An open cooperative as a revolutionary tool for building other economy at the world level
Today I have not expropriated any banks, nor presented anything anyone can call illegal, against perhaps what expected by many, neither do I present a strategy directly related to my return to public freedom, which does not mean I am not still defining that plan.
What I now present is a revolutionary project on a global scale, a fruit of the immersion and learning I was allowed to thanks to my 19 months of intense activity in the seclusion of hiding.
The moment this project was born during my nights of creative solitude, it became clear to me that I had to make this both a priority and a reality before taking any risk as an individual. Today, I am pleased to have acted on that determination, and I hereby submit the project so that it may become everyone’s.
It is the open, global cooperative Fair Coop, one more step in the extension of the integral revolution worldwide; and also the p2p society values, open cooperation, and hacker ethics, among others.
I will now explain some of the thoughts that inspired me to do this:
The blockchain and Bitcoin brought to the world one of the few missing pieces to allow us to become independent from the old economic system. Old, centralized and new, decentralized systems have begun an open competition for domination in the world of the future. And for the first time in thousands of years, decentralized systems have another chance.
However, for those of us who understand the world in terms of cooperation, decentralization is not enough; we believe this new world needs self-organization and mutual support, cooperation needs to infiltrate all those corners where domination is falling behind.
Cooperative, self-managed, collective, community-based projects are extending and multiplying everywhere.
The practices that preset the way this other world can be everyday, are very much alive. Although these practices are beginning to be quite interconnected at bio-region scale, they are still too isolated and there is mutual ignorance among initiatives that are thousands of kilometers from each other, on different continents, based on different languages.
Large amounts of commons are being built in parallel at the local scale, but any one project’s evolution has so far been insufficiently shared with the others. We need more powerful tools to help us share our knowledge, and we must be able to finance their development.
We don’t want to stay as viewers in the confrontation between the old, oligarchic and the new, netarchic capitalism. We want a cooperative system also on a global scale, like the ones we practice at local scale, and if we want to see it happen we have to build it.
Therefore it became necessary to work on a project to put social cooperation back on the stage of the dominance struggles between economic systems, showing that the path to put human beings back at the center is possible, and is there for us to expand it.
This project has arrived and is called Fair.Coop, The Earth cooperative for a fair economy.
The initial push to boot this initiative is what we have named “hacking money markets to introduce the virus of cooperation”.
This means:
A cryptocurrency, negotiable in an uncontrolled way in decentralized markets around the world can be understood as social capital, in which the number of shares is equal to the total number of created coins.
If we choose it as our founding capital for a cooperative, it means this capital, instead of being accounted in the dominant currency (euro, dollar…) will be in a currency the system can not control, and also, as our cooperative project grows and provides resources and services of proven usefulness, the value of this capital and the entire cryptocurrency will grow accordingly.
It is an important point and I will explain the meaning of this in a different way so it can be fully understood:
Consider traditional capitalism. Company owners extract value primarily through:
– Income from capital
– Labour exploitation
In some transnational corporations, netarchic capitalism adds a third way to extract value: free collaboration between humans. For example Facebook or Google ads generate a lot of money because we use their “free” services, while we in fact are working for them for free.
What if it is us who create technological tools for cooperation between equals, and use them to generate free knowledge, global commons?
Well, then we can do what we like and consider helpful: cooperating, sharing, learning, while letting the economic value of our work remain in cooperative projects, and even reverse to ourselves.
It became necessary therefore to find a coin that was not controlled by old capitalism (euros / dollars …), nor exploited by the most innovative capitalism (Bitcoin), one in which we can incorporate our values and cooperative practices. Faircoin therefore was chosen.
After months of networking and creation, Fair.coop is born today.
The space is open to start cooperation among all of us, and we have supplied the cooperative 10,000,000 faircoins, representing 20% of total existing coins.
This social capital was injected into Fair.coop with the following distribution:
– 5,000,000 faircoins for the Global South fund (address: https://chain.fair-coin.org/address/fU3wRGZwese65gZqRiQiJvE483iyjY2QD4 )
– 2,500,000 faircoins for the Commons fund (address: https://chain.fair-coin.org/address/fMxkQtTCFZpWuZNZQTq7HxwcZ6rQn1yAWj )
– 1,500,000 faircoins for the Technology Infrastructure fund (address: https://chain.fair-coin.org/address/fJ7dwkfHiJW9867xcovaJ9QDN7khDEMJMm )
– 1,000,000 faircoins for the Pooled fund (address: https://chain.fair-coin.org/address/fNWcvkQLg9ELKkV5gH1nsYBJnzHqw7pka7 )
And the following conditions:
Except for the Pool fund which can be used to cover operating expenses at the discretion of the Ecosystem Council and the whole fair.coop, contributions to the other three funds can not be touched in one year.
With the Global South fund we call for a redistribution that can reach as many local projects as possible, prioritizing the empowerment of the areas and environments most attacked by the current system, generating a peer-to-peer cooperation environment, to restore global economic justice.
As for the Commons and Technology Infrastructure funds, the call is to qualitatively prioritize projects that can most benefit the global common good.
This period may well serve to build a participatory, creative and mutually supportive process leading to decisions in relation to the right priorities, defined collectively and efficiently. Also, as collaboration between equals multiplies under all Fair.Coop and especially the FairNetwork,the value of FairCoop’s social capital is expected to respond by growing in value relative to fiat currencies, not forgetting, as a symbol of our independence, that 1 faircoin will always equal 1 faircoin.
In this way and just for starters, 20% of the existing monetary resources remain in the hands of a participatory and open political process. Meanwhile Fair Coop will work to continue recovering for the common good resources which may be redistributed through the same funds.
So this time, if our collaborative and freely shared vocation is to benefit someone financially, it will be the same ones who are building it before anyone else, that is all cooperatives, and through the funded projects, all of humanity.
In other words, we have finally found a way to cooperatively organize, share, learn, help, one that can self-manage without the need, at least in the most delicate initial phase, to depend on others, or having to prioritize selling our production in the market, not even keeping up with regular member fees. All we need in this first phase is to create free knowledge, share andbecome interwoven the way we know best, extend the intangible, and build the material commons; build social currency networks based on faircoin, such as the Faircredit project already presented (LINK).
We can innovate to create value together in many areas of the commons.
We can each contribute our bit of knowledge, political participation, time, donations, products, services, investment, network-building. Each based on their capabilities and priorities.
The market will value it by buying our cryptocurrency and pushing up the value of our social capital, in relation to other currencies. So we can finally “squat” the forex markets, responsible for so much inequality, to recover from a part, large or small, time will tell, of these injustices.
I can imagine some anticapitalist will see it as contradictory, me expressing the role of money markets in this project.
Anyone trying to quit using money, and who has already done much work regarding community economy and direct exchange can certainly go beyond fair.coop’s monetary initiatives, which does not prevent them to get involved, as one more, in collective creation and political participation.
But most of us who are often using a currency, fiat or social, for trading or saving, are dependent on a reference framework for prices and store-of-value function, which is imposed by central banks, so we are somehow passive partners of the system we want to overcome.
Moreover, I would like to recall that the Forex market is an irrefutable historical fact over 100 years old, with a trend to be less and less regulated. In recent years, only authoritarian states (such as the case of China where the value is set by government decision) have explored a second path in relation to how to deal politically with the market, while for all I know, from areas related to the ideas we share in the context of the integral revolution, for example, despite experiencing multiple pathways to social currencies as exchange tools has not generated any previous approach on how to confront the forex market to build economic empowerment worldwide.
In recent years, new cryptocurrency exchange markets have appeared, uncontrollable by governments, and therefore it is no longer necessary to have a country and a central bank in order to have a currency that can be exchanged across the world. The banking system is outdated and more and more of us are realizing it, so the path we’re starting now is for building something that will, some day, consolidate a global alternative.
What was lacking to start walking, was a monetary initiative present in these markets which, instead of relying on human competition to keep the most value, be based on human cooperation as equals, to create value for all of them. With the arrival of Fair.Coop, faircoin has become the cryptocurrency focused on social cooperation that was missing.
So we’ll see over time whether this way we’re choosing is the best or not, but at least with this initiative we now have a path to explore, as to how to address this global issue of how to create a more just economic system with the level of social cooperation this planet needs and current technology allows.
Fair Coop is born! Let’s get connected, entangled, let’s share, discuss, build! Everything is there to be done and everything is possible. Now it’s up to us!
Let’s be the change we wish to see in the world!
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