Minutes Organizing Collective Action Day 2

Feedback from the Assembly:
1.     Not sure about linking up with WWF – they join up with large corporates. Would this be degrowth?
2.     Fight capitalist expansion – including fossil fuel expansion
 
Discussion about structure of today. We would like to discuss more, and to understand more the proposals. 
Barcelona is a so-called frame. We could do some proposal and put them in this frame.
Maybe I had a different expectation of how the process would work.
Half of the working groups didn’t get to this outcome.
I think everyone here wants to discuss the ideas; we also have the timeframe.
Now we should start discussing.
Now we can enter with the full picture on the proposals.
Don’t rely too much on the colours from yesterday.
Could cluster them or just do in a random order.
Could break into smaller groups, or cluster them.
Could cluster by Barcelona
 
One cluster could be strengthening links. And then you give examples. 
Internal and external linking. Internal network improvement.
 
Clusters (just the names we made up at this point, see below for consensus names):
1.     Internal network improvement
2.     Building alliances, creating hubs
3.     Making information or knowledge visible
4.     Confrontational strategy
 
Could degrowth be seen as an umbrella ideology? E.g. to build alliances with the big environmental NGOs such as BUND.
To achieve these things it’s very important to agree what degrowth is. Is it an exclusive ideology? Or can we put our groups into degrowth?
A lot of movements, especially green movements, use negative elements – stories of loss. We need to come up with positive, narrative of gains. Think a little bit about storytelling here as another category, perhaps.
I partially agree with it but one criticism – I am also part of the Transition movement – is that we never can speak of negative. In the global South, people were living, and extractivists come and destroy this life. This is conflict. 
Of course.
By showing solidarity we can do something which might be fun and even at the same time can make life might be better for us.
People fall back to “What can I do?”
That’s the main point – what can people do. We don’t know who we are; we have to map ourselves; a movement is made by a structure. Can be physical e.g. organising local clubs. Building theory and practice. If you know who you are, you can open the network to other ones.
Or you fall a degrowth umbrella for already existing local groups, like Transition Towns etc.
But would there be a set of criteria, or we explain what is degrowth?
There are of course some basic restrictions, e.g. Racism (there is racism linked with organic agriculture in eastern Germany).
Stimulates, brings more public of course, brings more discussion within the potential members, more input from outside. This could be a very important outcome of this conference.
A very lose confederation.
Something we have to discuss is the illegal actions. Conflictive strategy actions. If you have this umbrella; to what degree would they exclude doing things against the law?
It depends why. E.g. maybe they are following undemocratic plans in a city for growth, so people dig up the roads – this is public infrastructure.
Civil disobedience; another thing is violence to humans.
I don’t think there is any anarchist movement in Europe that is for violence to humans.
Oh come on, people throw stones like this at Police.
To me, to throw stones at human beings is not a good strategy.
Criteria could be nonviolence, but for civil disobedience.
To me that type of criteria is very divisive.
There is legal and legitimate.
Who is conducting the violence?
We cannot solve this question. I think this is open questions on research or controversial issues. It will also not be solved by research, but can inform the movement.
We were not discussing criteria; we are talking about whether we agree with it.
Do we want a minimum set of criteria.
I think criteria is very top-down settled, for me this is not working.  For me, it is a process of learning and identification.
We as a group; our task is to raise the question whether it is necessary to define criteria, it is not our job to make the criteria.
Should we start writing things down?
Brief discussion on hand signals.
I disagree what you were saying (about criteria); some people are here and have the advantage to go here. When I go back home I have to explain what degrowth is, so it’s not empty. Not guidelines, charter; that’s very strict. I would say values.
This is just what I also want to respond to you; you must offer some broad ideas, what is degrowth.
I totally agree with this; easy to read by NGOs and other groups. So they say, aha, my project also fits there.
 
2 min break to name the clusters and identify any controversial issues. (Took a little longer than 2 minutes)
1.    Knowledge management
2.    Building alliances
3.    Offline social structure (local, national; international)
4.     (Discussion: Confrontational / Oppositional / conflictive / illegal strategy. It has to do with building alliances – but that is building alliances. Linking with some issues that are politically hot; our strategy should be to extract from this political conflict E.g. campaign against coal-mining; relate these ideas with degrowth). Conflictive actions (?).
Facilitator could make a drawing for tomorrow.
 
Strategies and actions.
 
There is this linkage in the degrowth movement, between umbrella and actions.
Fight against specific cases of capitalist expansion and fight with people in those regions for a good life.
It’s multidimensional; we can say this in the presentation.
 
Link with struggles at the commodity frontiers. For me, degrowth is Europe, which links very strongly with Environmental Justice movement in the South. They are not fighting for degrowth, it makes no sense in their context. We support them but we cannot fight there because we are here. We don’t have to go to Latin America to see commodity expansion, we have them here; and we can link with people in these regions. What is our territory of action?
 
Now, a question: do we go more into them tomorrow?
Tomorrow there are 3 sheets to fill in. Tomorrow is more on the conflictual issues; today is more finding consensus.
We don’t need to stick to this; I would not so strictly stick at these orders. Try to answer the question what is important for the whole group.
One idea, we could talk about different colours: put the cluster there in a nice way, so it’s easily understandable, e.g. green for consensus, red for controversials.
I think our group is more about transformation than vision.
Our clusters even looks to me like pre-requisites for being a movement. Without a knowledge management, alliances, structure, we are not a movement.
We could draw an umbrella over the image. 
 
After the summer school, degrowth in Barcelona, we tried mapping it.  This is the starting point to building social structure. We were before talking about criteria. One difficulty, how we can include people? A proposal could be like consensus conference – we cannot decide here – what is our identity?
A conference for building the identity.
The GAP is not representative of the movement.
Isn’t this getting a little bit concrete? Something for tomorrow.
 
Establish linkages on these conficts.; showing the degrowth aspects.
Networks – bring them to the local communities, offline.
For me a question is, isn’t the cluster the point we can put on such a diagram like this? And talk about more concrete tomorrow. The idea would be to put the 5 clusters. Clusters and number of the proposals that link to them.
I can imagine tomorrow we would decide some of them are very concrete, and others are more like a measure.
 
2 more actions
>learning from mistakes / share lessons learned
>Storytelling. Develop a positive narrative.
 
More clusters (these replace the Conflictive action cluster):
5.     Understanding conflicts from a degrowth perspective.
6.     Building alliances with environmental and social actors.
 
Discussion
Took a photo to present tomorrow.