Peer2Politics

The Commons are more effectively utilized and developed as community-managed resources and infrastructures than as state-managed property.

The Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC, pronounced “seek”) is surely one of the more audacious commons-based innovations to have emerged in the past five years.  It is notable for providing a legal and financial superstructure that is helping to support a wide variety of smaller self-organized commons.  Some of us are calling this proto-form an “omni-commons,” inspired by the example of the Omni Commons in Oakland.

In 2008, Enric Duran stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from European banks to start a progressive hacktivist commune. Nathan Schneider traveled to Catalonia to meet the man, who is still on the run from the authorities.

A key challenge facing all of the movements, noted Kate Swade of Shared Assets, is whether to pursue solutions through pragmatic politics and elections, or whether to try to change the general political discourse and institutional structures over the long term. It seems difficult to pursue both options at the same time. This apparent choice may be especially vexing for the Degrowth movement, whose very name is often seen as unappealing to the political mainstream. (“At least the term can’t be easily co-opted,” quipped one leader at the Fourth International Degrowth Conference in Leipzig, Germany, held days after this workshop.) Is this a cautionary lesson for other movements seeking to change the discourse?

After 2 years of living underground and out of the public eye, the time has finally come for me to get ready for my journey back to freedom. The journey won’t be easy, and will require a lot of work to build widespread support. This is the reason for making this appeal to create teams for the ongoing collaborative effort needed in order to make this happen.

Enric Duran of the Catalan Integrated Cooperative has taken the time to comment on Michel Bauwens’ recent article on Open Coops, contrasting Bauwens’ proposals with the practical realities already under way in the CIC’s own forward thinking cooperativist environment.

If the previous decade brought the business embrace of Linux, free software and the knowledge commonsof science and technology to the fore, the present one marks their entry into the field of politics as discourses with broad social acceptance. From the FLOK Society project in remote Ecuador to Cooperativa Integral Catalana (CIC) in Spain and SYRIZA in Greece, the epicentre of discussion is a model for the organization of social, political, economic and cultural life, based on the principles of peer production and governance, of social and solidarity economy, and of the social-collective goods which we refer to as “the Commons”.

Here we present a Commons Transition interview with Enric Duran. Prior to co-founding theCatalan Integral Cooperative — a Commons Transition partner project creating a cooperative, self managed public system in Catalonia — Duran became famous for his 2008 “bank action”, an act which involved defrauding 39 Spanish banks of nearly €500,000 and subsequently distributing these funds to a variety of activist movements and social causes. He presently lives as a fugitive outside Spain, and is currently busy organizing the FairCoop Open Cooperative, a community-built effort to alleviate global economic inequalities through the use of mutual credit, reputation systems and cryptocurrencies.