#utu-ubuntu

Biodiversity business is defined in this report as:

‘commercial enterprise that generates profits via activities which conserve biodiversity, use biological resources sustainably, and share the benefits arising from this use equitably’.

Solarpunk business is inclusive of all living things.

Antonio Gramsci died in prison opposing Mussolini and the fascist state. I had only ever seen this famous quote of his in the form of memes. And, recently, while working on the underpinning foundations of the systemic redesign of things such as business models, product development strategies, even the boosting our own human creative capacities in the face of what they call in marketing speak "the polycrisis", I found myself saying what we needed was a Gramscian consulting house.

By this I meant, this was a time of monsters and we needed humane socio-cultural ethos to inform our commercial activities (see my solarpunk business model development work under tag #utu-ubuntu) when I realized we needed more than that. We need monster resistant approaches to transformation and disruptive innovation planning.

The old world's tools and methods, their assumptions and frameworks, were not fit for purpose for this time of monsters. The new world is not yet born. We must give birth to it. We need to navigate this monstrous space - the inbetween, or as the classical grandmasters say, this is the interregnum and Hari Seldon has faded out as obsolete.

As Gramsci was a communist, and I was born in a place with a democratically elected communist government (in India, nothing is impossible) and I now live in what is more or less a socialist state with free healthcare, education, and childcare et al, I want to first articulate my positionality in the political ideological sense before a) y'all label and pigeonhole me, and b) I'm misunderstood.

I do not hold to any "isms" - I've spent 50 years living around the world in different cultures and ways of being, doing, and thinking to ever believe that there is any "ONE" right way for human societies to organize themselves. On the other hand, I'm a multidisciplinary strategist and planner, one with degrees in engineering, business, and unofficially, design. This allows me to draw upon my experience of looking for the best ideas and ways of thinking and knowing regardless of which book, which discipline, or which ideology claims them as their own.

From this perspective, I approach this analysis of Gramsci, as a learning exercise for myself, as part of the work I'm doing in the text blocks on Tumblr in response to the motivating question of "What kind of business model and related value system for economic activity that sustains lives and livelihoods would best support the solarpunk community's visions and ideals for a better future for themselves and their grandchildren?"

“His preoccupation with the problem of consent, his ‘broad’ view of the state as the entire complex of practical and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the consent of those over whom it rules.”

John Hoffman. (1984). The Gramscian Challenge

I now explore Gramscian thought as it might pertain to facilitating answers to navigating this interregnum or "time of monsters". A long quote below follows with my observations interspersed in italics (yes, I know) and emphasis added as bold.

The political and practical implications of Gramsci’s ideas were far-reaching because he warned of the limited possibilities of direct revolutionary struggle for control of the means of production; this ‘war of attack’ could only succeed with a prior ‘war of position’ in the form of struggle over ideas and beliefs, to create a new hegemony (Gramsci 1971). 

Thus teh floods of bullshit generated by barely intelligent chatbots swamping any inputs that could conceivably inform ideas and beliefs that run counter to whatever dominant narrative has the money to pay for continued dominance.

This idea of a ‘counter-hegemonic’ struggle – advancing alternatives to dominant ideas of what is normal and legitimate – has had broad appeal in social and political movements.

Et voila, one could say that solarpunk is a 'counter-hegemonic' struggle - one that promotes radical optimism and practical manifestations of hope EVEN in the face of the monsters in these turbulent times which feel full of conflict if only due to the struggle over whether "green" will win over "fossil fuels" or whether nature is sentient and alive vs an inert resource to be extracted and exploited.

It has also contributed to the idea that ‘knowledge’ is a social construct that serves to legitimate social structures (Heywood 1994: 101).

Whee! No wonder I find the work of weaving together ways of knowing from entirely different societies so empowering. See my Ways of Knowing : Ways of Thinking framework based on Native American, Aboriginal, local, traditional knowledges alongside modern scientific ways of knowing and the western knowledge system (a social construct that serves to legitimate its own hegemony as the one right way to know and think - only we are objective rah rah rah)

In practical terms, Gramsci’s insights about how power is constituted in the realm of ideas and knowledge – expressed through consent rather than force – have inspired the use of explicit strategies to contest hegemonic norms of legitimacy. Gramsci’s ideas have influenced popular education practices, including the adult literacy and consciousness-raising methods of Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), liberation theology, methods of participatory action research (PAR), and many approaches to popular media, communication and cultural action.

Oh hey, fam, we're all Gramscian here and now, even the people who rather watch Spock cuddle with Jim. But jokes apart, I now recognize why I intuitively used the words Gramscian consulting house before I even knew in detail what it meant, simply from the power of the meme. The McKinseys of the world are just monster farmers.

The idea of power as ‘hegemony’ has also influenced debates about civil society. Critics of the way civil society is narrowly conceived in liberal democratic thought – reduced to an ‘associational’ domain in contrast to the state and market – have used Gramsci’s definition to remind us that civil society can also be a public sphere of political struggle and contestation over ideas and norms. The goal of ‘civil society strengthening’ in development policy can thus be pursued either in a neo-liberal sense of building civic institutions to complement (or hold to account) states and markets, or in a Gramscian sense of building civic capacities to think differently, to challenge assumptions and norms, and to articulate new ideas and visions.

Yaas. Here's a few Gramsci memes for you to use in case you're as moved as I am to go out there and fight your way through the monsters to midwife the new world we need to be born.

Kenyan urban geographer and feminist development scholar Dr. Mary Njeri Kinyanjui's work introduced me to the phrase "solidarity entrepreneurs" to describe what I had been observing among rural and urban entrepreneurs in Asia and Africa ever since I first began visual ethnography and exploratory user research in 2008.

The above photograph I took from a moving car at the borderlands of Uganda and Kenya in January 2016 captures the concept of solidarity among entrepreneurs operating in economic informality in one momentary snapshot. I did not meet these women specifically but I'll stand by my story as I draw upon 15 years of observations and immersion in this world. Until lately, it was all I ever thought about.

The lady in the purple skirt fries some sort of snack for a living and has this well chosen spot by the side of the road just before the borderpost. Traffic will slow down here, and if you're lucky, it'll back up. People might step out to buy a snack.

The lady in black is a mama mboga - the colloquial name for a jua kali vegetable vendor, mboga means vegetable in Swahili. I'll be starting a parallel series this week on the mama mbogas in Nairobi who embraced radical technologies and collaborative innovation practices during the pandemic going all solarpunk to thrive and grow their trade.

Now, interpreting the photograph based on experiential knowledge and years of observation and analysis - what a visual design ethnographer does, in fact - one moves on to the third lady - extreme right who has clearly purchased some vegetable from mama mboga and is waiting expectantly with her hand out for her change.

Mama Mboga does not happen to have the correct change on her so she asked her neighbour - Mama Fried Snack (I made that up) for some shillings to help her out. She may or may not have handed money over immediately - they work together, these are not random spots that change daily. Believe it or not these ladies pay the city council officers of Busia town, Kenya a daily fee for operating on the side the of the road.

If you're familiar with Kenya, there's one more sweetspot in this photograph - the backdrop to the outstretched hands sharing money and cooperating so that one entrepreneur can better serve their customer is the green wall painting on the shack behind which is the advertisement for MPesa - the world's most famous mobile money transfer app - an innovation that's transformed wide swathes of the Kenyan economy.

But, the mamas doing business still prefer cash - they operate at the micropayment level and the transaction fees involved may often be greater than the price of the tomato or onion being sold.

This may not be evidence enough of cooperation and collaboration and a humane cultural ethos that underpins entrepreneurship in economic informality (Kinyanjui, 2019) so next I'll begin to illustrate each of the social logics and humane values that Kinyanjui describes to make her case in Kenya.

I, myself, first observed cooperative economic activities in my first non-commercial project that looked at household financial management in rural Philippines, India, and Malawi in 2008-2009. But that is a story for another day. This was an introduction.

Some eye candy follows with captions to balance the screed.

They call them informal and criminalize them (entrepreneurs outside the formal economic system aka the modern sector aka capitalism) but they tax them through daily fees for sitting on the side of the road. And give receipts. Is this not taxation by the city council? Why are they not recognized as tax payers just because they don't have a fancy retail outlet?

Taxation without recognition, forget representation. Shops like these pay council fees on a daily basis but what citizen services do they get in return? This is free money to let you sit under a tree without being harassed. On the other hand, location and predictability matter since being able to be found under the same tree helps you build a customer base.