Mutual Aid Networks and Local Solidarity
Stephanie Rearick and her friends and co-workers have been constructing a solidarity-based economic network in Madison, Wisconsin and beyond:
Stephanie Rearick and her friends and co-workers have been constructing a solidarity-based economic network in Madison, Wisconsin and beyond:
Why do humans, full of good qualities and wishing for happiness, not manage to live together in harmony?
Surely the most striking thing about the promise of the direct economy and P2P production for a generation that has been separated from production by crisis and precariousness is the end of the figure of the consumer.
Over the past 20 years, the existence of common spaces, places of social debate and pretty much everything involving citizenship has been erased in a conscious and ideologically-directed manner.
So what might a commons-based economy actually look like in its broadest dimensions, and how might we achieve it?
Is it possible to imagine a new sort of synthesis or synergy between the emerging peer production and commons movement on the one hand, and growing, innovative elements of the co-operative and solidarity economy movements on the other?
The P2P Foundation recently launched a new website, the Commons Transition Platform, as a central repository for policy ideas that help promote a wide variety of commons and peer-to-peer dynamics.
One of the challenges that we have in this process is how to create distributed systems of organization that work, not only technology-based, but human-based.
In opposition to corporate control and intellectual property, we need systems and processes which emphasize sharing and collaboration for food systems work.
The idea of Las Indias is that it is a community with cooperative businesses, not a community of cooperatives.
One thing everyone I met has in common is a desire to create a new world order, a new way of creating, connecting and being which is beyond the market, beyond ownership, growth and capitalism.
The open food movement has been developing at a pace in recent months through projects like the Australian-based Open Food Network, a free and open source project aimed at supporting diverse food enterprises and making it easy to access local sustainable food.