Upstream - Robin Murray

Episode Date: February 8, 2016

In this episode, we spoke with the late Robin Murray, a prolific sustainability and environmental economist, an advocate for a living economy, and a key player in the birth of the fair trade movement. Robin Murray was named by The Guardian as one of the fifty people who could save the planet, and worked to establish the London Climate Change Agency with the Deputy Mayor of London. Robin alternated working between innovative economic programs in local, regional, and national governments, as well as with academic teaching and writing. His recent work focused on new waste and energy systems and on projects in the social and innovation economy. In this interview, he described his life as an economist, gave us a detailed alternative economic history from World War II to the present, and described hopeful signs of the emergence of the new economy especially in relation to connectivity and cooperation. Robin Murray passed away recently at the age of 76. We are incredibly grateful for having had the opportunity to meet and interview him while he was visiting Schumacher College in 2016.

Hello and welcome. You are listening to an Upstream interview, which is part of the Economics for Transition project. My name is Della Duncan. And my name is Jacob. And we are here in conversation at Schumacher College with Robin Murray. Welcome, Robin. Hello. Robin, let's just start with, can you give our listeners a little bit of an introduction to yourself? How would you introduce yourself? Well, I was born in the war, Second World War.

There's a bit of an introduction. So it meant that I grew up in the 40s and 50s, which does shape people and how they are. You can hardly think about it, but, you know, with no baths and no toilets and so on. Which I don't say... My memory of it is not at all poverty, funnily enough. I didn't like the cold. It was terribly cold. I still regard carpets as a complete luxury. But it's not that, it is the quality

of the feeling as you grow up that matters. And I don't know how much this has coloured me. And then I, as it were, came to age in the 60s. And that is a change and suddenly there was a burst out of creativity and for me it was the 70s that were the great age of experimentation and this that and the other so I was teaching at the Institute of Development Studies in Brighton which was the main centre for Development Studies. But it was very open, very loose, and we were very much involved in community activities starting off around a nursery school. It took seven years to win, but involved. Also, we produced a paper called Queen's Spark, which was a community paper sold door to door.

And we fought all sorts of things and created a community centre. We built our own kind of self, not self-build, but self-change community centre. It was in that kind of days. And we used to cook on a rota for a Sunday with 40 people, I remember, and all the children, my children, I had two daughters, they all remember this period very well as a period of all over Britain, great experimentation. In the early 80s, I'd been working with various new, we call them revolutionary governments. In Vietnam, I was close to some of the people who'd been involved there. I spent a lot of time in Ethiopia. Later in Eritrea, Nicaragua, and so on. There were a lot of these undient groups and we organised seminars for them in Sussex so that

they could come and discuss your very subject, of the living economy that was what you can imagine six whole weeks funded by the British government amazingly enough and one day would be what would be a new education system next day was

how would you reorganise agriculture and you had all these who were newly coming to state power, suddenly they had responsibilities which were completely different to their previous ones. It was completely fascinating, six weeks. However, in 1979, we had a change of regime, which is Mrs. Thatcher came to power. And of course, in the historical background, it was neoliberalism coming to power, of which two of the leaders were Reagan and Thatcher, US and the Anglo-Saxons. Israel had been the first, and Chile. Chile, after the coup in 73, and Israel had

both enforced this kind of monetarist neoliberal policy. But the UK and the US were the big ones, because that started affecting the whole way people thought about this deregulation. So the 80s completely changed the environment. And I, at that time, went to work for the Greater London Council, which was the municipal body for the whole of London, who had tried to resist some of the new administration, were trying to somehow deal with half a million people who were unemployed, the destruction of industry in London, of the docks.

London had just collapsed. We'd lost a million people as a result of this. And that was the background to them being elected into power. And that was the background to them being elected into power. So they were, I think, one of the very early groups of municipal governments who set up an economic unit. We started off with five people and we were told, do something about this. told, do something about this. And so for four years, we did another thing, which was trying to plant the seeds of a living economy in London. And it was a period of fantastically very interesting experimentation. Looking back on it 25 or so years later, in a way the major achievement in a sense of that particular four or five years of London's history is that the administration were enormously brave on issues of what we would now call equality. roedd yr Adran Gweithredol yn ffyrdd iawn ar wahanol faterion o'r hyn a byddwn ni'n ei alw'n eithriadol. Y materion gwirfoddol, roedd Cymiteaeth Gweithredol arbennig,

Cymiteaeth Blyd, a oedd ganddo llawer o bobl o'r symudiadau, yn ogystal â phrofiadau yn y mewn, ac roedden nhw'n eu and they promoted those. But those that had strong and visible movements. The one which was explosive was the gay movement and the whole issue of homophobia and so on. This was explosive on every radio and newspaper in Britain were scandalised by this. The head, Ken Livingstone, who was the leader, I remember appearing on, being interviewed in a radio programme and saying to the interviewer who was challenging him, saying, listen, all of us are bisexual.

And the woman said, I certainly am not and he said you'll realize with reflection that you are it is within all of us and you've got to understand this and this was so much political flak, but within four years it had begun to die down. If you look at the history over the last 30 years, it has been transformed by that. The role that a municipal government can play. In our area of the economy, we didn music of you know recordings and which was becoming much more accessible to people video and so on was a it was a ferment was developing them and we started supporting these and saying the cultural industries were going to be central, which they have become completely central to London.

We did the same in health. And instead of supporting the old structures, which were being cut down like hospitals and so on, being cut down like hospitals and so on. We were supporting the new movements that had grown up around particular issues. It was part of this movement away from the mass to a much more, if you like, post-modern fact that everyone is different and they have different health needs and it's not all cholera and all those things are everyone has different chronic diseases and so on those you have to have a system that is responsive so we were supporting that and in information technology and cable and the new

infrastructures for the new economy we were in there very early and again in hindsight these are now accepted but all these other things at the time were regarded as a way out. So one of the things that we did, the food was another area where we supported a new food movement around not saving the sausage factory which we've been trying to do, I think it's a wall sausage factory, but the food movement said no it's going to be consumers that are going to really make the difference. And so we supported a new group called the London Food Commission, and a chap who'd been a hill farmer, and another one who'd been a farmer in Spain. And they led them.

This moved the whole movement to a much bigger scale, and that transformed the food economy over the next 10 years. bigger scale and that transformed the food economy over the next 10 years. So one of them was a response to the queries that we'd received from all those countries that I was talking about earlier, who we've been discussing the seeds of the living economy. Vietnam, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Cuba, Nicaragua, all these. They were saying they were being shut out by the international economy, this new neoliberal regime. Could we help them? Because they didn't trust the private merchants and they couldn't get an outlet here and they didn't have this. So we organised kind of

like a barter system and we set up a little group of I think five originally called Twin Trading, which stood for the Third World Information Network because we were told that was the only legal power we had was to do information. We weren't allowed to set up companies. So we did it like that. Well, they said, the lawyer said, a very supportive lawyer said, do you think we could call trade information? I said, of course, this is the modern way of looking at trade. You know, the actual exchange of the thing is,

it's really the information between us all that is the important thing. Anyway out of that came something that we now call Fairtrade and in our case it morphed into the development of support for small peasant farmers originally in Mexico and then throughout Latin America and then in Africa to help them sell their products at what are now called fair trade prices but more in the north and we have many sister organizations in on the continent in Japan in America and so there was a network developed, a very interesting network, which became I forget what it is now, six or ten billion something like this pounds in this so-called fair trade economy. And TWIN, which is two-thirds owned by the farmers, the rest is by supportive individuals, now has a network of I think 350,000 farmers each in their own co-ops.

A dense network of producers. You asked me about economics. This was about economics but driven by the attempt to make a different type of economy. It's not just about giving a bit more money to the producers that they both in Africa and Latin America if so to us the most important thing is you've supported us and given us advice so that we can have strong organizations of our own and they they are very, I don't think we've had one in those 30 years which has gone bust and that has been reconstituted.

And it wasn't through their own fault they went bust. And we have these very long-term relationships which have really worked and so they regard that really as this is the key thing is the relationship and the more equal distribution of powers that has been the important thing of fair trade and I was involved in that for many years. Do you have something? Thank you. Yeah, I think, you know, you mentioned the economy. And I would like to know what is your relationship to economics and the economy, whether you identify as an economist, and if so, a particular type type of economist and what has been your relationship with that?

Well, I think people can call themselves all sorts of things. So what do I mean? I think the origin of my interest in what is called economics is that in my first degree I did medieval history, running up to about 1660. There's a little bit of post. The late absolutism came into this. And what I realised was to understand the movements of history in that period, you did have to understand the economy. Because it's like a thread running through all I was trying to understand. So in the monastic period, the principal powers, monastic powers, were those who actually were very good at organising their agriculture and their trade because they had a network of, you know, all the monasteries in the order would be scattered

very often way beyond let's say France or wherever, a lot of them started there. And they quickly became, if you like, they were out competing everyone else, they wouldn't put it like that. They became very rich and powerful and expanded. And within, they'd been set up as pure and ideal. Within a couple of centuries, Cluny had the first Pope. at their Pope and that then involved being right at the head of the whole Vatican's huge estates etc. and the complications that arise from it. So another order would start to purify that. Within a century or two they became the Popes. You could see that the economy was kind of driving, was always in a certain tension, but it supported ideals. But the ideal, you couldn't, they were dancing together almost.

What I call the economy, the business of doing these things, and in this case selling, but also feeding the monks. You know, they had to survive as well. We call that loosely the economy was then working with the ideals of the founders as represented in the orders and the same thing happened right the way through you know in other secular fields so I thought well I must if we want to create different types of society, which I was interested in, we must understand the economy part. So I signed up to be a master's student at the London School of Economics. little knowing that it had just been that MA or Masters MSc had been taken over by the Chicago School of Economists who were behind both the Thatcher and the Reagan revolutions and they only thought in money they were the monetarists

Milton Friedman and co I didn't't know this, I was complete innocent. So I sat and looked and they were very bad teachers. So I copied down, I managed to pass, but an old tutor left from the old days, very nice man, said, Robin, why do they only think about money? And that was a profound question. And the answer I came to was that if everything could be got into the economy of money, of exchange, if we could commoditise everything and that would need a money, and that would need a money, then if we controlled money, we could control this enormously, in their vision, global, incredibly complex system, just through the control of money.

And that we could get rid of the interference of states and all this, which is they didn't like states. And I thought, oh my gosh. of states and all this which is they didn't like States in a way they are on something that is the case if you follow the money I've always felt if you want to understand anything follow the money because there's going to be a lot of ideology and interests around this but it's the money that will lead you to a place. And I was, meanwhile, to pay for myself teaching workers' education courses in the evening. And they were themselves being subject to changes.

And so I was involved in them thinking how, later on in the shipbuilding industry, how their shipyards were being closed, them thinking how later on in the shipbuilding industry, how their shipyards were being closed, in their case out-competed by Japan, what could be done. And so the alternative economy involved you in thinking through how a different kind of economy could exist in a financial economy and in some areas like food not necessarily you could you needn't sell the stuff you can eat it

some of it but you may actually have to have some money to do the things that you paid for thinking of it like that so that's what I became passionately interested in. And I did a lot of work in the 70s with those governments that had taken over power by either defeating the Americans in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam, or the Portuguese colonialists, or in Nicaragua. And they had all come together and we worked at the Institute of Development Studies where I was. And we were working with them. And they were then discussing all this alternative economy.

all this alternative economy. So, since 89 when there were such big changes and the collapse of a failed system which was this highly centralised Soviet model, which in various forms is how people have been thinking whether they were social democrats or or Soviet type societies they couldn't but they were trying to get the state to deal with this enormously complex thing we call the economy I think for last 25 years I've been interested in how a different kind of, the different way that seeds could develop and grow from social movements, from initiatives and how they start, they can start small, a beekeepers co-keepers cooperative or whatever it is but then gradually diffuse and connect and spread so that they become very significant first of all they grow and they become almost mezzo and in doing so they then come into clash with some of the old order and so there is a both political and economic power comes into it

and there's often a tipping point so in waste where i was much involved for seven years in developing recycling as against the old putting it in or burning the thing. Once you got up to 50% recycling, everything changed because it then became more expensive to deal with the incinerators and such like, whereas yours became cheaper and cheaper. ac yn y lleol, ond eich cwbl yn dod yn fwy a fwy. Felly, wrth i'r cychwyn ddechrau yn fwy aros, roedd angen cael cysylltiad arall o gael cyfrifol. Ac roedd pawb yn dweud, na, mae'n fwy a fwy arall i'w roi yn y graen. Y swyddogion ariannol o'r cymunedau, ni allwn ni ddarparu hyn. Yn ystod o'r tro, roeddech chi'n gallu gweld

y cwbl yn tyfu. Ac yn Canada, lle rwyf wedi gweithio am ddwy flynedd, roeddent wedi gwneud hyn. Yn ystod oed, roeddech chi'n gallu gweld hynny'n tyfu. Ac yn Canada, lle rwyf wedi gweithio am ddwy flynedd, roeddent wedi gwneud hynny. Ac fe wnaethoch chi ddod o hyd i gyfrif newydd yn datblygu o hynny. Felly, dyma, os ydych chi'n hoffi, y datblygiad o brosiect i broses diffusiwn, ac yna i newid systemig. Felly, nid yw'n dweud nad yw'n rhywle ddim o ran Llywodraeth, ond mae'n rhoi Llywodraeth of diffusion and then to systemic change. So it's not saying it's without government, but it's putting government within a much wider system of economic initiative and, if you like, the think of is that growth and profit can be the means to an end, or in maybe the growth industrial society, it has become the end, that profit and growth is the end. And that the new economy or the seeds of the new economy are really it's a new way of looking about looking

at economics where the the end is health well-being sustainability resilience and then money in the old sense the monetary or money is the means to getting that end and that yeah there's something about there's a difference between those two economies and and when i think about you know when people say oh the bottom line of a company is people profit and planet but sometimes it still seems in some cases that profit still is the bottom bottom line so i'm wondering it sounds like is that a good kind of distinction as to what very good we want money to be the servant not the master and in this intermediate and there's a very interesting question which is even if we didn't live in a world driven by profit and expansion of money.

The only point in a capitalist society for money is to expand. Why would anyone put forward any money which is not going to be expanded? Because it's no use to have an extra pound note, other than that it then commands greater. used to have an extra pound note other than that it then commands greater. So you've got this central driver within the very heart of the economy of the expansion of money capital which feeds its way right the way through the economy and when people are asking for degrowth, I think there needs to be a distinction made between that driver and the way in which we then use the planet. Because you could imagine an economy which actually saves on the planet in various ways, but still has the growth of profit. Those are two different spheres. So, for example, some of the people who are arguing for a green, the next stage being green

capitalism, what they see is that there will be capitalist investment in things that then save on energy, on materials, and this, that, and the other. Alternatives to oil. So that they would still make money, but they'd make it by actually using less than we've been doing. And degrowth, I think, is particularly about the pressures on the planet and I often feel well of course we could have an alternative to the profit-driven capital that is the ultimate challenge for the moment and I say look that really is radical because you're now being rather like the Soviet Union you're saying you're going to abolish capitalism but it'll how are you then

going to organize all this and it's much easier to think of how we're going to create autonomous spaces where money is the servant, not the master, where we're gradually creating these, just like capitalism wasn't created overnight. It was created in little pockets everywhere, which then joined up in some places rather than others. So I see our task as creating these resilient and growing because we've reached a point of history where this is possible and in this sense I'm quite optimistic because I think now the things that are now taking more and more of the economy are what I will call relational services on the one hand, like social care, health care, education, environmental care, but those early ones are all about relationships. And although one reads in the papers about robotic carers, I think it doesn't need any of us to say this is not where it's at any more than having robotic lovers.

You know, it is about human relations. And there are some very exciting new alternative ways of doing the caring, which are now are real, are undercutting all the main private ones, which have been in Britain. So terrible, some terrible scandals from this. So that's on the rise. On the other hand, you're having these extraordinary technological developments through ICT, such as 3D printing and the reduction in the price of solar, so on, which suddenly put these, and let alone the open source movement in software these are creating new to the basis of a new type of economy and so anyone who says to me you know it's not really I mean you know your small food co-op this really

doesn't make sense I said well if you think there's not a new economy underway, two-thirds nearly of the world's software is now based on an open-source platform which is produced for nothing and distributed for nothing. This is quite significant. And solar is looking as though it's going the same way. So I think there's a lot of basis. is looking as though it's going the same way. So I think there's a lot of basis and we've got a society

where a lot more people are now moving into creating their own spaces, their own forms of living and working and being and having. And that is, therefore, the human is there as well I think we've got to a stage in the West at least where that is very much on the cards so those to sum it up just as Adam Smith in the 18th century was trying to make

sense of all the new private butchers and bakers and candlestick makers who were growing up within the old absolutist feudal state. And he was then very fascinated by what he saw, by fishermen and so on. How does that economy work? It wasn't about big multinationals, as we were told in the 60s and 70s. And I see the same now, that what we see is all the equivalent of Adam Smith's private capital. We see it as social. All sorts of wonderful social initiatives which have their own magnetic force and do not operate like the butcher and baker the same way they have a different one where different monies are coming up. Not a single money as the Chicago school wanted but but multiple monies, each of which can define a little

community of its own. And this is enabled by ICT. So it's a thrilling moment to be involved in what we can refer to as the economy in this context, this holistic context I'm talking about. And what's so hopeful about that too is, you know, you think about economies of scale that, you know, you don't have to, you can have a community, you could be doing a great thing,

but you don't have to grow and grow. Because of information technology, you can do your own thing and be successful and then share your story and even help online someone else who wants to start their thing or have your open source information out there and then that's how it can spread and it wouldn't be possible without information technology. So I've been much involved this year with where I grew up in the hills in the north of England with the closure of our local village shop which was formed as a co-op in 1878 by the miners in the valley. But finally, you know, no one's been able to make it work as a even as a co-op but a centralized co-op

so what we found we co-op has taken a community co-ops taking it over raised the money bought the place what we found is that there is a network of 300 lid shops that have found a way of reopening or starting a village shop and it's a network which shares all its knowledge openly run by it's the main people are called the Plunkett Foundation it's a marvelous one they've given us enormous help in getting to where we are but it's some of them specialize on let's say very good IT systems so they say by all means come and come down and have a look

at our IT system we found a way our margins where we all tell what margins we put on the different products just like a big retailer would we can learn what goes well what is it good to have a cafe how do you do the cafe when does it go like this there's an enormous sharing of information and knowledge now that's 300 doesn't make a big supermarket but it makes very significant difference to all those villages and it also creates what we could call the economies of cooperation. And I think this is very powerful. Cooperation is not something that grows on trees.

It has to be created. There is a huge art in it. It's about the forms of personal relations, which are often quite different to the ones that have been pressed, increasingly pressed on people to behave as though they're all, you know, kind of private competitive entrepreneurs, even if they're just individuals. Forms of alienation. It is, it is, from each other, as well as from oneself. And from nature.

Yes. So regaining those things which I think are deep within us actually, that none of us want to be a kind of private individual only thinking about this. This is not the thing you want to do as you get older and think of what have I done with my life, except this is a pretty miserable menu of life whereas I think now particularly your generation our demand what are the great things is you're demanding so much more you are saying look what is the meaning of things you know we are not here just to do this we've gone beyond the survival stage now it's the being stage how do you create an economy a life does this well cooperation tasks of how you do it how

you listen when you speak how you speak who speaks when it's not speaking but doing things together that's important this is is an art, but once you get it, oh, what power there is, what force there is, whereas everyone else has to pay high prices to persuade people to do things. No, so in our fair trade company, people often say, oh, you're not benchmarked. You know, benchmarking in London.

You can imagine. And I say, no, our benchmark is with the peasant members. That's the benchmark. And as long as the people have enough to live on, we have a very narrow ratio between chief executive and the lowest paid. I think it's two and a half to one. As long as people have enough to live on, the thing that is being offered by this is the participation in a project

which has done what it's done. And so you then have people who are really committed. Now that comes from the economics of cooperation and of meaning. So I think that's one of the cards in the hand of the new economy relative to the old. And if people feel that they need to have a million a year bonus, that's because it was a miserable job to be a banker. Of course you'd have to have a million pounds to waste your life doing all this banking and running down of people and so on.

What you make me think of is this feeling that I certainly have and that I see shared in a lot of other young people that we are quite very worried about the direction that we're heading in terms of the destruction of the planet and I realize it has to do with the economy and the goals of our economy and that really alienates me from engaging with economic issues that you used to do that. Just not think the economy is not for me. go about engaging in the economy or in economics in a way that can support these kinds of cooperative Well it's very delicate because I think you've got to be first of all part of a group who share your common perspective because you're going to need it in each of you're going to have to be helped

because there's you know one you're not you're in I won't call it a hostile world or a world of difficulty what you're doing and I say that because the people who are in the mainstream world do have a lot of relevant skills. Some of them I regard as not very helpful. But others like this lovely coffee trader who came over and left his private company to work with us and our coffee team. us in our coffee team he has the skill of a trader and to actually understand how larger organizations work and some of the things that are pertinent these are useful so to particularly idealist and lovely students who asked me this I say well what about going to work for the police service or or the World Bank or or British Rail you know something big alien, and so on, but which then, you know, you understand some aspects of those things may be pertinent, may be relevant. It's a bit of a dangerous thing to suggest, but don't be frightened.

Or perhaps a better piece of advice would be to go and work with a company which is creating new forms within itself so some of the new economy companies are very interesting in what they do you know because they know innovation is crucial so they're trying to I was often struck by the Hewlett Packard er enghraifft ar un pwynt, roedd yn ddiddorol iawn oherwydd fe dweud, wrth gwrs, mynd allan a gweithio am rywun arall oherwydd rydym am i chi ddod a chael cymaint o wybodaeth fel y gallwch oherwydd rydym am i chi fod yn y rhai greadigol ac mae'r grwpiau dylunio yn ddiddorol iawn. groups are very interesting. Even though they're big and they charge the earth, they are very creative. The big architectural groups, these have skills so that when it comes to building

your own house, you'll be very pleased to that kind of thing. So almost, I'm not going to suggest you go into the army because that I think is taking it too far but they do have that there are skills and senses of to some extent what the mainstream economy works like that it is worthwhile thinking within the group because the danger of course, perhaps one of you might go into banking, the danger is that you then think, actually this is rather a nice life. And so you need your group to be there and to feed back to them, because then you can create your own initiatives. Now that is one answer. Another is to get straight on with the initiatives and find out through doing these things you will find that you're in

relation to some firms which may be apparently private and profit-oriented but particularly if they're not listed companies they may also like farmers farmers are private people but not all of them are in it to maximize their money they they like the job a lot of the small firms are like this. And so that would be another way. And then you can get to know them and you'll learn from them like that. Some of the best of the small firms, some of the Danish furniture makers, I was always struck up in Jutland, struck by the fact that the father would send the son, not the daughter usually, to go and work for five years in Germany, five years in Italy, five years in Britain, come back when the father was coming up to 60. things and come back and then not just take on from where the father left off but with a refreshed outlook. So perhaps to keep that kind of thing in mind, not to close in on

oneself, to keep always open, to travel, to see other things, to see other creativity because you've got to be creative yourself in the things that you're developing. I think that ties in beautifully with wanting to go and visit all kinds of examples of the new living economy. That's it. What are some of the most inspiring stories of the new economy that you've seen throughout your life? Well, now, the moment you get into it, you find it's a slight, I won't call it an addiction, but you do have to have a faith. They are they are so wonderful many of them one of the ones I was thinking of from the title of your your programs was one which was called seeds the NYS seeds of

the new society not of the new economy of the new society and this was in the Seychelles which had had its own little tiny revolution, only 60,000 people there. And they had nothing to nationalise, which is what they would have done in the late 70s. But they had schools and so the new man, who was a very interesting lawyer, Rene, President Rene, said he wanted to change the school system which was a very very elite system in the Seychelles, there's a hundred islands as it were, so not all the kids at all could go to the no secondary schools and the only two schools were a girls and a boys kind of grammar school and if you were really

successful you could go to a technical college in England, you know, the most oedd yn ysgol gramau ac os oes gennych chi'n llwyddiannus iawn, gallech chi fynd i'r coleg technol yng Nghyngor, y cyfarwydd mwyaf llwyddiannus. Felly roedd popeth yn ymgyrch â'r model hir hwn. Felly, fe wnaeth y cydweithiwr o'r Belgiad i sefydlu gwylio newydd o new vision of education. And this was everyone coming from the islands, all living together, and looking after themselves, and developing all the different multiple skills. And these included, so if you were doing biology, you'd look after the pigs and then study the pigs' biology. If you went marine ecology, you'd go out and catch fish on, they had a fishing boat that they

captured from the Japanese, you'd go out on this. So it was all linking, doing and learning. doing and learning and they had they set up the first Creole paper in Seychelles which they produced what is Creole? Creole is their language

it's like Haiti and they had the radio station and so on they covered there were seven pillars and they had a radio station and so on. They covered, there were seven pillars. One of them was to have their own army, which the Tanzanians came and taught them the army.

And when, in fact, there was an attempted invasion of South Africa to overturn Rene, they were all mobilised, ready to then defend themselves. And it was a remarkable, it was a very extraordinary, for them all to be able to come and then have secondary education together. And of course there were lots of things to learn from that because the difficulty in that case was sexuality. Because the mothers of the girls were worried about the loss of virginity because that would mean that they wouldn't get such a good husband. because that would mean that they wouldn't get such a good husband. So there was a very rigid, kind of almost like a concentration camp at night, between the boys' dormitories and the girls', even though the island had the highest level of teenage pregnancy, I think, in the world. And this led to, you know, within this very creative force, it led to tensions.

And the similar experiments have had the same thing. So interesting, it comes back to these very deep and personal, emotional things. But that was a wonderful, wonderful experiment. And I'll give you one other which was called Sekem which was a pharmacist from Egypt who'd gone and studied in Austria married a German or an Austrian and become involved in the Steiner movement. And so in his 40s, he said to his wife, would you ever think of coming back to Egypt? Because there's so much we should do in Egypt.

And she said, well, of course I love Egypt, which is why I married you. So they went back and she said, well, so what will you do? He said, well, why don't we create an oasis in the desert? And she said, he said, because we can get the freehold. We can get the freehold in the desert for almost nothing. And we'll use all our knowledge

and so on to create this oasis. So that's what they did. And it was slightly on Steiner principles. So they sunk a huge borehole, started creating organic vegetables, biodynamic vegetables. They started selling and they started a school and so on. So it grew and more and more it grew and it was selling it successfully and people said biodynamic. It was quite new in Egypt you see. One day he came back from Cairo, he'd been selling the stuff. He found that the military had taken over. And he went along and he said, what on earth are you doing? They said, well, colonels decided

that it's time that we took this over, i.e. he was going to take it over, the colonel wanted it for himself. So Abouliche said, listen, get the colonel, I want to talk to So Aboulis said, listen, get the Colonel, I want to talk to him. He said, listen, it's quite easy to do this, don't destroy this because you won't be able to run it. What I'll do is I'll help you do another one. So he persuaded the Colonel to go away. all to go away. But in the meantime, some of the traditional companies had been testing out his vegetables, said they were contaminated. So of course this was then run in the papers. So they analysed them, they had their own laboratory. This was true. His biodynamic vegetables had very nasty think it was pesticides so they thought how does that come so he goes they go around and they found that I

think about 40 or 50 miles away was a big cotton growing area and all the cotton had come over like this so they said, we've got to find out how to grow organic cotton. And as the result of this, they then get all the knowledge from Germany. They got Germans to come, and of course the German scientists loved coming. So they developed organic cotton, and I think Egypt is now 80% organic. So they developed organic cotton and I think Egypt is now 80% organic. So any story, the great thing is to get the people like that, he's written his story, Ibrahim Abulish. And you then see that the way these things unfold around an idea, around this magnetic force,

and they come up against all these challenges, whether from the army or from... which you then think, how do we get past, how do we use that in a positive way and not just as a blockage? These are the things that encourage one in the kind of challenges that all of us face. encourage one in the kind of challenges that all of us face. And thinking about, you know, that example of once something beautiful is created, once something of the new economy is created and it's doing really well, that then somebody might want to come and buy it or, you know, might...

Seize it. Or someone from the inside might do something and... And sell it. And sell it and sell it and that really goes with the idea of land trust it does and so can you just talk a little bit about land trust and asset lock and and what you think that what role that might play in the new economy well i think land is a very significant thing and it's becoming ever more important whether as a source of materials or as a place to live or to farm some of our nicaraguan colleagues in the co-ops there are finding real difficulty because

people are coming and offering them enough money for them to live without working anymore to live without working anymore and it seems very generous and this is because of this huge land grab that is now taking place for some in Africa it's water some it's materials this shortage is leading to this tremendous land grab and the way it appears in the economy is an increase in the value of these planetary resources which if you can as it were enclose them and own them you are then going to be able to extract what we in economics call ground rent you hold the rest of if you like the society up to ransom because you've got what they need. So the question of how we manage restricted resources, whether in cities or in farmland and so on, which varies a deal in productivity and its fertility, this becomes a crucial aspect of the new economy. And community land trusts are a way of sterilising this land

from this commoditisation and the appropriation of monopoly rents. And if you can put the ownership of the freehold into some form of social ownership or stewardship, then you're taking out one kind of acid, which is an acid both to dissolve, which eats away both at social relations, but also at the planet. Because of course they then want to exploit this, you know, to the full and not to look after the natural qualities, the natural resources that we have. Now in Britain we have a very interesting history which is the National Trust and

this is when owners of large estates who don't have anyone to leave things to leave it to the National Trust and that has been a formidable barrier. It has its own issues of how you run it and who's responsible and so on. But it is, it has actually stopped you know, miscellaneous development of... Because that's the state who's owning it and not the community? No, no, no. Not the state. Because the moment the state owns it, the trouble about that, the state is very effective under some regimes. And you get a sudden switch to a different regime, such as the one we have in Britain at the moment. They want to sell off every single thing. Plunge it right the way back, all the way back.

Public housing and so on. You know, they're destroying it. We sold our energy company down to Goldman Sachs. Exactly, precisely this. So this is part of the problem, there's no asset lock with the state. So the community land trusts that are now growing up have been particularly around housing and finding land which would normally be development land and therefore earn a nice high premium over agricultural land. And instead of doing that, allowing that to be developed for low-cost housing so that the extra surplus rent that would have come from that is actually fed back de facto to the people

who are going to be able to afford a house and we have now what 70 or 80 of community land trusts here have been growing rapidly there are over 200 in the United States Canada has a very strong one in Burlington, Vermont and it's a bit now spreading as a movement. Nothing has quite achieved the radicalism of Letchworth Garden City in Britain which did this for a whole city of 30,000 people and they still after what over a hundred years the community in Letchworth still own all the industrial and commercial land from which they receive rent of over 10 million a year which is resistant to all the cuts the public sector cuts is still there and they can keep their own as it were welfare and social community facilities

going so I think now this is one of the things we have to think about is having Having, as it were, community, cooperative, social ownership of these key planetary resources, could be in the Amazon, and defending them and protecting them, and then making sure that all the pressures that will be to take them somehow to reprivatize them that there is the asset lock is one of them but then there are people governments can come in and overturn it you know this is a perpetual you know it is it's a bit of a battle but you try and protect it like a medieval castle. Imagine that, because you're going to have the marauding hordes who will see the value that there is there.

And you've got to have that protection, which will not just be through law, but will be also through ideas. And what is sanctity. Values. What is sacred about this? You know they can't just nationalize the church as Henry the eighth did. You know you couldn't now do that to say all right well we're taking over all the Catholic churches. You wouldn't get away with that. So they have a bit of sacred space. You have to be careful that they don't get locked into the race

to flog it all off as well. So that's the way I see land as a key part, along with creating social capital and new ways for labour to mean useful work rather than useless toil and how information can be shared like an old commons. So the idea of the way in which you had common land in the past can not only apply to land but also to information and there's been a great movement, the open source, similar movements, free software is a very exciting part. That's all part of the, a part of any alternative that we have

has to draw on all four of those elements. Maybe a last question. I think this ties in very much to the project you were working on, Synergia. Can you talk a little bit about that and the purpose of that and why you're excited about it? And any other projects too that you're working on? Right now. Well, Synergia.

I think we were electrified to see about MOOCs, certainly any of us who've been teaching in universities, the idea that those Stanford professors who got fed up with just lecturing to 200 people put it on the web and suddenly they had five million as it were. You know, this is breathtaking. And similarly, the Khan Academy. The Khan Academy is a wonderful project. I'd include the Khan Academy in our sparring project. Plus YouTube and then it spreads. And the bits I've looked at at the Khan Academy, you know, it's really good. Is that karma? Khan, K-A-H-N. Anyway, it made me think right, made us think. Look, if we could, we have so much

knowledge, we started off in the cooperative movement, through the experience, the difficulties, the problems, the wrong directions, the right ones, the ones that have grown and expanded. We have so much knowledge but it is not shared. Cooperative education has gone down, there is an international cooperative association but you know it isn't properly funded. And what we now have is we have a MOOC, a MOOC technological possibility of a platform that everyone could post their courses, because there are some cooperative colleges, or the things they want to do. For example, the fair trade producers have problems on the organic side.

So when they have a problem, you could have a little course on how to develop, to process organic wastes from coffee and so on. Either this very specific or it could be very much wider. a phethau fel hyn. Efallai yw hyn yn ddiddorol iawn, neu gallai fod yn llawer fwy amrywiol. Sut i greu co-op sy'n siŵr o ddyluniau arall. Sut i wneud rhywbeth lle dydyn ni ddim yn dod yn un sefydliad mawr arall, sy'n gweithredu yn enw, ond ddim yn ysbryd. Mae cymaint o bethau i'w rhannu. Felly, fe ddychmygwyd, wel, gadewch i ni geisio creu'r llatform hwnnw, creu ychydig o gwrsiau model, ond gwneud i'r holl unedau ymwneud â'r cymorth. Nawr, nid yw hyn yn cael ei wneud yn unigol fel dysgu ar ffyrdd.

Mae'n safle. A'r hyn a deimloom ei fod angen ei wneud mewn grwpiau gwirioneddol, What we felt was it needed, or needed to do it in real groups of real people, with real, perhaps, tutor support or whatever. So it's like study groups. So you could have, we could hear, start a study group on this. We were all here together. And we would work at it, but using this material. And we'd quickly find out which the really fantastically good ones were and which weren't so good just like you do on you know Amazon

comments or whatever it is and you would suddenly have a completely new learning environment global there are some wonderful the Japanese food co-ops. We'd love to go and visit them. We could read about them and we could connect with them through a platform like this. So that's the idea. Making it real is another matter. So there have been drafts of two of the courses. And there is a platform prototyped by Athabasca University, who know about all this, in Alberta, Canada. And I hope something might be launched in the next six months. The idea of a study group reminds me of Joanna Macy

in her book, Active Hope, and coming back to life, she talks about the idea of a study action group, which is a group that you do. It's a three-prong thing where you do studying, the actual research, and then you do art. So something, would it be left-brained? Yes. Yeah, so you do something right-brained, the opposite.

You do something right-brained, studying, left-brained, art, and then you do some sort of action. Yeah. And I'm just thinking of that. That's a beautiful offer. It is. I suppose what I'd imagined was this would be people who were already in action. Right.

imagined was this would be people who were already in action and therefore had that problem about how to stand back and reflect. And so then if I was doing it, I wouldn't just want to talk necessarily to people in village shops, although we would be, or even my own village shop, I'd try and get some of them, you know, why don't we do this together and that would be or even my own village shop with I try and get some of them you know why don't we do this together and that would be fun but it would also be nice to hear from some of the food coops and people who've done something quite different energy coops to see what their experience was whether we could learn from them so I'd be quite open about who's in the group. I think to be linked into action is good, and I hope that the form of the group, certainly

in reading groups I've ever been in, has a bit of the left brain or whatever about it too. You know, that's to say it's not just what you're reflecting on. It then becomes something else. Whether it's feasible to do an actual artistic project is a good idea, but that would vary by the group and the people. Thank you for the reminder to both do action and reflection. Thank you for the reminder to both do action and reflection. And thank you so much for sharing your ideas, your projects, and your wisdom with us today.

We really enjoyed the conversation. It's lovely. It's a great pleasure. And I hope this radio program will be part of this much wider conversation about these very hopeful times. I hope so too. You've been listening to an Upstream interview, which is part of the Economics for Transition project. To listen to more interviews and episodes, please visit economicsfortransition.org.