A reminder that I won’t be able to finish marking the debate material until the briefs are in.

All presentation write-ups are due by Thursday.

I strongly encourage you to read Porritt’s Chapter 15, where he discusses civil society. It is quite relevant to today’s discussion.

Monbiot makes the argument that that there is a history of common property systems that are not an unregulated free-for-all.

He argues that Garrett Hardens’ essay provided an ideological rationale for the World Bank and others to privatize traditional common resources, something colonial powers had been doing for centuries.

He accuses of Hardin of confusing the commons with open access systems (e.g. the oceans, the atmosphere).

The essence of the article is that – in contrast with Porritt – capitalism and socialism are not seen as the only economic alternatives. In addition to describing the defining features of those two systems, it advances a third alternative – that of communitarianism.

It also argues that, as much as they may have differed from one another, capitalism and socialism share certain modernist precepts in common: a belief that nature exists solely to serve human needs, and a tendency to subordinate human development to industrial efficiency.

This builds on the insight of Karl Polanyi that industrialism disembeds people and nature from the land and turns them into 'human and natural resources,' thus severing their organic link to place.

Peter Ross and David Usher in their book From the Roots Up: Economic Development As If the Community Mattered offer up a way of dividing up the communitarian economy – what they call the social economy – that's useful.

They divide the economy into two main sectors: formal and informal.

The formal sector consists of big business and the public sector.

The informal sector consists of seven sub-sectors: small business enterprises collective and cooperative enterprises community organizations and enterprises voluntary activity barter and skills exchanges mutual aid, and household activity.

What distinguishes the two major sectors is: the rationale for economic activity and scale.

The rationale for the formal economy is profit maximization and/or advancing the political goals of the state, which sometimes coincide closely with the objectives of the corporate sector.

The rationale in the informal sector is serving the needs of producers, consumers, communities, and also (in some cases) nature.

While the scale of the formal economy is massive, the scale of informal sector organizations is often quite small, with some organizations straddling the line.

An interesting example of a highly successful region that relies on relatively small, skill-intensive enterprises and co-ops is Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, an area centered on Bologna.

As Ernesto Sirolli describes, the region (as of 1999) had 4 million people and boasts a business ratio of one business for every 11 persons, 90% of which have fewer than 99 employees. In Capri, the knitwear capital of Europe (population: 60,000), businesses do over $2 billion in sales, and the average enterprise has five employees.

Collaboration amongst businesses is a prominent feature of economic life, as are co-ops.

• In Emilia-Romagna is noted for its parmesan cheese, produced by over 700 farm co-operatives:

cooperatives make up over 40% of the GDP of the E-R region

in Bologna two out of three adult citizens are members of a cooperative

in Bologna, over 85% of the city's social services are provided by social co-ops

per capita income in E-R has risen from 17th to second among Italy's 20 regions

per capital income is 50% higher than the national.

Of the European regions, E-R is number 11 of 122 regions in terms of GNP per inhabitant

Bologna has the highest disposable income of any of Italy's 103 provinces

Bologna has the highest per capita expenditure on the arts of any city in Italy

The unemployment rate of 4% is virtually full employment 70% of Bologna's households have home ownership.Source:

http://www.cooperativegrocer.coop/articles/index.php?id=483

If you Google “co-ops in Emilia-Romagna,” you'll find lots of other interesting info as well.

Another famous example of a co-op economy is the system of famous Mondragon co-ops centred in the Basque country of northern Spain.

The idea behind the communitarian economy is that it potentially re-embeds the economy in nature and society and enables it to serve more sustainable ends.

It's even possible that we might find a way to create a “steady-state economy” in such a system.

Do you think this is possible and, if so, what would it look like?

Civil Society

The StatePrivate Sector

Balancing the 3 elementsof society…

Arguably, state control of the economy has been a disaster on a number of levels. Can you offer your views?

An unregulated free market economy has also been far less than optimal. Thoughts?

Relying on the “social economy” may not be adequate in a sophisticated, highly integrated society, though Emilia-Romagna offers promise. [In truth, it is a hybrid.]

A balanced model might involve all three elements: state, private sector, and civil society.

At a micro scale, it might look like community economic development (CED), a phenomenon we haven’t had much time to explore.

At a macro scale, it might look more like Sweden where individuals and corporations are heavily taxed, there is a very strong safety net, and unions and government partner with businesses on social and economic policy [see the film “Poor No More”].

While it has been under threat in recent years, the “Scandinavian model” emerged as various socialist parties in these countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark) chose to adopt neither the capitalist nor the “Bolshevik” model – i.e. refused to trade an economic ‘dictatorship’ for a political dictatorship.

Scandinavians have consistently proven to have the highest levels of well-being, both physical and psychological, in the world.