Dídac Costa @ Towards and Autonomous Europe - Part 2
Channel: Barcelona Antipode Workshop
Date: 05/12/2016

François from Makvaerket collaborated with SqEK members who attented the Towards Autonomy Workshop (https://www.facebook.com/events/283360665397476/) to share this recordings of the talk of Dídac Costa, who tells us about the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC), Exchange Networks, Social Currencies, and the eco-villages Ca la Fou and EcoAmaia

Dídac is a sociologist, activist and writer. So far as we know, there has not been any presentations of the Integral Revolution's projects in Aarhus. Don't miss out on it!!

Dídac Costa will speak about some Catalan cooperative,
post-capitalist and eco-libertarian projects that began around 2009.

The first project he will present are the Eco-Networks (http://ecoxarxes.cat/), a new kind of barter network that puts together social currency exchange networks with food coops. There are now 20 in Catalunya.

Costa will also present the Catalan Integral Cooperative (http://cooperativa.cat/en/whats-cic/general-principles/)
and some cooperative housing and work community projects, and
ecovillages, such as Amat ecovillage (www.ecovilamat.org) and Ca La Fou (http://www.calafou.org/).

Costa was an active member since the beginning of these initiatives, that strive for the creation of tools for a radical social transformation from capitalism and state structures, while allowing us to live without them.

Overcoming many old forms of protest and struggle of social
movements in recent decades such as squatting, recycling,
demonstrations, violence and precariousness, Costa considers that when they walk alone, those are forms of political dissident which are subject to social control of capitalist states, and do not represent any real threat to the stablishment.

On the other hand, the creation of our own currency systems, of
means for technological sovereignty, cooperative housing, P2P cultural methods or wikicracies, etc. don't require us to wait for a
revolution, does not need a sustained mobilization, waiting for concessions from power, or the abandonment of social life by opting for an isolated and precarious life.

Nonetheless, these proposals require us to have the capacity for
self-organization. This is where the system has defeated us as
individuals and communities: through isolation, atomization,
disempowerement, and by subjecting us to educational systems that favor uncritical obedience to orders of superiors instead of
dialogue among equals reaching agreements.

These proposals for social change, don't require us to engage in a
direct confrontation with capitalism and the state, and allow us
to overcome them by being able to live gradually without them, and thus to free ourselves from what is basically little more than an upgraded feudal system.

These projects teach us how to walk by walking, through action; and by learning from mistakes and the inevitable conflicts that arise in our projects because we have not been educated to deal with them, but instead to be incapable of doing so, waiting for an external authority of some kind to solve our problems.

This kind of neo-feudal system is maintained with more violent means of oppression and economic instability in Southern countries, and overprotective oppressive means of abundance in the North. Where the system has even managed to finance a controlled dissidence that demobilizes the population by
solving part of the social contradictions and tensions -which are natural outcomes of capitalism-, while leaving intact the relations of domination on the social and national levels.