170 Excerpt. Don’t Ask People to Pick a Side, with Tim Hollo

Yeah , so you mentioned the differences to our structure , hierarchical structure , I mean , let's remember we're a federation , so it wasn't entirely meant to be yeah , but anyway , that aside , for the moment , I did became so very quickly , didn't it ? Yeah , it doesn't have to be so . Let's reference Barcelona in this context . Talk to us about that case .

What's worse , like many of the smaller , less wealthy and powerful European countries , the centralized European government enforced austerity on Spain and forced their government to enforce austerity policies .

So , where Australia weathered the crisis remarkably well because we actually supported people to be able to go about their lives better , wasn't it a case in point of what we can do , what we can do when you actually have a couple of people like Ken Henry kind of saying we need to do this , and I have my disputes with his views of the economy and the world ,

but that was tremendously successful . In Spain . They enforced austerity . They ended up with 25% unemployment . They had 50% youth unemployment across the country . It was absolute . So , yeah , people were being forced out of their homes , that people couldn't afford to feed themselves and their families , skipping meals , couldn't afford medical care .

This vast protest movement evolved across Spain the movement of the squares , they called it , and huge protests on the streets doing a lot of really interesting kind of deep democracy , in fact , that they were doing on the streets as people were doing elsewhere around the world .

Sintama Square in Athens , the Occupy movement in America All of these were about actually doing citizens' assemblies and things doing politics differently , and they had some success in various ways around the world and in Spain .

In Spain , one of the big things out of the movement of the squares was the establishment of the political party Podemos , which has won some seats and has had some influence , but it hasn't been transformative . What happened in Barcelona was , rather than focusing on the political first , they focused on the community first , and they started with Mitchell Aid .

They started with community gardens , working with restaurateurs , working with local groups so that they could distribute food and meals to people who couldn't feed themselves .

They have a long history of cooperatives and so their cooperatives worked with their medical providers , so they had cooperative medical providers to where people who could afford to could pay it forward so that those who needed it and couldn't afford the medical care could get it .

They had this incredibly powerful radical housing justice movement where people would actually come out and defend people who are being evicted from their homes and enable them to stay in their homes and say it's not possible , what are you going to do here ? You're not even going to let this apartment because nobody can afford it , so just let them stay .

So Mitchell Aid was the core of what they were doing in Barcelona helping each other , helping the community to help itself , and each step of the way they were being pushed back by government Government who saw its role as maintaining the power of markets , maintaining the power of corporations , the status quo , business owners , pushing them back .

And so , with municipal elections coming up and remember that in a lot of Europe municipal government is kind of equivalent to our state government here City government is really very powerful .

With municipal elections coming up these mutual aid groups , these people doing this work on the ground , came together in a similar way to kind of the voices for Indy approach , with kitchen table community conversations , with community hall conversations , and they developed a shared political platform which they called Barcelona . In common , they adopted the platform .

They nominated Articola , one of the leaders of the squatters rights movement , as their mayoral candidate . They ran for election and they won the government of Barcelona .

And because they started with the community , because they started with Mutual Aid and the electoral politics was bolted on afterwards as we need to do this actually , because otherwise they're going to stop us they worked incredibly hard to not just kind of get into city hall and govern , but to devolve power out of city hall onto the streets .

Every step of the way , they have been working really hard to enable communities to make their own decisions about local planning issues , about control of the water system . This is a really interesting example where other leftist movements want to nationalise things like water supply , for instance .

And that's not a solution in my opinion , because it's still centralised control . Whether it's centralised control by a profit maximising corporation or centralised control by a government which is still in the same economic system , it's really problematic .

What they did in Barcelona was take back ownership by the municipal government but devolve the decision making power to the local communities . They do that with transport , with planning , with housing , with water .

They've been working incredibly hard to transform the way they do government Not just the decisions the government is making , but the way they do government , and one of my favourite things about it is that they see this as a global movement for change .

So it's local , it's hyper local , it's city based and municipal , and they've been working really hard to connect with other communities and cities around the world . They've held these fearless cities congresses where they bring people together to share ideas and cross fertilise and inspire each other to do things .

It's a municipalist globalism , a localist geopolitics which is inverting the state-based geopolitics which causes war , which causes disputes , which stops us from getting shit done all the time , inverting that into a grassroots up , globalist municipalism .

Yeah , I figure I'm on to something if this happens , even though I'm late to the party in a way . And yet her work , which was showing a lot of this stuff ages ago , right , and was she ? She was a Nobel Prize winner .

So just getting it back in keeping with the other economies and the other ways of governing ourselves , getting them in right proportions and so forth in a way . But she pioneered a lot of this work and her global research , even back then , was saying this is how it works , but , like everywhere , her research was extensive .

economy . And Ostrom did a tremendous amount of incredibly deep research with communities , as you say , all around the world , in how local communities manage common pool resources .

And it's really important that the commons is one of those words which has been deliberately kind of misunderstood and misdefined Totally and most people will think about the commons if you think about it at all , we'll think about this frame , the tragedy of the commons , which was put forward by Garrett Harden , who was a white supremacist American geographer actually ,

who didn't really do any work into the commons and wrote this very influential essay called the Tragedy of the Commons , where he talked about how a group of people who , for whatever reason , don't talk to each other and don't want to cooperate , if they're all kind of trying to get the most resources out of this one piece of shared land , they'll destroy that

piece of land , and of course they will . But that's not a description of the commons , it's a description of capitalism .

And the fundamental point is that they're always discussing it , they're always working it , they're always working out the rules themselves that they agree to be bound by themselves .

And she put forward a set of guiding principles of how the commons can be managed effectively and are managed effectively and have been managed effectively for countless millennia until capitalist , imperialist , colonialist organizing came along and started to destroy it . And it's all about communication .

It's all about the fact that the people who are going to be bound by the rules of how we share need to be the ones who actually make the rules themselves .

They're coordinated , and that you need good and well managed dispute resolution structures and that you need systems of sanctions where the group can come together to sanction those who are abusing the system in some way , but always , you know these graduated sanctions that are always about reintegrating , not about permanently excluding , and you need agreed boundaries .

This is one of the really important things as well . You need . You need to know where the boundaries of your group lie , not in order to fight or exclude or other the people elsewhere , but in order to collectively manage the you know beyond those boundaries .

So Ostrom's , one of her beautiful conceptions is polycentrism , which is , you know , fundamental to Murray Bookchin and the municipal confederism and what they're doing .

To the point of killing it , and we still haven't learned the lesson from that .

No , ostrom talks about how , if each local community manages their own piece of the river system and then they coordinate in a polycentric way across them , so that you know , the local community comes together to determine how they work with the river and then each local community sends delegates to work together across the whole river system , they will manage it

effectively .

is , and it's just like that community in the Kimberley I was talking about at the Town Hall , saying we know what works yeah we are here . We are the people that did it . It's here . It's worthwhile reinforcing that point that this isn't elusive If we do want to address this stuff it's here .

You know the participatory city in London , and I guess if we needed another layer of evidence that places like ours , and even the most divided places of ours , could grapple with this stuff .

This group started in South London in a , you know , in a poor area of South London which was not just poor but , as a consequence of that poverty , quite socially divided and there were , you know , there was rising racism in that community and what they , what they trialled there and then moved into East London , into the borough of Barking and Dagenham was setting

up these open spaces on high streets in empty storefronts because so many of them poor communities , just a space where people could come and chat and meet and talk about what they would like to do . And then this group participatory city would help them to do that thing .

And it was often things like a little cooking group where that people could come together and cook together and share food and help each other learn , learn each other's recipes and things like that . Or or just a knitting club or a tool library .

They set up community gardens , that kind of thing , and this has been massively expanded now in Barking and Dagenham where they've got quite a few of these , these , these spots on high streets . We're really all the .

All that the organisation participatory city is doing is providing people with a space to come and offer what they would like or find someone else who's thinking similarly and work together .

And they offer the facilitation skills , they offer the space , they offer help to kind of navigate difficult interpersonal relationships or difficult relationships with local government so that they can get access to space . But it's such gentle , soft touch and they are just sitting there enabling the community to do this stuff together .

And the evidence is unbelievable the amount of cohesion and connection , social cohesion that's building out of this , the reduction in racism in the community , the reduction in votes for the hard right parties , elections even . And people finding agency together , finding communal agencies .

So they'll come together and find a blank wall in a run down city block where they'll paint a mural together and that will create the connection in the community that's there while they're doing it , but it lasts , because every time these people walk past or drive past or ride past this mural , they get the return of this warmth , this feeling of connection that

they got out of it . So many of these examples . And it's just , it's creating a different way of doing politics , a different way of doing the economy . It's creating abundance , shared abundance , where capitalism is enforcing scarcity on us all the time .

You know you've got sharing groups going on here and repairing groups so that you know if you've got a toaster that doesn't work , you can bring in and somebody can help you learn how to fix it and it keeps it going for longer .

You can upcycle clothing that somebody else might want to wear and then you see that piece of clothing on the street that somebody else is wearing and you kind of just feel happy about seeing that . Yeah , it generates abundance , it generates social cohesion and it changes everything . It literally changes the world . It does Changes what's possible .

and I've got echoes of different contexts where I've worked on these things and seen the same stuff as well . So let's talk about these deliberate you mentioned again , you know , facilitation , the skills . So let's talk about these deliberative processes and how they work and indeed how we might do more of them .

The lens to do it is probably through a woman that you and I are both friends with , who you cited as the primary case in Australia , Amanda Carl . Talk to what's really stood out about her work .

So she works in as some of your long term listeners would definitely know because you've interviewed her in communities in transition out of fossil fuels . She goes into their communities , always at their invitation , and facilitates these conversations , their deliberative conversations , where you start with this asset based community development approach .

You start with a conversation around what is it that our community has going for it , what do we share , what are our common values and the things that we would like to see here , and then she talks to them about what other communities that are in a similar situation around Australia and around the world might be doing , and then she supports the community to

determine its own way forward , to come up with proposals that they then want to take to government or to start doing it themselves , to just , you know , to come together to set up a community renewable energy cooperative , for instance , and to just get on with things , and this is in communities which consistently vote for climate deniers , for proto-fascists .

You know communities which have very high one nation votes , very high votes for the right wing and used to be known as conservative but are now really pretty hard right wing parties and the extremely explicitly extreme right .

And these same people , the very same people who vote in that way , will come together in a room that Amanda can facilitate and come up with proposals for a swift transition to renewable energy and community cooperatives . And you know this stuff that is easy to kind of ridicule as lefty , pinky , crazy stuff that only wealthy people in the inner city want to do .

And we know how to do things in a way that brings out our best , because we've done it , because it's what Indigenous communities have tended to do since time immemorial . We see it in commons economies , in commons governance ways , in cooperatives . We know how to do government and economy in a way that brings out our best .

Our system is built in such a way that it brings out our worst . It tells us that we are purely competitive , selfish , profit maximising beings and that this is the only way we can ever interact . And it's not true .

When you talked about the Stanford and Milgram experiments , for example , that have been wealthy , bunged and indeed people now have access to the records , the broader records behind those experiments and seen the resistance people showed in the experiments to what they were being asked to do , that that wasn't put into the conclusions of the time .

So we are coming to grapple slowly with the fact that we're not , you know , out to get each other . This is not our nature .

We do have these tendencies in us too , and we can't pretend that we don't . What we need to do is work out how to manage them effectively , and that's what they do with you know . To come back to Tennant Creek , that's what it's all about .

It's about saying we understand that sometimes you just want to hit something , sometimes you want to go out and get smashed , and of course you do , because the world is out to get you , frankly . So yeah , shit happens .

What we need to do is work out how we as a community come together to help you come back from there and to work out how to bring out the best in you and in us together , not assume the worst of you in such a way that it will encourage you to continue to play out being the worst that you could be .

You know , it's interesting , even in that context where we might not think the principles play out , it's a highly cooperative domain , right , interesting to think . All right , so you've talked about in your book , and of course , it's the next logical thought that we need more of these processes , more of the people who can facilitate them .

Yeah , yeah , right , across the country and beyond . You know , for that matter , amanda will talk about how it's really a life's work she's done on herself . Yeah , what are your thoughts about how we literally physically go about having more people be able to facilitate processes like this , to do it ?