(2018-12-02) Bartlett Microsolidarity Proposal

Richard Bartlett: The original Microsolidarity Proposal. Courage Before Hope: A Proposal to Weave Emotional and Economic Microsolidarity. Or: What To Do in the Last Decade of the Anthropocene

I’ve spent most of the past 2 years travelling with my partner Nati, trying to discover what is the most strategic & wise action to take in a world that seems to be accelerating towards collapse

I have a strategy that feels good enough to engage my will and commitment. This document is a statement of intention. All going well, it’s where I want to invest my productive energy for the next 7 years or so.

Phase 1 is a lot of conversation and contemplation.

Phase 2 is this writing and re-writing process. Writing in public forces me to fill in the gaps in the argument, and to make my assumptions explicit.

Phase 3 is where you come in as a reader and collaborator. If you feel struck by this proposal, I’d love for you to improve my thinking with your feedback. The best possible response will be for other people to run related experiments in parallel.

The design elements come from 7 years of thinking & doing in the Loomio Cooperative and Enspiral Network.

I intend to start a new community as a sibling or cousin of Enspiral: about 30 to 200 people supporting each other to do more meaningful work. Our method will focus on getting people into “crews”, small groups of 3-8 people that start with emotional intimacy and get to economic intimacy. There’s a sequence from psychological safety to shared ownership of productive assets. The larger community functions mostly as a dating pool for people to find their crew-mates. The crews support the personal development of their members while doing useful things like providing housing, establishing circular-economy startups, growing food, making revolutionary art, or whatever activity seems meaningful to their members.

I think modular and open source strategy is much more valuable than charismatic leadership, so I’m documenting my strategy as thoroughly and accessibly as I can.

This article is long, so let’s start with a map:

Part 1. I start by briefly setting context, giving a name to the metacrisis I believe is threatening society as we know it.

Part 2. Then there’s a chunky piece of theory to explain how I think about groups, and groups of groups.

Part 3. With that background established, I can spell out my “microsolidarity” proposal in more detail.

Part 4. Then we get to the counter-intuitive part. I’m intentionally contradicting a lot of received wisdom from progressive and radical politics, so I want to do that explicitly, in the hopes that we can learn from each other.

Part 1. Collapse

we are well into a major collapse of our biological life support systems

While the biological substrate for life is disintegrating, so is our social fabric.

This is how I set the design criteria: assuming we are in a major collapse, what is an appropriate action to take?

First criteria: we need enormous courage to persist without a guarantee of a positive outcome.

Second criteria: we need resilient methods for making meaning in the midst of chaos

Third criteria: people with life-supporting values need to grow our power to influence the distribution of resources.

Finally, I believe that the core of this bio/socio/psycho/spiritual collapse is a metacrisis of relationship

If that’s true, then my response must be relational first.

Microsolidarity Part 2: a Theory of Groups and Groups of Groups

I’m going to propose some new words, to access new ideas

1: the Self

2: the Dyad

let’s say a Dyad can only be in one of two states: Domination or Partnership.

If you want to follow this logic that domination relationships are the root of all injustice, and partnership relationships are the root of all freedom, here are some juicy links

I reckon if the old domination society is finally disintegrating, let’s grow the next one around partnerships

3: the Crew

A Crew is a group that is small enough to fit around a single dinner table, around 3-8 people

This is a long-term set of relationships with singular purpose, like a co-op, shared house, or affinity group.

4: the Congregation

There’s another crucial size somewhere between 30 and 200 people: small enough that most of the members can know each other’s name, big enough to support many Crews to coalesce.

In my experience the best way to find your Crew is to spend some time in a Congregation

If you use my language for a second, you can think of Enspiral as a Congregation of Crews

Loomio is one of about 10 or 20 stable Crews in the network

5: the Crowd

all human groups bigger than Dunbar’s Number get lumped into this one category: the Crowd

There’s an empty space between Self and Crowd

From where I’m standing, it looks like contemporary neoliberal urban westernised society is mostly designed for Selves and Crowds.

Anywhere you look: government policy, media narratives, conferences, employee performance management, UX design, the healthcare system… in all these different fields you will usually hear people being treated as either individuals or anonymous mass populations

Over the past 7 years of working with people who are trying to make the world a safer, fairer, healthier place, I’ve concluded that membership in a good Crew is a critical success factor.

can we create the conditions for many excellent Crews to coalesce?

Microsolidarity Part 3: The Reciprocity Game

Around ~5-8 people is a sweet spot of high impact and low coordination cost. Our little Loomio co-op is one example: we've raised more than $1M in ethical financing and supported 1000s of groups to be more inclusive and more effective in their governance

A good Crew is not only super efficient. It can also be a potent site for personal development. In a Crew you can experience human difference as a resource, which is our best antidote to bigoted tribalism

My Crew is where my values gain nuance and complexity

I believe courage is developed when we _en_courage each other, with our enthusiastic listening, praising, challenging

Meaning, too. I make sense of a phenomenon by considering how my peers respond to it.

Unfortunately, Crews are often dysfunctional

Nati and I have spent the past 2 years helping groups to recover from some of these dysfunctions. I’m writing a book of practical solutions for the common failure patterns of collaborative groups. Hopefully these ideas can help a little, but what’s needed most of all is practice.

A Sequence to Crystallise new Crews

The first step is to start a Congregation localised to one geographic region

As a starting point I suggest our purpose could be something like “people supporting each other to do more meaningful work

“Meaningful work” is intentionally subjective, inviting a complicated amalgam of different purposes: planting trees, raising kids, writing software; if it is truly meaningful to you, it’s probably worth doing

I suspect the first thing to do within a Crew is to establish psychological safety, a space where all the parts of your networked Self are welcome to show up.

Most of the people we plan to invite have already got a sense of what work is most meaningful to them, but almost all of us are financially precarious. So I’m interested in moving quite rapidly from emotional intimacy to economics

Personally I’m interested in building economic solidarity, because I think we can do more good when we’re in a position to be generous. But maybe the rest of the Congregation will have different priorities.

The Reciprocity Game

Building trust is not rocket science. It’s mostly about reciprocity

Level 1: Listening

Level 2: Money

One person talks about (A) the work they do for money, and (B) the work that is most meaningful to them. Discuss together how they might bring A and B into closer alignment

Level 3: Consistency

Either in a Partnership (2 people) or in a Crew (up to 8), practice meeting once a month (virtually or in person).

Level 4: Conflict

you do something thoughtless, or miscommunicate in a way that upsets somebody you care about. They get hurt. Then you apologise, take responsibility, and attempt to make amends. They listen and forgive. Woohoo! You transformed your conflict into greater connection

Level 5: Co-owners

maybe it’s a new tech platform or a community project or a commune. Maybe it’s a savings pool or lending circle or livelihood pod for sharing credit, income or savings with your trusted peers. Whatever the idea, find some people who want to work on it with you. Now, when you formally incorporate as a company or an association or co-op, whatever, share the legal ownership with a few people.

Microsolidarity Part 4. An Unorthodox Recipe For Social Change

There are many components of the microsolidarity proposal that are out of step with the prevailing currents of progressive and radical thought. I’ll name five of those attributes here

1. Exclusivity

I invite you to start your own Congregation, but you’re not invited to join mine.

Actually there could be two barriers to inclusion: first to join the Congregation, then an even higher threshold to join a Crew.

All of this exclusion is necessarily going to select for people with specific privileges, so it’s not a comprehensive plan to erase oppression and injustice in the world

2. Not for profit but with profit

We see the harm done by wealth inequality and corruption, so we conflate the wealth with the inequality. Anticapitalists conflate the marketplace with capitalism.

I’ve tried being broke, and I’ve tried having enough to be generous, and I know which one is better for the planet.

When I was 21, after reading Small Is Beautiful, E.F. Schumacher’s powerful short book on meaningful work, I immediately wrote a blog post publicly declaring my rejection of bullshit jobs.

I certainly did enjoy the privilege of New Zealand’s social welfare system to pay my rent when I couldn’t.

Now I’ve co-founded two small worker-owned businesses which pay me to do my most meaningful work (Loomio & The Hum)

These companies are not built for profit, but with profit

3. Do Better Than Good

I propose to outcompete individualistic consumerism with microsolidarity. I mean, how hard can it be to do a better job of meeting people’s psychological and material needs than this shitty 21st century gig economy?

4. Decentralised governance with not a blockchain in sight.

5. Design for smallness

If our Congregation gets much bigger than 100 people, it’ll be time to start thinking about how to split in two.

our intimate peer-to-peer relationships have an extraordinary capacity for ambiguity and complexity. A high trust group can be very coherent and effective even with very low levels of explicit agreement about our state, direction and norms

If you want to be agile and adaptive in a complex and rapidly changing environment, you must move as much decision-making power as possible into groups that are small enough to be governed by spoken dialogue, not written policy.

For case studies demonstrating the relationship between performance and small-scale autonomy across many different industries, see Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux and Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal.

The Assembly of Congregations: A Decentralised Autonomous U.N.?

it’s fun to imagine what might happen at the next order of magnitude. Here’s a fun metaphor, which I gratefully borrow from my Enspiral-mate Ants Cabraal

Imagine if we mobilised another 40,000 people to work on global challenges, but instead of the traditional centralised organisational structure of the U.N., with its hierarchies, department and managers, imagine if we were organised in small, decentralised, self-managing, commons-oriented, future-proof, complexity-capable networks. After all, 40,000 people is just 200 Congregations of 200. (Grand Challenge, Network Governance)