How to spread the idea of (much) more radical change?

Last week, I blogged about whether governments can solve the climate problem, and argued that we need a much more radical approach – system change, no less (i.e. system replacement, rather than trying to tweak this fundamentally damaging system).

Here, I want to talk more about how I came to this conclusion, and what the route to radical change might be.

Romania: how not to ‘develop’.

I’ve been working for an environmental organisation for the last 21 years, and had been looking into what was happening to the biosphere for more than 21 years before that. This is what I do, all the time, and I see the problems of biodiversity loss and global warming getting worse, with nothing in place that looks like it might slow them down.

I co-founded Lowimpact in 2001, after working for an organisation involved with ‘sustainable development’ in Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. I worked in Romania, and saw three main trends there that horrified me.

1. Western corporations were moving into Romania and wiping out local businesses. I spoke with many bar and restaurant owners who showed me their brand new glass-fronted fridges, given to them for free by Coca-Cola, but with one condition – they were only to sell Coca-Cola products, and no drinks made by Romanian companies. Similar things were happening in other economic sectors, and Romanian business couldn’t compete with the deeper pockets of the corporate giants.
2. People’s lives were becoming harder. Friends in NGOs were living in concrete blocks that were often without heat or lighting for long periods during the harsh Romanian winter – living in a cold, dark, concrete cave, with ice on the inside of the windows. A common joke was ‘we’re going to join the EU – will the last person out please turn off the lights’. Western corporations were getting a source of cheap labour and Romania was losing its most entrepreneurial people.
3. International investors and logging companies were starting to buy up Romania’s forests and felling them for timber exports – a lot of it illegally. Much of the sawdust generated was acidic and leached into the river systems, killing wildlife in the Danube and the Black Sea. One of the biggest culprits is IKEA. The transition to capitalism was accompanied by the familiar growth in cars and motorways, and the wiping out of small family farms by industrial agriculture.

These trends represent economic, social and environmental disaster for Romania. We were talking with Romanian schools, NGOs and community organisers, but my organisation wouldn’t let me speak about the issues above (although of course I did, and Romanians were already well aware of them). As far as they were concerned, they were bringing the benefits of capitalism to Eastern Europe. I resigned, and launched Lowimpact in 2001, to promote ideas around sustainable behaviour change and to investigate ways to build a new kind of community-based, post-capitalist economy.

Radical alternatives

No-one can stop me writing about this now, of course, although this isn’t new to most people nowadays – these trends are expected by most people as capitalism spreads its tentacles into every nook of every country in the world. Capitalism is lethal to nature.

Romanians and other East Europeans, after the anti-communist revolutions of the early 90s, would tell you that the ‘what’ is most definitely not communism. They suffered for most of the 20^th century under the centralised control of communist governments. People don’t like it. It breeds corruption, and its growth imperative is every bit as environmentally-destructive as capitalism’s. Marx was wrong. He was a genius in many ways, but his analysis of history and his proposed solutions, were very wrong.

Meanwhile, capitalists and wannabee capitalists are not going to stop trying to make more and more money from money, on the back of other people’s work – forever chasing profits, interest and rent. And states are not going to stop chasing perpetual GDP growth. To try to persuade capitalists or states to change their ways is a futile task.

I’ve been looking for over 40 years for the key to a transition to a post-capitalist world. Most leads have been false – amounting to nothing more than magical thinking, calls for altruism to a largely unresponsive public, or appeals to equally unresponsive governments to do something, while the situation deteriorates daily for biodiversity and climate. We have to do something radical, quickly. But what? We can only build infrastructure and tools that cut off extractive sources of income and stymie growth. And I believe that we now have the means to do that.

The answer, I (and many others) believe, lies in building the ‘commons’ economy. There have been some tools developed recently, by the Credit Commons Society, that will, I hope, allow the much-anticipated commons economy to be be built. These are:

• Use-credit obligations; here’s a new topic introduction that I’ve been promising for weeks, that provides the mechanism for building a commons in every sector of the economy, starting with housing and energy.
• Mutual credit is something we’ve been talking about for a while – a moneyless trading system that can help small businesses through times of crisis without banks or interest.
• Credit Commons – a protocol for federating local small business networks into a global mutual credit trading system.

A few questions for you

I’d like to ask for your advice. How best to spread these ideas:

• A book?
• Blog articles?
• Public meetings?
• Conferences?
• Social media?
• Social interaction / word of mouth?
• Articles in the mainstream press?
• All of the above?
• Or forget it, and go to the pub? In which case, mine’s a pint of (local, non-corporate) bitter.

But whatever the medium, here are some questions for you:

1. Do you believe that:

• humans are on a very dangerous and stupid path;
• we need to change direction, quickly;
• which is impossible with capitalism;
• so we need a new economy?

If so, I’d like to help strengthen your position; to persuade you that the commons economy is that new economy; to show how it can be achieved, and how you can help.

2. Do you stand on the edge of these positions, thinking that they’re probably right, and you lean towards them, but you haven’t had enough time to look into them properly, and you’re still holding a bit of hope that governments or multi-billionaires might help us change direction?

If so, I’d like to persuade you that governments and multi-billionaires can only accelerate us on the wrong path; that building the commons economy is the way to change direction; to show how it can be achieved, and how you can help.

3. Do you believe that an army could be raised to win a war against capitalism, and centralised power generally?

If so, I don’t think there are many of you left, and so I guess I don’t have much to say to you, apart from ‘give it up – centralised power is way too strong, and even if it were possible for you to succeed, I wouldn’t want you to have centralised power any more than I want capitalists or the state to have it’.

4. Do you not believe (or maybe even care) that we’re heading in the wrong direction?

I’m guessing that this isn’t you, or it would be unlikely that you’d be on this site in the first place. But for this group, persuasion or appeals to altruism are pointless. We just have to provide the tools and infrastructure for them to obtain the things they need more cheaply, more conveniently or both – the ‘Holy Grail’. If this happens, you can be sure that they’ll tell friends and family, and things will start to grow exponentially. And it will need to – we don’t have much time.

I’ll be blogging about the outline of a proposed book over the coming weeks, as well as progress on building the commons in the north-west and south-west of England, London, India, Sweden and elsewhere.