Berlin Diaries: “Protests, Concerns & Hopes”
The human race is obliviously marching towards the perfect storm that is rapidly forming on our collective horizon. According to the doomsday clock, we are very close to it indeed. Only 100 seconds away, to be exact! If we reach it due to our neglect, greed and lack of action, we will quickly realise that no lives on this planet matter at all.
Nuclear clouds don’t care about the colour of human skin since the black, white, yellow, red or the brown ones burn the same, just like the bones below it. Climate change is equally ignorant — it will freeze, drown and starve us all, regardless of race, religion or passport that we hold. Obviously, the same can be said about various diseases and the current COVID-19 pandemic in particular which is sowing death and sorrow all around the world with complete ignorance of one’s nationality or race.
Existential threats described above combined with other burning issues such as perpetual financial crises, growing inequality, rise of nationalism, increasing democratic deficit, cyber based disinformation and systemic racism — to mention just a few — should give us plenty of reasons and motivation to mobilise and unite internationally into one collective anti-extinction, egalitarian, green force.
The sooner we realise that there is no other way to avoid the global catastrophe, the sooner we will be able to stop and, hopefully, reverse the ticking of the doomsday clock. In his latest and arguably the most important book, Internationalism or Extinction, Noam Chomsky wrote:
“The urgency of “looming extinction” cannot be overlooked. It should be a constant focus of programs of education, organisation, and activism, and in the background of all other struggles. But it cannot displace these other concerns, in part because of the critical significance of many other struggles…”
One such issue is undoubtedly the struggle against racial inequality.
In the USA, with well over 100.000 dead as a result of the mishandling of the pandemic, and with over 40 million unemployed and with a history of injustice, inequality, brutality underscored by systemic racism, mass protests led by Black Lives Matter were inevitable.
There is no need to underline the fact that every single human being on this planet should be supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement and that we should all stand shoulder to shoulder with our American comrades of colour in their struggle for justice and equality.
Since the protests started, plenty has been achieved already. A fair few confederate and colonial statues have been removed — in the US as well as abroad! The city of Minneapolis has committed to dismantling its police force. And big budgetary reforms have been pledged in New York; the city with a 6 billion dollars large annual police department budget. That is 3 times the size of nuclear capable North Korea’s military budget which, by the way, has a universal health care system in place: let this sink in for a moment or two! Furthermore, a database to record police brutality at the protests was created. Several ‘bad apples’ out of truckload of ‘bad apples’ within American police force have been dismissed for their conduct. In the case of murder of George Floyd, officers involved were charged with aiding and abetting murder.
However, given the scale of the problem and it’s systemic nature, these are all largely symbolic acts and as such nowhere near enough to provide the final solution.
Systemic issues require radical systemic changes!
As the great Dr. Martin Luther King said back in 1968:
“The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”
While current BLM protests are absolutely necessary and should be supported with everything we got, it is concerning to see that their general message is nowhere near as strong as it used to be over fifty years ago. Largely spontaneous protests without strong leadership and ideological and political backing most likely won’t result in desired, radical systemic change. In fact, it is perfectly possible for such protests to end up being counterproductive if their demands get muted by corrupt mainstream media or, in the worse case scenario, if protests get ‘hijacked’ by certain parts of neoliberal establishment and endup being used as a tool for ‘regime change’ agenda — this time at home rather than abroad.
Unfortunately, this is not where concerns end. There are two blatantly obvious terms mainly absent from the American mainstream media as well as from the general public discourse and they are — ‘3rd political party’ and ‘neo-liberal capitalism’. Both should be highly ranked on the agenda yet one needs to try really hard to find even slightest reference to either.
For example, it is interesting to note that Black Lives Matter Berlin (the city I am writing this text from) has anti-capitalism near the top of their common consensus list, right after justice and equality. At the same time, the original American Black Lives Matter website not only doesn’t have ‘anti-capitalism’ as part of their policy, but it doesn’t even mention the word ‘capitalism’ anywhere on the site at all. Yes, you read that right!
How about ‘3rd political party’? This is certainly a once in a lifetime opportunity for creating an anti-racist, anti-war, anti-capitalist, green, egalitarian, and progressive political party while using ongoing protests to mobilise the masses. Such a party could potentially win the upcoming elections or at very least put enormous pressure on the Democrats while ensuring BLM demands are met. Of course, this is easier said than done, but I am surprised that there is virtually no mention of such an obvious idea in public discourse, yet alone concrete action of achieving this well needed and well overdue political mainstream alternative.
Radical systemic changes in the so-called ‘developed world’ — changes that the BLM is fighting for — require internationalism, organisation via political and ideological backing and persistence.
Otherwise, we will either end up with some sort of fascism on steroids delivered by the Trumps of this world or fund the status quo while being shot in the legs instead of the heart by the Bidens of this world. Perhaps being shot in the leg is the lesser of the two evils, but it’s about the time we ditch this principle and try something else for a change.
Chicago based Black Panther, Fred Hampton, said in his 1969 speech:
“We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.”
Capitalism and racism are deeply interlinked, from over 400 years of Transatlantic slave trade to modern time prison labor, sweatshops and wide ranging disparities in regards to wealth, education, justice, health care, employment and other factors. There is simply no reasonable way of fighting one issue without addressing the other.
Let’s hope that the Black Lives Matter will sharpen up their demands, general message and direction — without doing this, a huge opportunity for the people of colour as well as humankind as a whole might be missed.
With the above in mind, could the BLM protests sweeping across the US, Europe and most of the world be the starting point of a wider progressive international fight for peace, equality, justice and the green future?
Could the BLM inspired protests potentially trigger unification of fragmented political ‘left’ and therefore solve what is arguably the biggest challenge international progressives face these days?
Perhaps DiEM25 and Progressive International (PI) can get involved by providing a unifying political ‘umbrella’ and backing for all involved. As PI mentions, the challenge is now to organise these ‘spontaneous expressions of solidarity’ internationally. By connecting best practices from grassroots activists and community leaders everywhere — we can already learn from each other’s ‘struggle against state violence’.
If there is ever going to be the right time to overcome our differences, organise and unite on the international level, that time is certainly now!
Learn more about the Progressive International!
For previous and future articles written by Ognjen Ogy Vrljicak, you can visit his blog.
DiEM25 democracy at work: Members enhance participatory processes and strategies to boost the movement’s impact
Last November, at our first General Assembly, DiEMers from across Europe came together in Prague to re-group and start a process of restructuring our movement to boost its radical agenda to transform Europe. As a result, dozens of proposals called for a general rethinking of our internal structures, processes, as well as our external strategies.
DiEMers produced, debated and voted in a wide range of comprehensive proposals. Among other things, these aimed to enhance DiEM25’s own internal democratic processes to make them more participatory and to better seize our unique transnational collective intelligence.
In addition, DiEMers and the movement’s Coordinating Collective tabled proposals to furnish us all with new ways to deploy more campaigns, finance our struggle, and better organise ourselves. A proposal that improves the way we participate in electoral contests was also approved. It underscores the need to put out movement first and make sure our values and the policies contained in our progressive agenda and Green New Deal for Europe are not sacrificed in order to achieve potential political alliances anywhere in Europe.
“Postpandemic Europe is in a steady slide towards a greater impoverishment of the powerless and the reempowerment of the powerful. DiEM25 has a transnational programme, our Green New Deal for Europe, to end this slide, to reverse it. And now we have the internal democratic tools to do so as well.” — Yanis Varoufakis
Learn more about the proposals DiEM25’s members approved after our Assembly in Prague:
Campaign for Democratic Relaunch of EU – Towards a European Constitution
Upgrading our digital collaboration infrastructure
Rethinking the DiEM25 Academy: Proposal for a Permanent Transnational Education System
Solidifying DiEM25’s Electoral Wings (EWs)
DiEMExplore
Growing DiEM25 as a Network
Citizens’ Assemblies for Democracy in Europe
Now, this all happened before COVID-19 came about, a crisis which unmasked the EU’s lack of solidarity and humanism. DiEMers came together once more just at the right time to take our struggle for a united and just Europe to the next level.
The EU might be dying but a United Europe will be born!
After months of work and various discussions since our Assembly last year, DiEMers continued deliberating over ways to continue improving our movement. Stemming from these deliberations, last night DiEMers voted-in the following changes to our organising principles and our way of working, to further enhance the movement:
The six votes on our Organising Principles, can be found below:
The establishment of Task Forces on Feminism, Diversity, and Disabilities
The increasing of the tenure of Validating Council members
Future amendments to the Organising Principles through DiEM25 Member Assemblies or the PDP process
The improvement of the coordination of National Collectives and Electoral Wings with the Coordinating Collective
The introduction of a Membership Fee to make the movement financially sustainable
The establishment of a member-led process for organising All-Member Votes
We’re in the midst of an unprecedented moment in history, where everything is possible, and DiEM25’s struggle is more relevant than ever.
Now it’s the time to honour our membership’s painstaking hard work and get hands on with the implementation of these critical proposals and plans, while exploring opportunities across Europe through which we can bring the mission of DiEM25 to our neighbourhoods, cities, countries.
DiEM25’s membership has stepped up to reshape how to carry our movement’s ideals forward with new vitality. We have agreed on how we will get things done: now let’s go and do it!
If you have not done so already, join us now!
DiEM25 stands in solidarity with those who fight racism and oppression around the world
The social upheaval caused by the murder of George Floyd is piled onto the current employment and health crises not only in the United States of America, but around the world.
Progressive activists have supported the people of Minneapolis by launching their own actions calling for justice. Beyond solidarity with the cause of the demonstrators in the USA, people are confronting the reality of racism and oppression in their own communities and countries, and are taking an unequivocal stance against it.
Protests are filling the streets of London, New York, Brussels and Toronto, and Iranians are holding a vigil for George Floyd — to name but a few. Actions against police forces in the United States have begun to take place, either through the jamming of their walkie talkies with Yugoslavian music, or DDoS attacks on their websites by Anonymous.
At DiEM25, we understand police brutality as yet another symptom of a society whose structural violence is already manifested in starvation wages, unpaid work leaves and vast unemployment, and racial discrimination. Rioting and looting is to be expected as a response to a society focused on profit and no longer on the welfare of its people. During the pandemic, governments have bailed out banks and big business instead of small enterprises, working people, and their communities. Anger, although never constructive, is understandable.
We also recognise that discrimination, racism and oppression are not only external struggles: but fights that we must engage with in our own communities and groups. That is why one of the ongoing votes establishing DiEM25 2.0 concerns the establishment of three Task Forces on Diversity, Feminism and Disabilities respectively (if you are a member, please click here to vote). Their mandate will be to assist the movement in improving both its relevant policies, but also our internal procedures and structures so we can be effective allies and participants in the fight against racism, xenophobia, and oppression.
Below is a video and song made through a collaboration by two DiEMers — one of our team members on the DiEM25 communications team, and a Syrian musician and music producer based in Brussels:
“Isterofimia from the Greek meaning “to be remembered after death”, is our duty to George Floyd, and the thousands before him, killed by our governments in our name. They put their lives at risk so that we could be here today. We must never forget.
We must fight to dismantle illegitimate, unaccountable political and corporate power standing against the interests of all people.
We’re people from Brussels, with hopes and dreams — like everybody else — tired of a system that chokes and kills for money and lets people die from hunger.
This track is to all those who put their lives on the line so that others could be free. We thank you.”
For a more in-depth analysis of the situation in the US, we wholeheartedly recommend (and commend) the article by the DiEM25 National Collective in Belgium.
The Green New Deal for Europe offers alternative urban futures: Milano in 15 years
A tour through the sustainable neighbourhoods of Milano’s periphery in 2035.
This is a “future vision”, a thought exercise in speculative design. Set fifteen years in the future, it intends to provide a plausible picture of what urban life could look like if the policies proposed in the Green New Deal for Europe blueprint were implemented in the next few years. Let’s follow a future travel journalist in their tour of what are currently some of the most troubled neighbourhoods of Milano and let’s have a look at how everything might change.
What would urban life look like if the policies proposed in the GNDE were implemented in the next few years?
Walking through the busy, colourful streets of Ponte Lambro today, you’d be hard pressed to imagine that only some fifteen years ago, this vibrant, multicultural hub of creative and care work was one of the neighbourhoods at the highest risk of social exclusion in Milano.
Like many peripheral neighbourhoods in the city, Ponte Lambro suffered a great deal from the deindustrialization of the ‘80s and from its lack of connection with the rest of the city. Throughout the ‘90s and the first two decades of the 21st century it was plagued with problems of poverty, lack of services and cultural spaces, poor housing conditions and lack of social cohesion due to the influx of further and further socially excluded groups. In 2020, only a scant 15 years ago, it was still considered a less than desirable place to live, where people washed up only when they had nowhere else to go.
But what has turned Ponte Lambro and the other so-called “urban wastelands” into the thriving communities of today?
The roots of this change can be found in the late ‘10s, when a series of initiatives to transform both the urban fabric and urban life were launched by different social actors in the attempt to transform cities into centres of sustainability by transforming the way people thought about food production, public transport, schooling, healthcare and their communities. Local volunteer associations, social cooperatives and foundations, working in isolation or in larger networks, established permaculture gardens, promoted awareness of sustainable solutions and helped build a sense of community among the different groups living in the neighbourhoods, mediating their expectations and needs.
These local efforts and the aspirations for a better way to experience the city expressed by the people living in those neighbourhoods, however, would have amounted to a drop in the ocean without the support and opportunities provided by the Green New Deal for Europe (GNDE).
Launched in 2020, this set of common policies for the European Union has supercharged these initiatives. On one hand, it provided common decentralised frameworks, created transparent funding mechanisms, as well as initiated technical support that local actors could access to respond to the needs of their community. On the other, it has brought public money towards disadvantaged areas, creating the infrastructure necessary for local actions on housing, sustainable mobility, environmental care, people care and other “glocal” issues to be effective.
The sustainable housing policies included in the GNDE, for example, have enabled the return of a large amount of unused housing stock to communities. In Ponte Lambro and other neighbourhoods, some of this housing stock was assigned to newly-created housing cooperatives, which transformed them into co-housing “villages” organised around community and collective domestic work. Villaggio Canova, at the very edge of the Ponte Lambro neighbourhood, is one of the oldest examples. There, families from different backgrounds and age groups live in self-contained apartments fitted with energy-saving devices and top-grade insulation. All residents share common facilities such as bread ovens, art rooms, playgrounds and smart grid energy generation. A central “common house” hosts periodic parties, cultural events, and assemblies deliberating on the management of the village. As of the time of writing, it is one of the most sought-after places of residence in the whole of South Milano.
Grants to retrofit other public and private housing to the highest environmental standards have also changed the face of the neighbourhoods. Most buildings now sport both solar panels and solar heating, with a few pioneers implementing also more exotic solutions such as MOST catalyst-based solar heating systems.
Since the beginning of the programme, infrastructural investments, from free public transport for residents to the creation of new cycle lanes and of inclusive equipment-sharing schemes for sustainable mobility (bikes, tricycles, and wheelchair attachments to cater for all needs) have greatly reduced the number of cars in the urban area, however the real step change kicked in when the Care Income was implemented.
Paid out to all people working in the care of others or the environment, natural or urban, this European initiative changed the landscape of work throughout the neighbourhoods, opening up opportunities for meaningful local work that was always seen as a necessity but never funded well enough to happen.
Urban restoration projects that had faltered for years suddenly had the opportunity to be completed and neglected parks and green spaces were restored through community-led projects and rewilding. The latter process has affected many formerly degraded areas, including the banks of the main rivers flowing through the city. Famously described as “a river in torment” by songwriter Caparezza in the early 2000s, the Lambro now boasts biodiverse water meadows along its banks, which are a hot spot for excursions and picnics, and has seen the return of many indigenous species of fish. For this the Milanese have to thank the local residents for taking up catfish hunting techniques and cooking recipes from Poland and Romania, which have allowed the use of invasive wels catfish as a source of sustainable protein. Many restaurants now incorporate the slimy menace in their menus. We tried it in one of the small family restaurants situated along the banks of the Lambro, and believe us, it’s as delicious as it is ugly.
Sustainable, local food production has also taken off massively thanks to the new agricultural policies implemented within the GNDE framework. The establishment of urban allotments has exploded in both Molise-Calvairate-Ponti and Gratosoglio at the beginning of the implementation period of the GNDE and now many of the early projects are mature and yield substantial crops of high-quality organic produce that is used in local schools and independent housing communities for the elderly or the disabled. Most restaurants in the neighbourhood also source their food hyper-locally, in part thanks to consortia of micro-allotments set up in interstitial spaces around the urban fabric.
Most schools have their own allotments and, ever since the early ‘20s, permaculture, as well as sustainable food processing and cooking, are staples of the curricula of all levels of schooling, which probably is one of the leading factors in the ever-increasing quality of the food offering. Only in the last five years, Milano has added four new restaurants to the European Golden League of vegan cuisine.
Situated next to the agricultural areas of the Parco Agricolo Sud, Ponte Lambro has been less involved in the urban agriculture movement compared to its sister neighbourhoods. The local assemblies of neighbours have preferred to establish close relations with the rural areas all around it for sustainable food provisioning. Consequent to this decision, the neighbourhood has seen an increase in small cooperatives dedicated to sustainable food processing; including bakeries, breweries and an award-winning conserve factory that serves the best bars and restaurants in the city, which attract foodies from all across the Union with their sustainable dishes, cooked with local ingredients and multicultural flair.
The processes of housing improvement, public transport expansion and work re-localisation have led to the almost complete disappearance of the notorious “cappa” — a permanent cloud of pollution particulate, visible even from satellite images, that used to hover over the city for decades. Now, on bright sunny days, residents and tourists alike can delight in a clear view of the Alps, particularly from the top of the newly-inaugurated Popular European Library.
Initially planned and then abandoned in the early 2000s, the project was taken up once again by huge popular demand at the time of the first participatory budget of the Comune di Milano.
Conceived through one of the finest examples of participative design processes in Europe and perhaps in the world, the library was built according to the most advanced principles of passive architecture, and houses not only a large collection of books, ranging from narrative to reference and research material, in particular on the topics of sustainable living, but an open-air theatre, an indoors auditorium for cultural events, breakout rooms for training and workshops and its own energy generation systems. Its daring spiral structure, inspired by Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s Waldspirale in Darmstadt, is covered in a vertical garden that provides not only a wonderful promenade with one of the best views of the Duomo in the whole of Milano to the thousands of visitors it has received since the inauguration, but also fresh produce for the cafeteria, which, according to the locals, serves the best carrot, beetroot and apple cake in the entire city. All sourced locally, of course.
And believe us, there is nowhere better to settle down with a cup of tea, a book and a piece of cake than the top of the spiral, especially in spring when the sun is setting and the last rays of light colour the still-snowy peaks of the Orobic Alps a radiant pink.
Cheers, or, as they say, Salute!
Laura C Zanetti Domingues and Guglielmo Miccolupi are both members of Commando Jugendstil, a collective of Italian solarpunk creators which has authored several short stories and essays on the transition of cities towards sustainability and the reframing of narratives around the sustainable future.
They are also involved in the EU-funded project “Milano, Cartoline da un Futuro Possibile” (Milan, Postcards from a Possible Future), which aims to empower the citizens of neighbourhoods in Milan to imagine and build their own sustainable future through participative and speculative design. Their article is inspired by this project.
Last Month in DiEM25: May 2020
On the precipice of a decisive summer, DiEM25 is preparing itself for the political struggle that lies before us. The financial crisis that was already underway since our failure to deal with the previous one has been turbo-charged by the economic slump caused by the pandemic, and the inability of those in power to react with meaningful policies.
It is our historic duty, when the European Union is dissolved in all but name, to represent through our politics, through our principles, and through our unity, the United Europe we want to build.
External Actions
This month we:
Launched the Progressive International (PI): DiEM25 co-founded the Progressive International, a global initiative for uniting progressive struggles across the world – an idea born out of a meeting between Yanis Varoufakis and Bernie Sanders two years ago. You can re-watch the inaugural presentation ‘Internationalism or Extinction’ featuring featuring five members of the PI Council: Prime Minister of Iceland Katrín Jakobsdóttir; Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate; Greek MP and DiEM25 co-founder Yanis Varoufakis; Guatemalan human rights & tech lawyer Renata Ávila; and writer and political analyst Nanjala Nyabola from Kenya.
Continued building on the success of DiEMTV with guests such as Caroline Lucas, James K. Galbraith, Vandana Shiva, Amazon whistleblower Chris Smalls, and many others!
Launched a Green New Deal for Europe articles series on why this COVID-19 crisis is a critical moment to address ecological breakdown: read about how the GNDE could shield us from future pandemics in an article by Redi Pecini.
Completed the first season of the Beyond the Balcony series, aimed at helping us organise across Europe during the pandemic. We had a total of over 100 grassroots organisers participate and close to 30,000 views on our YouTube channel!
Issued a response to Merkel and Macron’s ‘common fund’ which was lauded by many as a “Hamiltonian Moment” (the defining moment for the political unity of the United States was the mutualisation of debt and the creation of a Central Bank by Alexander Hamilton) for Europe. Similarly, pundits celebrated the EU’s declaration of a 750 billion euro transfer package, to which we responded with: “the EC valiantly tried to portray a crushing defeat as a stupendous victory. Conjuring up 750bn euro via leveraged loan guarantees (provided by, mostly, bankrupt states), von der Leyen is hoping the public will lose interest before her package shrinks into macro-insignificance.” We explain what this common fund really represents for Europe.
MeRA25 continued its resistance to the preparations of the Greek government for the austerity to come, through the presentation of alternatives for the environment, the economy, healthcare, tourism, refugees and migrants, and many other areas which are under attack by the right-wing. The possibility of another national election also looms over the country (articles in Greek)
DiEM25 NC France called for a European Rent Strike .
Belgian NC made a statement on George Floyd and racial profiling and discrimination by police in Belgium.
For DiEM25 in the news, you can access the internal area where our Press Team collects all relevant news stories regarding our work!
Internal Actions
This month we:
Finished the consultation for the six All-Member Votes that are set to launch the implementation of DiEM25 2.0!
Launched the new and improved DiEM25 website and members area with improved financial transparency, organising tools and many more exciting features.
Launched our first members’ survey to help us better understand the interests of the membership and improve our capacity for coordinated and impactful actions.
Held more live-recorded CC meetings open to the public and vsible on YouTube.
Next Month in DiEM25: June!
The votes for the finalisation of DiEM25 2.0 will run until the second week of June. Our movement will engage in the implementation of the results of the Prague Process (member proposals for actions and campaign, and the CC vision) based on the results of AMVs.
Another season of DiEM25 TV! Stay tuned and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
If you wish to send a point to be included in the next newsletter, or want to help drafting it, please contact us at [email protected].
The Green New Deal for Europe reestablishes workers’ rights to a dignified life
It’s time to invest in workers, not bail out the usual suspects.
A spirit has been lingering at the horizon. It was long neglected in favor of expediency. But it has now emerged as a Green New Deal for Europe — the ultimate act of trying to save the European Union from shattering and to stop the machine-like destruction of life in all its forms. The ideology of turning everything into gold has squandered the people’s appetite and has made the world indigestible. It has packaged, shipped and formalised reality out of existence.
The project we envisioned is in the shade of its own towering fumes. Europe lies in the ashes of austerity, with the coronavirus ravishing through the open wound. But a shoot is sprouting — it is a new deal to empower workers and make progress towards inclusion and justice.
In every crisis hides opportunity. In 1919 during the spanish flu, it was cooperatives that held the line. After World War II the cooperative model almost completely disappeared. The Marshall plan, a fund to rebuild Europe, was solely focused on capitalistic enterprises. We are heading towards a crossroads. One road leading to a just and fair Europe, the other to its demise. The Green New Deal is an answer to rebuild a better Europe. It is a deal of inclusion and justice, of care and respect for the people and the environment. It is a beacon of hope.
Democratize the enterprise!
The most important aspect of cooperative businesses is that workers own the majority of the shares in the company. This democratises the company and ensures that the workers themselves make all the decisions on how to run the company, including how profits are invested or distributed. In larger cooperatives, the workers can also elect others to make those decisions.
Through democratic decision-making processes in which every member is involved, “policies can’t be determined by an investor whose only priority is profit.” As is explained in the Green New Deal for Europe report, “Cooperative ownership can increase job security and empower workers.” This enormous shift in power from external shareholders to workers, is what makes a cooperative an amazing instrument to redesign our economy.
In a debate between Richard D. Wolff and Gene Epstein: it is put forward that cooperatives are underrepresented on the free market. People are free to start a cooperative — where are they? This question hangs in the air during the debate, but never gets answered directly: “Well everybody knows that worker cooperatives are not productive and they don’t have the know-how to manage such enterprises.” If we scrutinize this claim, it just says that workers are too dumb and lazy to run their own company.
This biased representation of cooperatives disempowering workers and disincentivizes them from taking part in a cooperative. Multi-billion dollars cooperatives ranging from agriculture, industry to banking are standing their ground in the global market. Yet, business schools are still not teaching the cooperative model. The avenues through which workers can start a cooperative are also constrained due to the basic fact that “they either require the consent of the owners or require the workers to start their own business.” It is also difficult to compete with businesses that offshore their labor to other countries.
As of yet, cooperative law in the EU has not been harmonized and is dispersed across nation states. This makes cross-border mergers difficult. Cooperatives also report that they have difficulty retaining members due to hostile capital takeovers and have experienced legal uncertainty in the application of competition law resulting in high costs.
Cooperatives give workers the opportunity to have a say in how the organizations and companies are structured. This allows them to challenge the logic of companies that put profits before people, and in which board of directors are only incentivized to care for themselves and their shareholders.
Worker cooperatives are a step towards addressing climate breakdown.
The world cooperative monitor reports that cooperatives go to great lengths to reach SDG’s — Sustainable Development Goals — which include environmental sustainability. The WIRE recently launched a campaign, signed by 3000 scholars, to raise awareness for the fact that democratising the workplace is key in fighting climate breakdown. At ABN-Amro, a Dutch bank which since the financial crisis is governed by the state. It recently came to light that their investment branch mainly invested in oil and gas companies, while on their website it says their core value was investing in sustainability.
Giving a democratic voice to women will have a positive impact on climate friendly decision making since it has also been proven key in the political domain. Cooperatives tend to look local and integrate communities around them. This would counter carbon leakage, where businesses leave countries for looser environmental rules. True democracy makes backdoor politics less likely and would provide a better balance between economic growth on the one hand and social and environmental sustainability on the other.
A working group set up between 2013-2014 to consult the European Commission acknowledges the importance of cooperatives, but one peculiar thing stood out. “Cooperatives include a wide variety of enterprises, such as individual businesses, SMEs as well as large companies”. Now how can an individual business be considered a cooperative? Apparently freelancers and contract workers can be seen as a cooperative — what? By means of subsidies, the EU has started to invest in the cooperative idea since it scored well on social development goals. But neoliberals have been finding loopholes to exploit people further. Just as they use ‘green’ product labels to sell the same product for higher prices, they now use the ‘cooperative’ label to employ people as freelancers and contract workers, and bypass social welfare.
Worker cooperatives are emerging as a response to infringements on workers rights during COVID-19.
Cooperatives in the EU are pooling resources, and their investments are focused on roughly three things during this COVID-19 crisis: food, health and income security. We can immediately notice that these investments are not investments to make profits but are investments in people: their first reaction is to care for the hungry and dying. A core value of a cooperative is that a chain is but as strong as its weakest link.
One of the first businesses to get in trouble were the airlines, a notoriously difficult market to keep your head above water. Many European airlines are already partially government owned. Right now governments all across Europe are negotiating bailouts to save the airlines. The EU is also helping airlines that are engaged in the supply of medical equipment.
These bailouts will very likely not be the last since the airport industry was shut down the earliest and hit the hardest. Many other businesses might follow like the car industry, huge construction firms, and the entertainment industry. What if instead of bailing out these firms, we bail out the workers? The EU could do this by making the funds available to the companies only under strict conditions. For instance, they could demand that workers become shareholders of their own companies.
The Green New Deal for Europe would enable cooperatives by:
- Ensuring greater participation of grassroots organisations in investment decision making.
- Focusing investment on worker cooperatives based on municipal or local ownership.
- Empowering businesses and others to make transparent agreements to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, waste and pollution.
The Environmental Justice Commission – whose implementation is part of the Green New Deal for Europe — would play a key role as a watchdog on behalf of citizens. This oversight institution would guarantee that funds are used for social and environmentally sustainable projects.
The European Union is on the verge of collapsing. Cooperatives offer a trusted model through which today’s economic landscape can be radically restructured — putting essential and other workers in the center of economic life.
Corporate dystopia is coming: here’s how the Left must fight it
Beyond the immediate public health crisis, there looms the worst recession in Europe since the dawn of the industrial age, the worst recession in Europe since the dawn of the industrial age.
We face, in all likelihood, the morphosis of neoliberalism into something darker, more authoritarian and nationalistically charged. But we also possess a once-in-a-generation opportunity for widespread radical change: something that the elites are well aware of. It is more urgent than ever that working people organise to defend and advance their interests against the tyranny of the billionaire class.
The coronavirus recession will be long and protracted, and will exacerbate the shift from neoliberalism towards corporate state capitalism.
Grace Blakely observes that a coming over-saturation of the market will lead to the rise of a new oligarchy who will wield near-monopolistic power. At a time when a wave of bankruptcies is coming to claim the small businesses of Europe, the largest corporations are being propelled to new heights of supremacy, with Jeff Bezos on course to become the world’s first trillionaire. This would make him wealthier than the GDP of any economy on earth bar thirteen and give Amazon the sort of power you’d associate with the East India Company, a nineteenth-century corporation that operated as a state unto itself.
This will not only bring a whole new meaning to ‘too big to fail’, but that disturbing phrase, ‘socialism for the rich’, will be institutionalised. If left unchallenged, this will transform the managed democracies of Europe into plutocratic tyrannies where the economy will be planned by behemothic firms and abetted in their efforts by mere figureheads purporting to lead Europe’s governments. With democracy nullified, billionaire overlords will usher in an era of corporate despotism.
The European left are not currently in a position to resist this. The past decade has seen its electoral wing fall prey to Pasokification, the phenomenon named after the Social Democratic Party of Greece which saw its vote share collapse from 43.9% in 2009 to 4.6% in 2015. Similar events occurred in France, Germany, Britain and Holland. One of the last European bastions of leftist success is in Spain, where a coalition of Unidas Podemos and PSOE keeps the dwindling flame of electoral socialism alive. All of this happened in the context of forty-year decline in trade union membership across most of the continent, particularly in the private sector.
With unprecedented state intervention in the economy and a new public appreciation of health, care and other essential workers, it would seem to many that the political zeitgeist is now shifting in the left’s favour. But 2008 is proof of what happens when the left assumes that a crisis will afford self-evident legitimacy to its arguments: the establishment seized the narrative and in the succeeding decade, the poorest were made to pay for the failings of the rich.
We should recognise that the political agenda is never granted to you by fortune. We must seize it for ourselves.
Creative solutions are required going forward. Luckily, the left has grown in both size and strength and now boasts more thinkers, activists and party members than it had ten years ago. We must use those talents to think our way forward.
Firstly, we must champion the cause of democracy in an increasingly undemocratic world: not just in parliamentary elections, but in our workplaces, organisations and communities. In his recent article for Jacobin, Ben Burgis suggests that a key step away from capitalism and towards ‘market socialism’ would be to transform all private companies into cooperatives: this would eliminate the top-down, hierarchical structure of businesses and introduce genuine democracy into the workplace. The capitalist class would be abolished, but in such a way that the world would remain comfortably familiar to non-socialists. We must also strive to democratise our own institutions, such as Trade Unions and political parties, where more power needs to be devolved to members.
Secondly, we need real unity on the left. Initiatives like Progressive International have been criticised for a dictatorial approach to this issue, but the consequences of disunity are too severe to entertain. Last year in Britain, Extinction Rebellion succeeded in bringing parts of London to a complete standstill and propelled climate issues to the top of the agenda, but it’s claim to be ‘beyond politics’ meant it failed to endorse Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in what it rightly called a ‘climate election’. By failing to lift a finger to prevent the landslide victory of the Conservatives, Extinction Rebellion failed to participate in the battle to rid Britain of an anti-environmental government. We don’t have any time left to repeat these mistakes. The green movement, the unions, and other left affiliates must make common cause and recognise that you cannot be an environmentalist without being an anti-capitalist, and vice versa.
Thirdly, we need to impress on people who usually vote for left parties the importance of direct action. Over-reliance on electoralism may be a reflection of a ‘detached spectatorialism’ observed by Mark Fisher: we know in theory that merely electing socialist governments won’t be enough to change society, but many still hesitate to actively engage, falling prey to the hopelessness and fear of inevitability that neoliberalism seeks to indoctrinate in us. That isn’t to say one should not bother voting: the extent to which elites actively try to disenfranchise groups demonstrates the importance of electoral participation. But we shouldn’t just encourage people to vote: we should encourage them to get out and engage with politics in their countries and communities, whether through advocating for a cause, participating in community support groups, or (once social distancing measures permit it) protest.
This connects to the fourth point: we need to energise and bolster the Trade Union movement. There is a direct link between falling trade union membership and rising inequality in society. The need to redress this imbalance is now more essential than ever. Despite low membership, particularly in the private sector, Unions have won many important battles in the last few years, particularly in France against the brutal neoliberal regime of Macron, and recently in Britain, where Unions prevented the government from cutting the support provided in its Job Retention Scheme from 80% of pre-furlough wages to 60%.
Now that Boris Johnson’s government seeks to restore profit to the economy by exposing working class people to coronavirus, Unions may well become the only things standing between vulnerable workers and what Engels called ‘social murder’. But Unions shouldn’t just fight for our lives, they should fight for our freedoms too: James McAsh has written that the right to work from home for those who can should not be suspended when lockdown ends, for it represents a shift in the power dynamic at work and may prove essential in revitalising local communities.
Lastly, the Left must become better communicators. We seem to have lost touch with many sections of the working class, and it is essential that the more middle and upper-class voices on the left yield ground and listen to those communities. The left’s institutions cannot be reliant on middle and upper-class people who can afford to volunteer for long periods without paid work. We should also support the blossoming alternative media, with outlets like Tribune, Double Down News, Novara, and Jacobin providing a left-wing balance to the propagandistic mainstream media. The Progressive International’s WIRE platform is a start, which translates stories, essays, and statements from progressive publications all over the world. Those who can afford it should financially support these outlets, and those who cannot should spread the word to friends and family.
We must unite, organise, and win: for ourselves, for the planet, and for our children.
If our tools against the elites in the coming battle consist merely of memes and tweeting in the echo-chamber of social media, then we can expect the next decade and beyond to be even bleaker than the last. Already, the establishment are beginning to forge the narrative of the next ten years and use this crisis to their advantage. There are mutterings of a return to austerity, and with fascism on the rise across the western world, leaders will likely intensify attacks on migrants and ethnic minorities.
If Rosa Luxemburg was correct to say that the future would either be an advance towards socialism or a retreat into barbarism, then the establishments have routinely proven that they will always opt for the latter. The point needs to be hammered home that coronavirus merely exposed what was already an unworkable socio-economic model. In the last decade, the western European economies have demonstrated the same socio-economic structural weakness and stagnation that we saw in the Soviet Bloc economies of Eastern Europe in the 1980s. An ageing population, a global collapse in GDP and the sixth mass extinction all force us to find an alternative way of living. In 2008, the left failed to win the battle for the post-crash world. It cannot afford to lose again.
In Greece, MeRA25 — DIEM25’s Electoral Wing in Greece — succeeded in the 2019 Greek general election, entering parliament with 9 MPs. This is a sign of hope for the left. DiEM25 is now working on establishing Electoral Wings across Europe in order to fight the Establishment and the Nationalist International.
For more information on left unity, see the Progressive International initiative — co-founded by DIEM25 and the Sanders Institute. And for readers in the United Kingdom, visit the T.U.C website to join a Trade Union today.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect DiEM25’s official policies or positions.
‘No Justice, No Peace’ March in Athens, Greece
A march from Syntagma Square to the American Embassy took place at 7pm EEST on June 3rd in Athens.
The march was organised as a show of solidarity with protestors against racial violence and the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minnesota (USA), uniting their fight with the struggle of Greek activists demonstrating the murder of Zak Kostopoulos (a leading LGBTQ+ activist in Greece) at the hands of citizens and police forces in the centre of Athens last year.
“We are united by:
Our Zakie and their George Floyd
Refugees, migrants and minorities seeking a place in the sun
The dead-end of poverty and unemployment
The systemic response to our struggles, which is fascism, racism and policy brutality
We stand in solidarity with demonstrators for justice and equality, wherever they might fight.”
With these words DiEM25 in Greece has called out to fellow progressive citizens and organisations to join in a march from Syntagma Square to the American Embassy in Athens.
A Chronicle of a Lost Decade Foretold
“Before our pandemic-induced lockdowns, politics seemed to be a game.”
ATHENS – To exorcise my worst fears about the coming decade, I chose to write a bleak chronicle of it. If, by December 2030, developments have invalidated it, I hope such dreary prognoses will have played a part by spurring us to appropriate action. Before our pandemic-induced lockdowns, politics seemed to be a game. Political parties behaved like sports teams having good or bad days, scoring points that propelled them up a league table that, at season’s end, determined who would form a government and then do next to nothing.
Then, the COVID-19 pandemic stripped away the veneer of indifference to reveal the political reality: some people do have the power to tell the rest of us what to do.
Lenin’s description of politics as “who does what to whom” seemed more apt than ever. By June 2020, as lockdowns began to ease, left-wing optimism that the pandemic would revive state power on behalf of the powerless remained, leading friends to fantasize about a renaissance of the commons and a capacious definition of public goods. Margaret Thatcher, I would remind them, left the British state larger, more powerful, and more concentrated than she had found it. An authoritarian state was necessary to support markets controlled by corporations and banks. Those in authority have never hesitated to harness massive government intervention to the preservation of oligarchic power. Why should a pandemic change that?
As a result of COVID-19, the grim reaper almost claimed both the British prime minister and the Prince of Wales, and even Hollywood’s nicest star. But it was the poorer and the browner that the reaper actually did claim. They were easy pickings.
It’s not hard to understand why. Disempowerment breeds poverty, which ages people faster and, ultimately, readies them for the cull. In the shadow of falling prices, wages, and interest rates, it was never likely that the spirit of solidarity, which soothed our souls during lockdowns, would translate into the use of state power to strengthen the weak and vulnerable.
On the contrary, it was megafirms and the ultra-rich that were grateful socialism was alive and well. Fearing that the masses, condemned to the savage arena of unfettered markets amid a public-health disaster, would no longer be able to afford to buy their products, they reallocated their spending to shares, yachts, and mansions. Thanks to the freshly printed money central banks pumped into them via the usual financiers, stock markets flourished as economies collapsed. Wall Street bankers assuaged their guilt, lingering since 2008, by letting middle-class customers fight over the scraps.
Plans for the green transition, which young climate activists had put on the agenda before 2020, were given only lip service as governments buckled under towering mountains of debt. Precautionary saving by the many reinforced the economic depression, yielding industrial-scale discontent on a browning planet.
The disconnect between the financial world and the real world, in which billions struggled, inevitably widened.
And with it grew the discontent that gave rise to the political monsters I was warning my left-leaning friends about.
As in the 1930s, in the souls of many, the grapes of wrath were growing heavy for a new, bitter vintage. In place of the 1930s soapboxes from which demagogues promised to restore dignity to the disgruntled masses, Big Tech provided apps and social networks perfectly suited for the task.
Once communities surrendered to the fear of infection, human rights seemed an unaffordable luxury. Big Tech developed biometric bracelets to monitor our vital data around the clock. In cahoots with governments, they combined the output with geolocation data, fed it all into algorithms, and ensured that the population received helpful text messages informing them what to do or where to go to stop new outbreaks in their tracks.
But a system that monitors our coughs could also monitor our laughs. It could know how our blood pressure responds to the leader’s speech, to the boss’s pep talk, to the police announcement banning a demonstration. The KGB and Cambridge Analytica suddenly seemed Neolithic.
With state power re-legitimized by the pandemic, cynical agitators took advantage. Instead of strengthening voices calling for international cooperation, China and the United States bolstered nationalism. Elsewhere, too, nationalist leaders stoked xenophobia and offered demoralized citizens a simple trade: personal pride and national greatness in exchange for authoritarian powers to protect them from lethal viruses, cunning foreigners, and scheming dissidents.
Just as cathedrals were the Middle Ages’ architectural legacy, the 2020s left us tall walls, electrified fences, and flocks of surveillance drones.
The nation-state’s revival made the world less open, less prosperous, and less free precisely for those who had always found it hard to travel, to make ends meet, and to speak their minds. For the oligarchs and functionaries of Big Tech, Big Pharma, and other megafirms, who got on famously with the strongmen in authority, globalization proceeded apace.
The myth of the global village gave way to an equilibrium between great-power blocs, each sporting burgeoning militaries, separate supply chains, idiosyncratic autocracies, and class divisions reinforced by new forms of nativism. The new socioeconomic cleavages threw the prevailing features of each country’s politics into sharp relief. Like people who become caricatures of themselves in a crisis, whole countries focused on their collective illusions, exaggerating and cementing pre-existing prejudices.
The great strength of the new fascists during the twenties was that, unlike their political forebears, they did not even have to enter government to gain power. Liberal and social-democratic parties began to fall over one another to embrace xenophobia-lite, then authoritarianism-lite, then totalitarianism-lite.
So, here we are, at the end of the decade. Where are we?
This article was originally published by FilmsForAction & Project Syndicate.