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Read the article published by the Catalan medium, Crític, about the Transitioning Cooperative Activity Group, in femProcomuns, which wants to contribute to working and collectively managing the economy, culture and society. It has been translated into English.
Ignasi Franch. Crític
Translated into English by: Pelin Dogan. Col·lectivat.cat
The cooperative Societat Minera Olesana, the energy community Solbrai or the group that inhabits Can Tonal, in Vallbona, are several initiatives that organize their governance collectively.
The capitalism of scarcity and crises continues to recommend finding individual solutions to structural problems. But the magnitude of challenges, like the global warming, recommends that we should rethink our way of life and that we should do it collectively. Worker and consumer multi-stakeholder cooperative femProcomuns puts its grain of sand in this sense with the work they do with Transitioning Cooperativized Activity Group (GAC Transitant, in Catalan), which wants to contribute to work and manage economy, culture, and society collectively. The initiative began to implement it in essential areas such as energy, water management or the persistent housing problem.
The first step in understanding how to work collectively is to know that, for there to be a commons, a community should take care of a resource and set some rules regarding how to do it. This resource will not be under the exclusive control and use of any particular person. Some of these resources are obvious, such as water, even though the commodification of the world has resulted in privatizations of all kinds of natural resources. For David Gomez, a member of femProcomuns, the terminology is not the most important thing: “There are community solutions that are commoning, but they are not necessarily called or identified as such. It is the people in the academy who give a name to things.” According to Mònica Garriga, also a member of femProcomuns, “there are many definitions of what commons are, but above all they are ways of doing things. The commoning begins in the kitchen of each household and does not necessarily have to be linked to a political model.”
for there to be a commons, a community should take care of a resource and set some rules regarding how to do it
Why go for the commons? Garriga considers that “it becomes increasingly necessary not to depend on the capitalist market because we already know where it takes us. To tragic situations of climate, economic, social crisis… That’s why we have to look for models where we work together to self-organize. We must work with public administrations by means of agreements, pacts, and conventions, but through our organizational capacity.” This was the leitmotif that drove Transitioning to work in initiatives like La Comunificadora, a Barcelona Activa programme working as an incubator for social economy initiatives. With that experience in hand, the organization fostered the Transitioning Ecosystem project, through which it called different people and different entities that could share a certain sensitivity around the same topic to start working on the organization and decision-making in a common way.
Water, a scarce good that can be managed in another way
How can we manage an essential and scarce good like water so that it is a collective and democratic management? One of the entities that participated in the Transitioning sessions was Comunitat Minera Olesana, a company with more than 150 years of history, established as a cooperative in the 90s, that provides for Olesa de Montserrat. It maintains relations with local suppliers, some of which are cooperatives. It has an intercooperation relationship with these cooperatives and they formed a second-degree cooperative (Aigua.coop). The increase in the cost of energy has resulted in Comunitat Minera Olesana installing photovoltaic panels.
Comunitat Minera Olesana has more than 10,000 members, they created the Consumers Board that acts as liaison with the Board of Directors
The entity takes on the challenge of tackling energy poverty by ensuring that no one is cut off from water, with a social fund, and the challenge of encouraging participation: there are more than 10,000 members, but about 80 or 100 attend the assemblies. For this reason, they created the Consumers Board, a body that acts as a liaison between the Assembly and the Board of Directors. Joan Arévalo i Vilà, President of the company, says that “it was very enriching to pool water management, to work on its potential for shared social empowerment with other common goods objectives and to promote intercooperation.”
Facing the energy crisis as a community
The City Council of Pinell de Brai was among the participants of the working group on energy —how it is produced, transported, transformed and used contributes to shaping the type of society and its relationship with the natural environment. The Council, together with the cooperative Azimut 360 and the environmental group GEPEC, drives the cooperative energy community Solbrai. The goal is to install photovoltaic panels in various spaces, from the municipal sports centre to private properties, to aspire to energy self-sufficiency and to escape the aggressive model of large wind power generation facilities.
PInell de Brai energy community wants the municipal brigade to undertake the maintenance of the facilites.
The mayor of Pinell de Brai, Eva Amposta, says that joint spaces for reflection such as the one promoted by Transitioning allow you to “question and improve everything you are doing; and to get out of the mental framework that we have internalized, in which we are energy consumers and we do not consider any other aspect”. Created in Pinell de Brai, Solbrai energy community seeks activity generation in their town. Azimut 360 will carry out trainings so that the maintenance of the facilities is undertaken by local professionals, or, if necessary, by the municipal brigade. The plan is to pool services with other cooperatives. Gómez, from femProcomuns, highlights entity’s community governance: the City Council will only have one vote in the Assembly. Amposta considers that Transitioning debates have strengthened the idea of proposing “an initiative with a total citizen participation nature, disentangled from the models where a single figure can end up controlling the projects”.
Having a home, much more than an individual right
Within the Transitioning Ecosystem, work sessions on housing were held, too. Despite being essential for decent living conditions, it is not included as a fundamental right. Thus, self-managed community initiatives are articulated to self-provide housing. Among the participants were members of the community of Can Tonal, in Vallbona, a social project that takes place on an estate that was abandoned, in Baix Montseny. “About 70 people share the work, the infrastructure, and the tools. They do a lot of personal growth work. They organize collective work days open to anyone, they work a lot in a self-managed way, they use the gift economy, and they have the idea that everyone contributes according to their possibilities and receives according to their needs,” explains Mònica Garriga, from femProcomuns.
At Can Tonal they look for synergies with other projects that work with the commons to weave complicities
Participants from Can Tonal highlight that the sessions allowed them to share experiences “with other projects that work on the commons and also meet very interesting people. They helped us broaden the perspective and realize that many initiatives are being carried out throughout the territory. We may visit some of these initiatives, or we may receive them.” At Transitioning they came together, for example, with the supermarket for vulnerable people developed around the Plataforma d’Afectats per la Hipoteca (PAH; Platform for People Affected by Mortgages) and Sabadell Crisis, which matches the answers to housing problems with problems of access to food. In Can Tonal they consider that the commons can serve as a “link between projects apparently from different fields”. And they express that it is interesting “to weave a revolutionary strategy that would go beyond the State, patriarchy, and capitalism, since it is the only realistic way to be able to have a society based on the commons.
Community in times of competitiveness
The idea to work on ways for more commoning faces a culturally and ideologically adverse climate. Citizens are encouraged to compete, rather than sharing. Gómez is concerned about this context, which also influences projects that have a certain social and solidarity vocation. “We work on the community dimension of the projects because we do not see the sense in the start-up model, which is oriented towards many initiatives starting up, competing with each other and only one of them becoming consolidated. It is a whole system that must be dismantled, but it is difficult to enter into the logic of sharing.”
Garriga believes that the social context will imply changes in the way of organizing: “The situations of scarcity that we are experiencing can make it easier for us to strengthen the ways of functioning so that we share resources, such as cars, among all.” Gómez also says that the commons go beyond economic factors, which not only serve to manage a resource in a sustainable way that allows it to remain available for future generations: “They also mean mutual support, weaving community ties,” he reminds.
It may be psychologically important to feel less alone, but Garriga dimensions another aspect of community resource management: that the societies in which the knowledge flows are more horizontal and more sovereign. “The commons also tell us about sharing knowledge so that no individual person is key, or so that we all are. A distributed knowledge allows a distributed governance and, therefore, making of informed decisions.” For Gómez, both the market model and state management “offer services through professionals framed in a hierarchical structure, and this leaves you in a position of passivity. You do not have to know anything; only receive what is given to you. Distributing knowledge, on the other hand, makes us more resilient societies.”