parts of Indonesia and Malaysia, Gotong-royong is a cooperation among many people to attain a shared goal with ideas of reciprocity or mutual aid.
  6. Guelaguetza: a cross between a potlatch and a tequio. The term describes “a reciprocal exchange of goods and services”.
  7. Harambee: a Kenyan tradition of community self-help events, e.g. playdraising or development activities. Harambee literally means “all pull together” in Swahili
  8. Imece: a name given for a traditional Turkish village-scale collaboration.
  9. Maloka: (or maloka in Portuguese) is an indigenous communal house found in the indigenous Amazon region of Colombia and Brazil.
  10. Meitheal: the Irish word for a work team, gang, or party and denotes the co-operative labour system in Ireland where groups of neighbours help each other in turn with farming work
  11. Mutirão: This is originally a Tupi term used in Brazil to describe collective mobilizations based on non-remunerated mutual help.
  12. Naffīr: an Arabic word used in parts of Sudan (including Kordofan, Darfur, parts of the Nuba mountains and Kassala) to describe particular types of communal work undertakings.
  13. Tequio: a very popular type of work for collective benefit in the Zapotec culture. Community members contribute materials or labor to carry out construction work for the community.


Key Statistics

  • "Research shows how Gross Domestic Product (GDP – which primarily measures economic growth) and Genuine Progress Indicators (GPI – which measures well-being more broadly, inclusive of economic growth) rise in tandem until about $7k per capita, when the correlation plateaus, before falling – suggesting limits to benefits of economic growth." [21]

Visualizations

Types of Solidarity

Pages in category "P2P Solidarity"

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