Making another world An activist reader November 2017 Contents

Beyond the Pink Tide: deals and the 3 future of the anti-globalisation movement If you thought chlorinated chicken was bad... 9 The violence of borders 12 We need to talk (honestly) about aid 15 Fearless Cities: the new urban movements 19 The culture of the commons 27 Between Honesty and Hope: Organising for 32 just solutions to climate change

Cover photo: Global Now activists at the European Summer University for Social Movements, organised by the European ATTAC network in Toulouse, France, in August 2017.

2 Beyond the Pink Tide: Trade deals and the future of the anti-globalisation movement The revolt against deals in Latin America was one of the driving forces behind the rise of progressive movements and governments in the continent. As Nick Dearden argues, new trade revolts in Latin America and Europe could throw up a another cycle of struggle

When the Zapatista Army launched an insurgency in Chiapas, Mexico on New Year’s Day 1994, their primary target was NAFTA, the US-Canada- Mexico trade deal which came into effect that day.

Many in Mexico feared the damage that the North American Free would do to their economy. The years that followed justified that fear. One million Mexican farmers lost their livelihoods, with 1.4 million related jobs scrapped too. Wages fell through the floor, prices rose, small businesses went to the wall, and millions tried to find a better life in the US. You wouldn’t know it to listen to Donald Trump, but the impact of NAFTA on Mexico far exceeds the damage done in the US.

Although the Zapatistas didn’t stop NAFTA, their rebellion proved a catalyst for perhaps the most interconnected global movement in history. The so

3 called anti-globalisation movement challenged the rule of unaccountable international institutions like the International Monetary Fund, and a global economy based on the power of big business. From the price of medicines to farmer’s livelihoods, environmental destruction to public services, the anti-globalisation movement rejected global economic policy making as dangerously antisocial. At the centre of these concerns were trade and investment rules which were taking power off governments and handing it to gigantic corporations.

The beating heart of this global resistance was always Latin America – the continent that has most fundamentally challenged the economic theory and practice of the US and European governments. And from the Cochabamba ‘water wars’ to the rise of the so called ‘Pink Tide’ governments in countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, trade rules and investment deals remained at the centre of the resistance. Not only did they fight back against a global economy dominated by big business, they started to build a regional economic system which would put redistribution of wealth and power right at its heart.

Here in Europe, it might have seemed surprising that trade could elicit such a response – at least until three years ago when we were faced with our own ‘free trade’ deal with the US, known as TTIP. At that point it became clearer that free trade today has little to do with exchanging goods, and much more to do with creating a new set of rules to protect and enhance the power of big business.

Latin American activists could have explained TTIP to us before negotiations even began. They’ve had decades of such deals. And they’re well versed in the fact that under free trade deals, governments lose important powers to protect their citizens and run their economies. When it comes to running public services, spending taxpayers’ money, passing laws to protect the environment, or making the lives of small farmers more secure, trade deals can constrain the power of governments. That’s because these deals entirely focus on making life as easy as possible for the investor – usually big business. The ‘right’ of international business to invest where they want, when they want, how they want comes ahead of any human right or international obligation.

But even in more basic form, free trade deals also create another problem for developing countries. Like many parts of the developing world, Latin America is used by the developed world as a source of raw materials: metals, fossil fuels, and basic foods. Just like in colonial times, these basic materials are exported, and manufactured products are imported back. Rather than adding value to their products and developing technology

4 and know how, these economies play the role of helping richer countries get richer still.

Trade deals tend to lock countries into these relationships, rather than allowing them to integrate with their regional neighbours at a similar level of development, which could help them break their unhelpful economic dependence on the West.

It is these structural problems that the ‘Pink Tide’ governments sought to redress. They even came up with an alternative trade system to encourage regional integration called ALBA (the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America). While never as developed as many would like, ALBA did encourage trade and integration on the basis of redistribution of wealth and co-operation rather than competition.

Building on Latin America’s trade revolution This summer in Brussels, European campaigners against TTIP came with trade campaigners from Latin America to assess what had been achieved and what more remains to be done. With wing governments of Latin America challenged by elections, coups, and economic collapse, there is an urgent need to rejuvenate the movements that gave birth to the anti-globalisation moment.

The Latin American governments had astonishing success in terms of fighting . But there are also big gaps in terms of long term structural change.

One of the central problems of the ALBA governments was their dependence on commodities – especially Venezuelan oil. The profit from these commodities was used to transform the lives of the poorest throughout the continent in the 2000s: poverty was slashed, as education and healthcare improved dramatically. It was a radical model of redistribution that lifted millions out of poverty.

But at the same time, not enough was done to truly diversify these economies. Too little investment in new industries means that Latin America is still too dependent on commodity . When commodity prices were at record highs in the 2000s, there was plenty to go around, and new money was readily lent by banks. But commodity prices are volatile, and the oil crash effectively brought an end to Latin America’s rise, with debts left in some countries which must be paid for by yet more commodity exports. The subservience of their economies to the US, EU, and newly emerging powers remains acute.

5 Big steps were made to build regional institutions so that the power of Western based institutions like the and International Monetary Fund could be broken. Countries like Ecuador literally sent senior World Bank staff packing, closing their offices, while wiping out a significant portion of the countries’ illegitimate debt. Mining companies were told to pay their taxes and abide by national laws.

But plans for radically different institutions – like the so called Bank of the South and a common currency to break the dependence on the dollar – floundered as Brazil argued with Venezuela about whether the aim was to improve Latin America’s standing within the current global system, or to break that system altogether.

Today, as neoliberal governments have taken over in Brazil and Argentina, while Venezuela edges towards collapse, these programmes are rapidly going into reverse.

Between Trump and Europe – where next for the trade revolt? In the 2000s, many Latin American activists took positions in their newly radical governments, but this often meant weaker movements pushing those government from the outside. Now the movements are reasserting themselves, and finding success.

El Salvador has been the victim of a long running trade case in a ‘corporate court’ after the government tried to prohibit a gold mining operation. That spurred on anti-mining groups who recently won a groundbreaking law to halt metal mining in the central American country.

Ecuador, victim of countless corporate court cases, ripped up 16 bilateral deals, including with the US and UK, after an audit pushed by grassroots activists found that such deals had had an overwhelmingly negative impact on the country.

The next 12 months will really test the strength of this rejuvenated activism.

Trump came into the White House promising to renegotiate NAFTA. Far from offering a helping hand to Mexicans, Trump rather thinks NAFTA was too soft on Mexico. But the renegotiation, starting this August, does begin a process which could, if resisted, send shock waves throughout Latin America.

If the US terms are too difficult for Mexico’s government, the continent might refocus on deals with Europe. The EU, keen to get its hands on more of Latin America’s resources, is using Trump’s presidency to appear as a

6 benevolent force in comparison, offering good old free trade deals to the continent, complete with strict investor protection rules. Doubtless Brexit Britain will be snapping at their heels. Already, UK ‘investors’ have taken 16 cases against Latin American countries – adding to the burden of the most sued countries on earth.

Strong resistance from Latin America could help sink Trump’s plans, and even NAFTA itself, but also force a further rethink of Europe’s weakened trade policy post TTIP. That will matter not only to citizens there, but here too.

Then, in December, Argentina hosts the World Trade Organisation summit – the body which oversees a set of trade rules for the whole world. This will be an opportunity to bring Latin American activists together to start arguing forcefully for a different sort of economy. With the G20 meeting also being held in Buenos Aires in 2018, Argentina has an opportunity to rekindle its radical image.

Resistance and alternatives – from Chiapas to ALBA Campaigners aren’t opposed to trade in and of itself, but rather to the system of trade and investment currently embedded in nearly all trade deals. So, activism needs to focus more concretely on what sort of trade deals we would want to see. At the recent meeting in Brussels, campaigners laid out a path to building a new trade system.

This means turning current trade rules on their head. Big business and super rich investors don’t need any more protection. What encourages positive investment is not letting corporations do whatever they like, but building a well functioning economy, and a skilled and well educated society. For this to work, and indeed for trade to work in the interests of the many not the few, governments must be able to regulate corporations and investment. Agreements between countries should encourage such regulation by insisting on high standards, the protection of workers and farmers, and the sharing of skills and technologies.

Latin America should also remember and build upon ALBA, rather than assuming that more exports to Europe or the US will solve its problems. Latin America’s problems don’t arise from the fact that it is insufficiently integrated into the global economy, as the free traders would have it. Rather the continent is integrated in the wrong way – one which embeds colonial forms of trade, prioritises the of commodities to the richer part of the world, and pushes big business over small business and farmers.

None of this will be handed down by a benevolent government. We’ll all

7 have to fight for it. But the current widespread concern about free trade in Europe and the US gives a real space for movements around the world. Neither Europe’s ‘business as usual’ approach to free trade, nor Trump’s beggar-my-neighbour trade strategy will build a better world. We need a fundamentally different approach which is both local and democratic on the one hand, and open and internationalist on the other.

There is no better place to discuss this than in Latin America – which has come further than any region in its experiments to create a fairer trade system. The spirit of Chiapas needs to be reborn. That’s the best hope we have of permanently transforming the global economy so that it puts people before profit.

What to look out for The WTO meets in December in Argentina. It will give Latin American movements the opportunity to reignite their opposition to neoliberal trade and start building alternatives.

NAFTA renegotiations start in August. This gives space for activists to raise the negative implications of NAFTA throughout Canada, Mexico and the US. If Trump attempts to push even more punitive terms on Mexico, it will have repercussions for the continent as a whole.

The EU is going on a trade offensive. Particularly look out for the EU-Mexico modernisation negotiations which will attempt to enhance the ‘rights’ of big business, as well as help the EU gets it hand on Mexican government spending (procurement). Also the very long awaited EU- deal (Mercosur is a which includes Brazil and Argentina).

This article was first published on novaramedia.com on 5 July 2017. Nick Dearden is the director of Now.

8 If you thought chlorinated chicken was bad... The secretary may be refusing to talk about what Americans do to their meat, but plans for a trade deal between the US and UK will look more like a corporate wish list, writes Jean Blaylock

It’s hardly ever a good idea to start talking about chlorinated chickens, as Liam Fox should have known, when answering questions about the trade talks he has started with the US. The puns write themselves – fox in the hen house, chickens coming home to roost etc etc. Chlorinated chickens have become a moot point, but that’s only the start of the problems with a potential US-UK trade deal.

Treating chickens with chlorine epitomises the difference in approaches to food safety and animal welfare in the US and the UK at present. The UK, along with the rest of the EU, takes a ‘farm to fork’ approach trying to eliminate bacteria such as salmonella or campylobacter at every stage in the chain. The US by contrast tolerates dirty meat until the very end, when it bleaches everything in the chlorine wash. Done properly, the UK approach is better for the birds, who are more likely to have healthy lives,

9 as well as for people, because there are fewer chances for bacteria to be spread to humans.

There is a choice here, represented by chlorine chicken, beef treated with growth hormone, and pork laced with ractopamine – all of which have risks for human health and animal welfare. As a House of Lords report published on Tuesday puts it “the government may find it hard to reconcile its free trade ambitions with its commendable desire for preserving high farm animal welfare standards.”

All these practices are also part of a highly industrialised farming system, with animals kept in intensive mega-farms, a model of farming that is dependent on fossil fuel, contributes to climate change and degrades our soil. Do we want to go further down this path by committing ourselves in this sort of trade deal, or do we want to keep our ability to choose a more sustainable, healthy food system?

The risks of these talks go far beyond this however. Fox’s meeting seeks to lay the groundwork for a future trade deal with the US, and we have a good idea what that might look like - TTIP on steroids. Fox has been meeting with a huge number of corporate lobbyists in the past few months, and some of the most powerful groups have been pushing for exactly that – a deal that starts where the controversial EU-USA deal broke off, and goes further in its approach to .

This would be disastrous for public services including the NHS. The massive private healthcare industry in the US would love to get its hands on more of the NHS, and US senators have already said they hope that could be one of the outcomes of a future deal. During the TTIP negotiations, legal advice showed the NHS was not protected, and May has declined to rule out putting it on the table.

A trade deal would lock in privatisation of public services. Such deals can include a ratchet clause ensuring that while the government could always keep privatising more things, it couldn’t bring any of them back into public ownership without punitive financial penalties. We are also likely to see rules, already proposed in other deals, that make discriminating between different sorts of fuels impossible. In other words, supporting renewable technologies when fossil fuels could do the job could become the basis for a trade dispute.

Much of Fox’s focus is on financial services and there is a huge danger that a trade agreement with the US could be used to enable financial deregulation – making proposals to break up big banks or impose a financial transactions tax extremely difficult. US Democratic senator 10 Elizabeth Warren has highlighted the risks: “We did this kind of [de] regulation before and it resulted in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. We cannot afford to go down this road again.”

And of course, a trade deal with the US would include the notorious ‘corporate courts’ (Investor State Dispute Resolution or ISDS). This allows foreign corporations to sue governments for passing regulations that could affect corporate profits, through an international arbitration process that completely bypasses our own national justice system. In practice, this means corporations will be able to sue Britain for doing almost anything they don’t like – environmental protection, regulating finance, renationalising public services, anti-smoking policies – you name it.

It’s not just that a trade deal with the US carries huge risks in itself, it is also the way it is being done. Firstly, Fox is desperate for a deal, but for the US this is just a side affair while it is mainly focused on renegotiating NAFTA (its trade deal with its neighbours, Canada and Mexico). The Trump administration is also on a war footing on trade, ready to start disputes not just about steel but even olives. The UK will have to take whatever is offered.

More fundamentally this is a deal being done in the dark, with no democratic accountability. Fox is not allowed to conclude a trade deal until the UK leaves the EU, but he wants to get as much prepared as possible, so that he can present a fait accompli for a quick conclusion. At that stage, it will be too late for there to be any scrutiny or input from parliament or the public, so it is vital that there is accountability now. Yet trade ministers have told MPs they won’t be providing any details of trade meetings like this one with other countries, and they have refused freedom of information requests to even just publish a schedule of meetings. Major policy decisions will be taken in these trade discussions. Do you trust Liam Fox to make all the right choices if he doesn’t even have to tell anyone what is being decided?

Parliament at present has almost no say in trade deals like this one with the US. They don’t get to set the objective and mandate for trade deals, they have no right to be informed of progress in negotiations or guide their progress, and they don’t get a vote before the deal is signed. They are asked to ratify a final deal, but the current procedure is a formality that does not allow MPs to actually outright reject a trade deal. This needs to change. Otherwise it is not just the chickens who are at risk, it is our democracy.

Jean Blaylock co-ordinates the Trade Justice Movement. This article first appeared on The Independent website. 11 The violence of borders Reece Jones is one of a number of academics now writing about the inherent violence of national borders and how we might start to move beyond them towards a universal freedom to move Photo: Rasande Tyskar Rasande Photo:

In your book Violent Borders you argue that borders are inherently violent. Can you explain this and the type of violence that stems from the presence of borders? The overt violence of border guards and border security infrastructure is only one aspect of the violence borders inflict on people and on the environment. In the book I expand on the other forms of violence found at borders, such as:

• The use of force or power—threatened or actual—that increases the chances of injury, death, or deprivation. For example, the construction of walls and the deployment of thousands of additional Border Patrol agents at the US-Mexico border has prevented easy crossings in urban areas like El Paso and San Diego and funneled migrants to harsh and dangerous deserts where thousands of people have died.

12 • The threat of violence which is necessary to limit access to land or to a resource through an enclosure. For instance, the threat of punishment for trespassing on private land or of arrest for not possessing the proper identity papers. • The violence borders do to the economic wellbeing of people around the world. This is a collective, structural violence that deprives the poor from access to wealth and opportunities through the enclosure of resources and the bordering of states. • The damage borders do to the environment of the earth. There is direct harm to the landscape through the construction of walls, the deployment of security personnel, and the use of surveillance technologies. Moreover, borders create separate jurisdictions that allow the ideology of resource extraction to become pervasive by preventing uniform environmental regulations. By allowing each country to put the well-being of the people inside its borders before the well-being of the world as a whole, borders fracture the regulation of the environment and prevent meaningful to combat climate change. These other forms of violence at borders are not as obvious as migrant deaths, but they are a direct outcome of a political system seeking to control access to resources and limit movement around the world. Taken together, borders should be seen as inherently violent and engendering a systematic violence to people and the environment.

Have borders always been inherently violent? Yes.

Do you think that the media portrayal of the migration crisis and border issues has been accurate/fair? The issue of border deaths has been around for over fifteen years so I am pleased to see that it has finally been recognized as a significant story in the media. However, the media coverage is inadequate for several reasons. First, the media emphasises refugees over other people on the move which delegitimises movement and creates the false impression that if the war in Syria was ended, the migration crisis would also end.

The second problem with the coverage is that it emphasises the impact on Europe, although less than fifteen percent of refugees globally are in Europe. Instead, countries like Jordan, Lebanon, and Pakistan are hosting the most refugees but are barely mentioned in the coverage.

Third, the media consistently places the blame for deaths on smugglers and human traffickers without acknowledging that if states did not have walls and hardened borders, the smugglers would not be necessary. The 13 root cause of border deaths are restrictive migration policies that do not provide a system for safe passage for people on the move.

You consider the to be the world’s deadliest border. Why is this the case? The borders of the EU are the deadliest in terms of the number of deaths in the last few years, which is due to a combination of EU policy and physical geography. Through December 1, 2016 there had been 6198 reported deaths at borders globally this year (which is already the highest number ever). Over 75% of those deaths, 4699 people, happened at the edges of the EU.

The short term policy problem is that even as the number of people displaced by conflict has increased to 65 million people, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the EU has not moved to accept an appropriate number of refugees for resettlement (nor has the US or Japan). The result has been asylum seekers languishing in camps for years or decades waiting for resettlement.

To avoid that, many people opted to simply travel directly to Europe and apply for asylum there. As easier routes through the Balkans have been closed down with fences and strict policing, the only option for many people on the move is to travel through Libya to take a boat in the Mediterranean. The sea crossing is perilous, compared to land routes at many other borders, which has resulted in the staggering number of deaths.

However, in Violent Borders I argue that we should not get too focused on the short term policy issues around refugees, because it obscures the larger and longer term issue of the role borders play in protecting the privileges of wealthy states by limiting the right to move for the majority of the people in the world.

You call the US-Mexico border a ‘militarised zone.’ How does the management of this border differ from others? The US-Mexico border is not that different from many other borders, but the militarization of the practice of border policing is particularly visible there. The substantial increases in funding for border security and for security infrastructure demonstrates clearly how the border has become a key sector for the military technology and armaments industry to repurpose their wares for security uses.

Are violent borders generally those of wealthier states? The problem emerges from the idea that states have the right to limit

14 movement at their borders, which applies to all states equally. The violence of borders is sometimes more evident at the edges of wealthy states because they have the resources to invest in security infrastructure and they are more attuned to protecting privileges by restricting the movement of the poor across their borders.

However, one of the most violent borders in the world is the India- Bangladesh border where the Indian Border Security Force has killed over 1000 Bangladeshi citizens in the past fifteen years.

This is an extract from an interview originally published on the E-International Relations website, www.e-ir.info. Reece Jones is associate professor of geography at the University of Hawai’i and the author of Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (Verso, 2017).

15 We need to talk (honestly) about aid The trickle-down dogma of the aid industry is false, argues Nick Dearden. We need international aid which supports public services and genuinely redistributes wealth

Millions of pounds of aid money will be poured into London’s financial companies to insure developing nations against floods and hurricanes, the UK government announced recently. The British tabloids responded with stories of City fat cats getting rich from our tax money. On the other side, charities defended aid, as always, as necessary to fight extreme poverty.

It’s become so common that the script could be written in advance. The government announces a scheme aimed more at generating profits for British business than fighting poverty. Right-wing newspapers, campaigning to end aid spending, shed crocodile tears complaining that it isn’t targeted at “the poorest”. Charities, whose budgets increasingly depend on aid spending, counter that it’s the best thing since sliced bread.

Beneath these routine arguments, the public is never allowed to engage in a more complex debate. Aid could, if radically refashioned and, preferably, renamed, play a much-needed role in redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor of the world, just as taxation does domestically. But it’s always been too tempting for governments to use it to further the interests of the powerful instead.

Over the past 10 years, aid thinking has been captured by free-market ideologues whose outdated dogma tells them that making the rich even richer is the best way to also make the poor less poor. Based on the false idea that any economic growth is bound to trickle down to the poor eventually, aid is routinely offered to help the private sector (read multinational corporations) to thrive.

That’s why today UK aid is spent setting up private schools and hospitals in Africa and Asia, contracted out to well-heeled corporate consultants, thrown into financial markets to “invest” in upmarket shopping malls and hotels, and used to “convince” the governments of African countries to make life easier for Western agribusiness. Not to mention the use of aid to prop up the post-Brexit financial centre of London. Or to help to “persuade” governments they want to negotiate a trade deal with us.

16 Rather than allowing countries to design their own path out of poverty, free from domination by Western powers, aid is used to force those counties into a predesigned path - dependent on the markets of rich countries, on international , on the whims of big business.

A radically different vision of aid If aid is to have any useful future, we need to openly challenge its direction. After all, aid was originally pushed by well-meaning campaigners who, in the 1960s, told industrialised governments it was their duty to redistribute some of their wealth to poorer countries, to help them to develop. In 1970, the UN passed a resolution that the amount to aim for was 0.7 percent of their gross national income.

Very few countries have reached the target, but a sustained campaign saw the Labour Party sign up to vastly increase aid in office, and Britain finally reached the target in 2013. Of course, some of that aid is spent as it should be - building education, creating decently paid jobs, expanding access to medicine. But too much isn’t. A new report from Global Justice Now sets out a radically different vision of aid. It starts with the word itself.

Aid conjures up images of a generous donor helping those who can’t help themselves. But this is not what aid does. Aid is minuscule in comparison with the wealth which the industrialised world has pulled out of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Historically the West’s wealth is built on the resources of the developing world. Even today, the world extracts more wealth from Africa than it puts in - through tax-dodging multinationals, through unfair trade deals, through the impact of climate change.

Aid, if spent properly, is a small piece of compensation. And even if the slate was magically wiped clean, a civilised society always redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor, on the understanding that everyone deserves a decent standard of living with human rights. But this isn’t really ‘aid’. It’s more like a global version of domestic taxation, which is how we should conceive of it.

Our welfare state is not a gift which the rich control, where they spend taxes on their pet projects. Neither should rich countries control aid. It should be made accountable to recipient countries themselves: governments and citizen movements in a democratic manner.

Taxation allowed us in Europe to transform our societies. Through public health services, public education, social housing, income support, old- aged provision, ordinary people no longer had their basic needs and rights dictated by the laws of the market. Today, aid should be used to create

17 a national health service for the whole world, together with education, housing and basic income, as a public right. We should share not just money but also doctors, teachers and civil servants.

Educated, healthy societies would attract investment, which can be helpful providing it’s properly taxed and regulated. Aid could be used to assist in building the knowledge to do this rather than, as is now the case, used to bully and bribe countries into deregulating.

Public-public partnerships Rather than funding privatisation schemes, or so-called public-private partnerships, we should support public-public partnerships, allowing different levels of government to share control of important economic utilities - such as energy, telecommunications, and more. Ensuring that national industries aren’t only controlled by central government can help overcome issues of corruption and lack of accountability.

Rather than making life easier for agribusiness, we should establish a food fund to make small farming, which is better for the environment and rural society, more viable. Land redistribution, cooperatives, access to local markets, marketing boards can all help remove the precariousness and vulnerability from farming.

This vision is not utopian. In fact, there are current examples to build on. A Dutch public water utility helping Mongolia’s capital to develop a modern, public water and sewage service. Funds to Zambia which are fed directly to more doctors and more teachers. A British programme to share NHS expertise and a UN programme to promote tax experts. Direct cash transfers to families so their children can go to school rather than work. Farmers teaching each other to improve productivity in an organic and sustainable manner.

These are the seeds of a better form of global wealth redistribution. If sufficient wealth was put behind such projects, and enough control given to the societies on the receiving end, poverty could be wiped out in a generation, and the world would be a much more democratic place.

If, on the other hand, we continue to pretend everything is OK and support aid uncritically, then any hint of social justice will disappear, and we will be left with a pot of money which is detrimental to the huge task of building a fairer world.

This article was first published in July 2017 on the Al Jazeera English website.

18 Fearless Cities: the new urban movements

A wave of new municipalist movements has been experimenting with how to take – and transform – power in cities large and small. Bertie Russell and Oscar Reyes report on the growing success of radical urban politics around the world Photo: Marc Lozano Marc Photo:

As dusk sets on a warm June evening in Barcelona, an enthusiastic crowd of activists, young people, pensioners and political tourists settles down to watch a conversation between Ada Colau and Manuela Carmena. The mayors of Barcelona and Madrid were elected as part of a political tide that has swept citizens’ groups with roots in the indignados movement into the government of cities across Spain.

The event marked the start of ‘Fearless Cities’, a gathering of over 700 people, representing dozens of experiments in taking power at city level, to empower citizens’ movements worldwide. More than a coming together of a series of local experiments, it marked the ‘coming out’ party for a new global social movement.

Occupy the institutions In June 2015, Barcelona en Comú (BComú) – a citizen-led platform

19 spearheaded by the housing rights activist and feminist Ada Colau – took control of the Catalan capital. Evolving from Spain’s Occupy movement (15M) and powerful solidarity networks such as the Mortgage Victims’ Platform (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, PAH), many of the Spanish indignados felt they had hit the limits of protest. When millions of signatures to abolish Spain’s cruel mortgage repossession laws were ignored, and with corruption and clientelism rife, it became necessary to change who the movement made demands of.

In a story that was echoed in other Spanish cities, from Madrid to A Coruña and Zaragoza, citizens started to wonder what would happen if the movement tried to occupy the institutions too. BComú began by producing a ‘code of ethics’ designed to guard against the institutionalisation of those preparing to run for public office, and undertook a city-wide process of co-authoring an emergency action plan that included measures to halt evictions, fine banks leaving multiple properties empty, and subsidise energy and transport costs for the unemployed and those earning under the minimum wage. From the beginning, this was not a simple return to electoral politics but an experiment in transforming local institutions. It was to use municipal institutions not instead of movement organising but to support, expand and generalise the movement.

Understanding the new municipalism Although many commentators have focused on Barcelona, activists within BComú have long suggested that ‘the municipal movement must be internationalist’. Only BComú had the global profile needed to call the Fearless Cities gathering, but the new municipalist movement that it is part of is about much more than Barcelona – it’s about the blossoming of examples around the world where citizens are successfully winning their cities.

In early June, Chokwe Antar Lumumba was elected as mayor of the state capital and largest city in Mississippi, on the promise of making Jackson ‘the most radical city on the planet’. Lumumba works closely with the civic platform, Cooperation Jackson, that aims to anchor the city’s economy in ‘worker-owned, democratically self-managed enterprises’. In an otherwise highly conservative Republican state, Jackson is pioneering a strategy for the self-determination of black working class communities.

In Valparaíso, Chile, an Autonomist Movement (Movimeinto de Autonomista) candidate was elected mayor at the head of a coalition of community and neighbourhood associations tired of the corruption of the major parties. In , , Critical Mass (Massa Critica) has forced the mayor to concede legal protection for the commons. In Beirut, Lebanon,

20 the anti-sectarian, anti-establishment Beirut, My City (Beirut Madinati) built a strong neighbourhood organising platform that saw it win around 30 per cent of the vote in the 2016 city council elections. And from Zagreb, Croatia, to New York, the list of radical civic platforms standing up to entrenched political interests continues to grow.

Each of these stories is unique – there is no single ‘model’ of radical municipalist organising. But there are a number of principles and practices that the new municipalist movements share.

Common experiences The political theorist Margaret Kohn once defined municipalism as ‘a politics of everyday life concerned with the issues that immediately affect citizens, including education, policing, jobs, culture and services. Municipalism is a political approach to community.’

According to Kohn, the experience of Italian municipal socialism in the late 19th and early 20th century built on these foundations by fostering a form of ‘governing through participation’ in associations that blurred the line between the state and civil society. The role of the municipality was to foster associations that challenge concentrations of power in the hands of a small elite. Capturing the city hall was never an end in itself but rather one method in expanding the scope of experiments in popular participation.

While the new municipalist movement shares some of these characteristics, this isn’t history repeating itself. Neither organised from above or coordinated by a central committee, nor fuelled by some shared set of theoretical texts or prefigured programme, the new municipal citizens’ movements have arisen out of the failure of national political parties or street-based organising to deliver transformative change. At the same time, the continued erosion of basic living standards and increasing inequality driven by the myth that there is ‘no alternative’ has increased awareness that revolutionary change extends beyond ‘economics’ to every aspect of our lived experiences.

This provides fertile ground for the development of a progressive post- capitalist politics that can win. As movement-parties negotiate the contradictions and compromises of being on the streets and in the municipal institutions, there will be mistakes and misgivings – and failures. Yet these experiments are forging new paths that cut through many of the traditional divisions that characterise politics – public/private, institution/ movement, global/local, bottom-up/top-down, and state/non-state. This new municipalism may be picking-up where the alter-globalisation

21 movement left off, retaining and reinvigorating the concepts of prefiguration, experimenting with ‘diagonal’ methods for dispersing power, and fuelling the expansion of non‑state, non-market ways of organising our societies.

The feminisation of politics Women are at the forefront of many of these citizens’ movements – reflected at Fearless Cities in a weekend of seminars and workshops where about two-thirds of the contributing panelists were women. Only a few days after the event, the movement-party Future City (Ciudad Futura), based in Rosario, Argentina, announced a 15-strong electoral list for the coming regional elections. All of them are women, including Caren Tepp, one of the group’s current councillors in Rosario. Referring to themselves as the mujeres sin miedo – women without fear – Ciudad Futura typifies the central role women are playing in the new municipalist movement.

As BComú activists Laura Roth and Kate Shea Baird have argued, however, achieving in institutional representation is only one factor in the feminisation of politics. Swapping the genders of political representatives is insufficient unless coupled with a challenge to the fundamental character of politics itself.

The gathering, hosted by Barcelona En Comú, ‘marked the coming out party for a new global social movement’

The feminisation of politics means expanding the domain of what counts as ‘political’, challenging who does and doesn’t have a right to speak, and moving away from a culture of confrontation to one of collaboration. As Ada Colau suggests, ‘You can be in politics without being a strong, arrogant male, who’s ultra-confident, who knows the answer to everything.’ The feminisation of politics means encouraging a political style that openly expresses doubts and contradictions – backed by a values- based politics that emphasizes the role of community and ‘the commons’. It means being able to ‘be in politics, aiming to win, but with doubts and contradictions, and being able to show this like normal people, and talk about it openly’. This open spirit is at the centre of the new political culture that the new municipalist movements are attempting to build.

The expansion of the commons ‘The commons’ is notoriously hard to define, except by considering what it isn’t. The commons – in contrast to the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ – isn’t simply about who owns and manages resources. Instead, the idea of the commons rejects the claim that we live in a world of resources to be exploited, and demands a radical rethink of how we relate to one another

22 and to the world around us. The commons is much broader than an economic strategy for resource management; it’s about building forms of autonomy and social solidarity as the substance of our day-to-day lives. This is a new front for political organising, and what this means in practice is being experimented with across this movement.

In Messina, , the movement Cambiamo Messina dal Basso created an institution called the Commons Lab. Through this, citizens have co‑authored the rules for the management of commons, urban gardens and a newly established participatory budget.

In Naples, where the progressive mayor Luigi de Magistris received 65 per cent of the vote in last year’s elections, the administration passed a law designed to identify ‘areas of civic importance ascribed to the category of the commons’, providing the basis for establishing the first Department of the Commons. Most immediately, this process identified seven of Naples’ social centres – the historical backbone of Italian social movements – and legally recognised them as ‘commons’. While some accused the municipal government of legalising the illegal occupation of public buildings, de Magistris defended the move:

‘These are not occupied but liberated spaces. When groups of citizens take them over, clean then, repair them, open them up to the collective with social, sports, or cultural activities, these spaces are returned to the citizenry. They are a new commons and they should be treated as such.’

Can Batlló in Barcelona is another such space, reclaimed by the local community for shared activities and micro-scale businesses. Barcelona City Council is working on a new model of ‘citizen patrimony’, which would formalise and expand a network of spaces across the city where the municipality provides greater resources and public infrastructure for self- managed common use. Ultimately, this could lead to the development of ‘public-common partnerships’, encouraging the expansion of non-state, non-profit entities run by and for citizens, such as day-care centres that – although funded by the local state – are run autonomously.

Remunicipalisation The collaboration between citizens’ groups, cooperatives and municipalities is also at the heart of many of the attempts to return public services to public ownership. That’s a trend that has escalated, with ‘more than 800 cases of re-municipalisation in recent years, involving over 1,600 cities’ according to Olivier Petitjean, co-editor of a new book on Reclaiming Public Services.

23 There are many reasons why cities and regions want to take services back under public ownership, but reducing cost (especially for poor people), improving the quality of services, and increasing financial transparency are recurrent themes. Efforts to create better conditions for workers are another key driver. In the energy sector, which accounts for around a third of the cases where services have been returned to public ownership, the shift is often driven by efforts to tackle climate change.

In Stuttgart, for example, the city council remunicipalised the electricity and gas networks in 2014. Its new municipal utility company is now at the centre of a strategy to become a ‘zero emission’ city by 2050 – an ambitious goal for a city of over half a million people that is home to several large manufacturers. The new utility company partnered with a local energy cooperative with a reputation as one of the pioneers of green energy supply in Germany, allowing it to learn from citizens’ initiatives. Taking control of the energy supply also means that the council can better coordinate efforts to reduce energy use.

Elsewhere, too, remunicipalisation is about more than simply a return to the old model of state ownership. On the Hawaiian island of Kauai, private energy companies were replaced by a not-for-profit citizens’ cooperative. The user-owners of the coop set a goal of 50 per cent renewable energy generation by 2023, which may be reached ahead of time – in stark contrast to the fossil fuel-heavy private utilities in many other parts of the USA.

Remunicipalisation has advanced furthest in the water and energy sectors, but it extends across the whole range of tasks that have traditionally been undertaken by local councils, and it has fostered novel forms of collaboration with citizens and workers. A number of French municipalities have taken back control of school meals from corporations to protect local agriculture and improve the quality of meals. In the small city of Mouans-Sartoux in southern France, the municipality bought farmland and now employs a local farmer to provide schools with 100 per cent organic produce.

Remunicipalisation is ultimately about much more than just ownership. The most successful, and innovative cases have given citizens greater control over how services work, with key decisions taken in common rather than imposed on service users.

Redesigning democracy Increasing citizens’ control is not just about taking over existing institutions, but building new democratic processes that involve citizens in the day-

24 to-day decision making of their cities. Sometimes that means using the local state as a lever to counter national policy failings. Brad Lander, a Progressive Caucus councillor in New York, explains how the city recently set up an Office of Labor Relations to amplify the power of workers in a context where trade unions and labour rights have been under attack for decades. The Office has already helped to settle dozens of labour disputes, and forced employers in the city to provide mandatory sick pay (which US federal law does not require).

In other cases, it involves changing how citizens interact with the city government. In Messina, Sicily, the governing citizens’ platform is creating ‘participatory redevelopment’ plans, with popular assemblies tasked with deciding directly how particular areas are to be redeveloped.

Cities have also embraced the use of new technologies to enhance participation in decision-making. Madrid’s city council uses an open- source software platform (‘Decide Madrid’) to channel citizens’ proposals on how the city should be run. It has already been used to propose and endorse a motion to make public buildings 100 per cent sustainable, and is starting to be used for participatory budgeting.

The municipalities using these online tools are clear that they only work if they are complemented by real-world encounters. ‘After 15M, people wanted more channels for participation,’ explained BComú councillor, Gala Pin, at a Fearless Cities workshop on radical democracy. ‘We adopted a digital platform but are careful to combine that with offline communication, conscious of digital divide.’ The city is also working on a ‘diverse participation’ plan, to encourage participation from people who might otherwise be under-represented, such as migrant women and older people.

All of these new democratic experiments have to walk a tightrope. As Laia Forné, the councillor responsible for active democracy and decentralisation in Barcelona, outlines: ‘Institutions want to produce regulations and static norms… social movements want to create leeway for a changing reality.’ That means building structures that take into account, and work with, conflicts and uncertainties over the future of our cities.

Radical municipalism in the UK Fearless Cities was a powerful statement of intent – to consolidate a new municipalist movement growing out of various attempts to forge what it means to think globally and act locally. These municipalist projects are beginning to define new ways for progressive movements to organise, challenging and moving beyond dichotomies that have traditionally

25 haunted the left.

One of the key lessons so far is that we shouldn’t despair that we didn’t have ‘our’ 15M movement. A wide range of conditions made these radical municipalist projects possible. As a comrade from Ahora Madrid reminded us, ‘If they can make it happen in Beirut, you can bloody well make it happen in Manchester!’

Another conclusion is that we must be wary of the electoral machine. In every one of the radical citizens’ platforms we encountered, the move into city hall has been a means to an end and not an end in itself. The objective is to use municipal institutions as part of a project of autonomy – to expand the commons, to build non-state institutions and to empower citizens (not their representatives) to control the collective conditions in which they live their lives.

The new municipalism isn’t about winning elections; it’s about building, transforming and distributing power. In the context of a resurgent and refreshingly progressive Labour Party in the UK, we must be particularly careful of mistaking electoral gains for collective power. Nobody will deliver change on our behalf. Nobody will build alternative ways of living, working and sharing for us. We must do it ourselves. It’s time to win back our cities.

Oscar Reyes is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and lives in Barcelona. Bertie Russell is a research associate at the University of Sheffield’s Urban Institute. This article was first published in the August/September 2017 issue of Red Pepper magazine.

26 The culture of the commons Mayo Fuster Morell is responsible for BarCola, a group working on collaborative economy policies in Barcelona. Here she shares her experiences and thoughts on how commons-based forms of collaboration can build a more just society

What is the commons? The commons is an umbrella term which encompasses many practices and transformative changes. The commons emphasises common interests and needs. It includes collaborative production, shared resources, collective ownership, as well as empowering and participative forms of political and economic organising.

It is, though, a very plural concept with very diverse ‘traditions’ and perspectives. Some commons for example, are connected to material resources (pastoral, fields, fishing etc) and others to immaterial ones (knowledge etc).

Why do you believe we need to return to the idea and practices of the commons? Commons were present prior to capitalism. But somehow this question implies that the commons is something of the past, not of the present. Is the family, the market, or public space something of the past? Would we pose such a question about these ways of organising ourselves? Commons is an integral part of our present society; not something to recover from the past.

Good point. Perhaps then the question is why is the issue rising up

27 the political agenda? I think this is partly connected to the democratisation of knowledge and engagement that came with the arrival of the internet. Cyber-scholars such as Yochai Benkler (author of The Wealth of Networks), argue that the commons moved from the margins to the centre of many economic systems, because of the reduction of the costs of collective action due to the widespread adoption of information technology. Others such as Carol Rose (author of The Comedy of the Commons) have shown how internet commons resources become more valuable the more people access them, which undermined former critiques of the commons which argued that they were unsustainable and encouraged free-riders. With the internet, the opposite is true!

Another trajectory we can see is that of defending public services and the resistance to neoliberal enclosure of public institutions. Yet despite these diverse trajectories, they clearly all point to integral parts of our current system that are not working and provide solutions.

Why did digital culture draw so heavily - and continue to have strong - commons-based approaches? There are many reasons. I would highlight two. The first is the fact that digital culture emerged, in many ways, from counterculture. Hippies and psychedelic subcultures were amongst the first to see the utility of the Internet, developing virtual communities. The values of community were very present in these early forms of the internet. In fact, the internet itself was and could still be conceived as a commons - even though it has been increasingly enclosed by corporations allied with authoritarian regimes.

The second reason is the decentralised character of the internet. This enabled the democratisation of access to the means of cultural production. Today, large parts of the population have access to immense resources of knowledge, along with programs to create and remix that knowledge. The internet also facilitated new forms of distribution of that knowledge, which favoured collaborative and open production. It made an economy based on collaborative and open production and distribution and sharing more efficient than closed, proprietary and product-based modes of the previous industrial era.

What stands out for you as the most interesting concrete projects in the digital commons? Wikipedia is certainly one. Since its creation in 2001, it has become one of the largest reference websites in the world, with an incredible 70,000 active contributors working on more than 41 million articles in 294 languages. The Free and Open source project, that has enabled people to freely use,

28 copy, study, and change software in any way, and underlies many well- known software systems is another one.

The rise of platform cooperatives such Fairmondo and SMart are also promising developments. Fairmondo is an online marketplace for ethical goods and services, that originated in Germany and has expanded to the UK. It is a cooperative alternative to Amazon and Ebay. SMart is a cooperative that pools services and skills to make them affordable for creative freelancers.

Crowdfunding platforms like Goteo, which are building alternatives to the current financial system are also potentially very significant. Goteo has created a community of over 65,000 people, providing civic crowdfunding and collaboration on citizen initiatives and social, cultural, technological and educational projects.

It seems digital commons movements are integrally linked with culture - both in the way they work and the cultural outputs they are producing. What are the lessons for social movements in general? It is perhaps not a surprise that the commons emerged as a predominant organisational form to organise the governance and sustainability of artistic production. These forms of culture often based favour open access, and remix, and putting community needs and creativity first and profitability second.

As I mentioned, one of the first digital areas to favor a more commons organisational form of production was in the area of software production, with the emergence of free and open source projects like Linux or Apache which became the dominant (larger than proprietary systems) in certain areas of software industry. From there, it was an easy step to move commons-based organisation of music, and film, and also encyclopedias and other content subjects, that could benefit from collaborative production. The term ‘free culture’ refers to this.

Now, we see commons production expanded to almost any area of production, including currencies, city landscapes (like urban gardens and orchards), architecture (FabLab), and the open design of cars (Like Wikispeed car) to toys. The early forms of the digital commons have helped inform these newer forms.

Regarding lessons for social movements, I think they can help us expand the conception and practice of participation moving from forms of organising that require high levels of involvement by a few, super activists towards models based on economies of participation. The key is to

29 integrate participation based on diversity - not only strong contributors, but also allowing for weak and sporadic involvement, and people who can only follow the process - and allowing those different types of involvement. Somehow we need to democratise participation in social movements in order to reach and adapt to a larger social base.

What are the key elements that make up a culture of the commons? Commons are very very diverse, that is something that defines them, as they adapt to local and specific circumstances, and are embedded within the specific community and commoning to which they belong.

I would say these are the great key principles, but not all of them are necessarily present in all commons:

• Community organising (openness to engagement) • Self-governance of the community by the creators of the commonly- held value • Open access to the resources created • Ethics of looking beyond profitability to serve social and environmental needs and inclusion Inclusion is perhaps one of the weakest elements, particularly in Open Source Software, where studies suggest that only 1.5% of contributors are women, while in proprietary closed software production, the proportion is closer 30%. Additionally, commons theorising tends to be very dominated by male authors, who engage very little with feminist theory.

Barcelona en Comú, in its attempts to reclaim political institutions for the common good, is one example where feminist wisdom is properly engaged in the commons and seeking to bring about gender equality.

Tell us about what you have been involved in through Barcelona en Comú I was on the initial list of people that promoted the launch of Barcelona en Comú. This was a citizen platform launched in 2014 in the wake of the popular uprisings that took the squares of many Spanish cities after the financial crisis. The platform for Barcelona en Comú was drawn up in a highly participative way, and has sought to put participative democracy and commons-methodologies at the heart of governance.

I am member of Barcelona en Comú and am responsible for BarCola, a group working on collaborative economy policies within the Barcelona City Council. Our group has helped organise the project and conference

30 of procomuns.net which is raising popular awareness of commons-based collaborative economic initiatives, providing technical guidelines to communities for building open source technologies and making specific policy recommendations for the Barcelona City Council and for the European Union and other administrations.

Our first international event in March 2016, brought together more than 400 participants to develop 120 policy recommendations for governments.

How is the so-called ‘Shared Economy’ different to the digital commons? The sharing economy is not different to the digital commons; it just puts more the emphasis on the economical dimension of the commons. However, there has been a wikiwashing of the term, with the media inaccurately using the term sharing economy to refer to the on-demand economy, dominated by firms like Uber and Airbnb.

These are economies based on collaborative production, but they do not include commons governance, access or an agenda of serving the public interest. A true sharing economy is one that is connected to the community and society and looks to serve the common interest, building more egalitarian relations.

How do we prevent corporations - or other structures of power such military - taking over the digital commons? There are in my view three key strategies and goals: 1. Create public-commons partnerships. Push for political institutions to be led by commons principles and to support commons-based economic production (such as reinventing public services led by citizens’ participation, what I call ‘commonification’). Barcelona en Comú is providing a great model for this. 2. Reclaim the economy, and particularly develop an alternative financial system. 3. Confront patriarchy with the commons, in other words embrace freedom and justice for all, not just for a particular privileged subject (men, white, etc) and help foster greater diversity in society.

I think increasing the commons has the greatest potential to develop an alternative to the current capitalist system.

This is a slightly edited version of an article first published by the Transnational Institute at www.tni.org/en/article/culture-of-the-commons

31 Between Honesty and Hope: Organising for just solutions to climate change The latest UN climate talks have failed to advance us beyond the inadequacies of the 2015 Paris agreement. The hope lies in a movement with its course set on system change argue Dorothy Guerrero and James O’Nions Photo: Lina Skov Photo:

The effects of global warming are already changing the ecosystems of many parts of the world. Hurricanes Irma and Harvey in the Caribbean are only the latest in a series of catastrophic events linked to climate change around the world. In the last five years, new records of extreme temperatures have been reported such as the deadly heatwave in Pakistan.

The grim reality is that new records are still expected and the incidents of stronger hurricanes, more frequent and higher levels of flooding, longer duration of devastating droughts, and the melting of ice caps and glaciers 32 will continue, since measures that match the actual level of the climate crisis we are facing are simply not being taken.

The people most affected by climate change are in the global south, not least because decades of neo-colonialism and corporate globalisation has left the majority of people in those countries without the infrastructure or resources to cope. And yet many have contributed virtually nothing to carbon emissions in the first place.

So climate change is a pressing environmental issue, but also an issue of social and economic justice. Thanks to the work of climate scientists, environmentalists and climate justice groups there is also now significant awareness of the reality of climate change. It is now a household issue and everyone’s concern.

But that doesn’t mean we’ve done what’s needed to stop it. Over the last decade, governments should have invested in a rapid shift to renewable energy, legislated to keep fossil fuels in the ground, supported ecological agriculture and subsidised the urgent transformation of transport systems. Instead, corporate interests have sidelined just solutions proposed by social movements, and business-as-usual operations have been dressed up as ‘climate-smart’ modern initiatives.

Just in the last month, the European Union has agreed to renew the utterly failed European Scheme. The scheme is a classic ‘market mechanism’, dreamt up by people who believe that the only way to achieve something is to allow corporations to benefit from it. Instead of legislating carbon emission reductions, the scheme allowed big polluters to buy ‘carbon credits’ from those who had not polluted up to their quota. Not only did it fail to reduce emissions within the EU, it set up a new tradable commodity and allowed traders to profit from it.

When profit structures our economy, environmental and social costs are shifted onto people and the planet. That’s why if we want to stop climate change, we need system change.

UN negotiations and global climate apartheid System change, however, has not been on the table at the UN climate talks. The latest round, which took place in Bonn in November 2017, saw little progress beyond the 2015 Paris agreement. That agreement, though it was heralded as a breakthrough, had very serious shortcomings. Although global governments agreed to take measures to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, which is very ambitious, the agreement was not in any way legally binding.

33 And there’s no real sense of how such ambition is going to be met, especially since the agreement failed to mention keeping fossil fuels in the ground, and didn’t include emissions from shipping and aviation.

The Paris agreement also failed to provide any new money to help poor countries to adapt to climate change, or to strengthen their economies in the context of a climate constrained world. We are entering an era of global climate apartheid, with a huge gap between rich and poor countries.

There are already growing numbers of temporary and permanent internal displacements of people in flood-prone and precarious areas, with the potential reality of the permanent displacement of huge numbers of people in the future who will lose their territories due to rising sea levels. Climate-induced external migration is a time bomb that is still being ignored.

Climate justice is not just an environmental issue, but rather something linked with the political, economic, trade and even security policies of governments, and with the maintenance of current global economic order. The UK plays a big role in maintaining and supporting that global order. Current and past economic injustices, along with systemic racism and the closing of borders, means the victims of climate change will have no future means for a better life.

The UN climate talks have done little to change that dynamic. They have sidelined the global inequality of climate change, while allowing transnational corporations a huge say through lobbying over how we attempt to reduce CO2 emissions. Next year’s UN climate conference will take place in Poland under the aegis of a government backing its own industry to the hilt.

Beyond the global climate talks Outside the climate talks in Bonn, however, there were signs of hope. The climate justice movement held its own People’s Climate Summit, and German activists led a 4,500-strong direct action to shut down production in nearby coal fields. These attempts to block the infrastructure of fossil fuel extraction, whether physically or through campaigns for financial divestment, have been part of the response of climate justice campaigners to the inadequacy of global climate talks.

The other side of this coin has been attempts to build alternatives to our current energy system. While economies of scale are starting to make solar and wind energy competitive with fossil fuels, leaving existing energy

34 corporations to manage our energy transition has failed to produce the urgency needed or to address issues such as energy poverty. Energy democracy – the development of community-owned, co-operative or democratically-controlled public energy production and distribution – seeks to address this.

In the UK, Switched on London and Energy Democracy Greater Manchester have campaigned for the respective mayors of those cities to establish public energy companies, following the example of Nottingham’s Robin Hood Energy. The aim is to both address climate change and start to build an alternative economy not based on the profit motive which has driven the climate crisis in the first place.

Despite the good intentions of everyone, the global climate movement is divided between those with moderate and radical politics. The have not adequately grasped the systemic nature of the ecological and political crisis of climate change. The task for the radicals is not just to foster understanding of the climate crisis as a phenomenon derived from the social and ecological contradictions of capitalism, but to go beyond the rhetoric and show that radical and popular solutions are possible.

With Donald Trump pulling the US out of the inadequate Paris agreement, there could be a temptation to make common cause with governments compromised by corporate capture who at least believe climate change needs addressing. But this approach is similar to the one which has got us to the state we’re in now. Only by confronting corporate power and mobilising and organising people for social transformation can we make further progress on climate justice.

Dorothy Guerrero is a Filippino climate justice activist and head of policy at Global Justice Now. James O’Nions is head of activism at Global Justice Now.

35 Making Another World Possible is a collection of recent articles about the struggle for a world beyond neoliberal capitalism. It focuses particularly on issues related to Global Justice Now’s campaigns, but also has a special section on real world alternatives being tried out in cities which have elected radical governments, especially Barcelona. Read it like a magazine, or use it as the basis of a discussion in your activist group.

Global Justice Now campaigns against injustice and inequality in the global economy. Instead of corporations and the super rich calling the shots, we want to see a world where ordinary people control the resources they need for a decent life.

We have local groups around the UK campaigning for a world where people come before profit. This includes a youth network with its own local groups.

We’re a democratic membership organisation too, so if you want to be part of a collective struggle for a better world, join us! globaljustice.org.uk/join

Global Justice Now, 66 Offley Road, London SW9 0LS • 020 7820 4900 [email protected]