[unomada-info] Manifesto Of The Commons: Towards a New Charter of Social Rights

[Infos de la Universidad Nomada]

http://www.universidadnomada.net/spip.php?article367

MANIFESTO OF THE COMMONS: Towards a New Charter of Social Rights 

On the occasion of the spanish municipal and regional elections of may
the 22th 2011


The crisis is a spectre haunting around Europe. The political and
economic elite have for more than three years promised a return to
normalcy, which in fact means a return to the conditions that gave rise
to all that has already occurred.  The policies and interventions of the
past three years have placed the well-being of finance capital above all
other considerations.  The capitalist appropriation of social life, the
insistence on the poorly-named ¨austerity,¨ the cuts to the welfare
state and social rights, and the privatization of the commons are
nothing more than a politics of dispossession and social degradation.
This - and nothing else - is the realpolitik that causes the weight of
the crisis to fall squarely on the backs of the middle and working
classes.

  Facing a set of adjustments and reforms designed to benefit the most
powerful, it cannot be emphasized strongly enough that the crisis is
above all else a crisis of the political, and that the we must turn away
from a politics that compels us to choose between the privileged sectors
of finance, from above, and the new war between the poor, from below.
Nothing is more urgent than to reject the populisms of the new
right, catalysers of rapacious greed, who have mobilized against
scapegoats old and new - immigrants, students, public sector workers,
young people, and whoever else is considered a threat in a society which
has already lost its fear. Disgracefully, the future of the commons is
bet on the social capacity to draw fear from difference.

Meanwhile, the left, irrespective of its various incarnations, from the
most timid to the most extreme, gloats in melancholy and impotence.
Incapable of comprehending the dimensions of the crisis, of presenting a
serious proposal to alter the current atmosphere, to point to
innovative approaches to income distribution and/or the expansion of
social rights, the institutional left is the target of a generalized
political disaffection that is leading to a gradual loss of social and
electoral support.  And while this trend can be seen across Europe, it
is multiplied in Spain.  Here, the left has hurled itself toward a
pre-prepared suicide.  The "I won´t let you down" mantra of the Zapatero
campaign in 2004 or the promises of left governments in Catalunya,
Galicia, Baleares, Barcelona, or so many other locales, are today sad
examples of the empty rhetoric of the political class. It hardly needs
to be repeated: these governments have not done anything to reinvent
political forms, nor the relations between state and citizen, and
obviously they have not undertaken policies different from those
prescribed in standard manuals of government administration and
management.  And all this, when the only window of opportunity for the
left to make substantive gains was opened - at the beginning of the last
decade - without the institutional left even recognizing it, by virtue
of the emergence of new social movements: the mobilizations against the
war, the "Nunca Mas" of local struggles against the appropriation of
water and land.  It was then when an historic opportunity to open a
cycle of political renovation emerged: conceiving society as something
more than a mere aggregation of voters, and aiming to transform moribund
institutions into more than mere guarantors of a regime of normalized
rights programmed from above.  That opportunity has clearly been
squandered, with irreversible consequences for the democracy that it
could have brought.

  In the coordinates of our new political landscape - marked as it is by
the new offensive of finance capital and the regression of the
institutional left - we are called now to new municipal elections and,
in many communities, to autonomous elections.  Among the responses which
we hope will be declared with clarity is the following: "they do NOT
represent me" or - more simply - "your history does NOT refer to me."
The times are those of the weak-willed, characterized by a choice
between options that fail to convince or to recognize an alternative.

  At the point of starting the electoral campaign season and the long
litany of tepid promises that it brings, our wager cannot be cast in
favour of empty labels or for the lesser evil.  The only worthwhile
choice is to go on the offensive - to invent another ethic, another
politics which is disconnected from nostalgia and resignation.  Without
falling into false conventionalisms or narrow localisms, in a world
where almost everything passes through global processes and
determinations, the city can be a privileged space of intervention: the
stage for a new generation of struggles for the reappropriation and
reinvention of the commons; the right terrain for the re-creation of a
culture of sharing, which recognizes and thrives on difference and
diversity; the first experiment for new forms of just distribution of
wealth and labor time.

  In this framework, politics, the politics of the city, which will play
out in the upcoming elections, confronts two options: to yield to its
old ways and opt for competitiveness and economic growth, thereby
accepting the false assumption of scarcity of resources; or to assert
new rights that recognize productive capacities and the capacity for
wealth creation in local, independent contexts.  The political
mobilization of the city implicates, in this latter option, the
mobilization of a new regime of rights.  It is obvious that these
emerging rights surpass the limits of current European institutional and
political arrangements, and necessitate an institutional revolution in
the European Union that meets - juridically, fiscally, monetarily, and
politically - their demands, establishing the only geometry that can
respond to the rules of fair distribution and equity.  What is required
is a European federation of free cities and regions at the service of
those who produce and reproduce the common wealth.  The politics of
austerity clearly show that the principal bulwarks of the financial
oligarchy in Europe are the worn-out leaderships of sovereign
nation-states which are at the service of the party system, and the
financial and corporate elite who benefit from the ongoing privatization
and exploitation of the commons.  The democratic revolutions occuring
in North Africa and the Arab world are a call to action, an inspiration
and a challenge for the democratic rebels of Europe and the
Mediterranean.

  What could not be done by other means has been attempted with a new
cycle of social struggles and mobilizations of the poor and immigrants.
 In these struggles, poverty is constructed as power, not as lack.  It
is not necessary to guess what will be the themes of the new urban
mobilizations.  They have to do with problems already on the agenda of
these developing mobilizations - problems which are presented as the
first draft in the formulation of new and emerging rights.  We formulate
these issues now as a charter - the charter of the Rights for the Urban
Commons:

1. Universal and Unconditional Right to a Basic Income. Without
hesitation, we can say that the majority of reproductive and creative
work is not remunerated in any form. Earning a salary cannot be the only
consideration for how productive work is defined, and remunerated work
cannot be viewed as the general form taken by labor. The law system,
however, only grants rights based on salaried work. The weakness and
narrowness of this foundational assumption leads to less social
protection and fewer rights for a growing number of people. It is for
this reason that a universal and unconditional income (we place the
amount at 800 euros a month) would not only alleviate the suffering of
millions of people subject to unemployment and hyper-exploitation, but
would also be a just payment for work that is currently not remunerated.
Along the same lines as the basic income, the state can make other
important advances: limiting speculative activities related to land and
housing, taxing financial transactions, eliminating inequalities in
various types of public benefits (transportation, housing, etc.), laying
the groundwork for an effective, equal distribution of wealth that
exceeds efforts from previous eras. 

2. Recognition of the Commons. There is no life, society, or dignified
collective existence without the recognition of the common means and
resources that sustain them. The city appears as the site of this
collective existence by virtue of its public and common dimensions. As a
public space, the city also potentially embodies the collection of
necessary guarantees for the reproduction of social life: from
healthcare to care-giving, from the environment and natural resources
(e.g. water and air); from education to pensions. Without recognizing
the common condition of these assets and resources, urban life would not
only deteriorate into a chain of obligations subject to distinct
mechanisms of exploitation (e.g. the mortgage, precaritized work,
private forms of social insurance, etc.): it would vanish into a
concatenation of individuated lives oriented solely around survival.
The economic powers have found in the city a privileged site for the
expansion of new forms of self-enrichment: privatizing public health
services, attacking pensions, assailing public education. What is at
stake in these struggles is the future of our society: the recognition
of communal forms of property and management - not merely as assets in
the hands of public institutions - is the best defence we have against
the privatization of our social existence.

3. Right to Information and to the Free Production and Reproduction of
Knowledge. Knowledge is one of the most important common assets of our
time: produced by media that are increasingly collective, resulting out
of an enormous social investment (as well as huge quantities of public
money), this knowledge is shared in publicly-accessible networks and
spaces of exchange. It is for this reason that we must aim to break all
institutional shackles on the production, modification, and
multiplication of knowledge. Instead of presenting a viable framework to
house our expanding stores of intellectual wealth, the current drive to
privatize knowledge undermines forms of cooperation and exchange that
make this wealth possible. We advocate for local governments to
intervene in the terrain of knowledge production through public
investment efforts, as we strongly support collective experimentation
and innovation vis-a-vis the production and distribution of knowledge.
Only in this way will the social value of one of our greatest collective
intellectual assets be recognized and defended.

4. Right to Mobility. The establishment of a right of universal
citizenship is the only just counterpart to the financialization of the
economic cycle, the hypermobility of capital, and the steep acceleration
of the rate of exploitation of the Global South. This right will only be
obtained by abolishing the borders among states, as well as those more
subtle, internal borders that fragment urban spaces into zones of
exclusion, ghettoes and spaces of control. The internal borders
effectively reproduce a hierarchy of liberties and negate the most
elementary rights: to residency, to vote, to free association, to
a living wage, etc. Local institutions and municipal governments can and
should intervene to abolish such mechanisms of exclusion, reestablishing
- via access to services and social rights - a generalized right of
equal citizenship. If this is not done, urban spaces will degenerate
into ungovernable zones of segregation, exclusion, and sharp inequality.

The Manifesto of the Commons offers a framework to reprogram the way our
society conceives social welfare, as part of a political and economic
project that invites and appeals to all on the political Left. However,
it should not be viewed as a means by which the parties of the Left
represent their constituents. This way of thinking about politics is
outdated, as the people today are constituted by a tendency toward
self-representation. Immigrants; women; those affected by the mortgage
crisis, the destruction of the environment, the degradation of public
services; newly constituted social networks; and a long list of emerging
communities have found new ways to speak for themselves, without the
mediation of institutional apparatuses or formal representatives. It is
time for the Left to accept the limits of its representativeness and
reach out - in an open, creative way - to the movements and social
aggregations that increasingly make up the fabric of our new urban
spaces. Through this reaching out we will hear the call for access to
decent housing, the right to healthcare, the recognition of the commons,
the right to education, and the right to mobility. And we will develop a
new and better way of inhabiting the city.  This manifesto lays out a
program for a social movement that annuls and goes beyond the current
state of politics and has no need for the participation of so-called
experts. What is required now is that all local governments - especially
those on the left - place themselves at the service of the necessities
of this movement.

All of us signing on to this declaration have no doubt that making the
aforementioned rights a reality is the work of the Left. Our historical
moment is now and time is of the essence.

Sign on by going to the following address and sending your information
(full name, organizational affiliation, and place of residence). We will
publish a list of signatories in a special page devoted to the Manifesto
of the Commons: manifiestoadhesiones en yahoo.es

In the alternative, you can sign the following on-line petition.  

------------ próxima parte ------------
Se ha borrado un adjunto en formato HTML...
URL: </pipermail/unomada-info/attachments/20110520/40c22a9b/attachment-0001.htm>