Catalan Integral Cooperative

A fine example of the emerging socio-economic system that will one day surpass capitalism as the dominant paradigm.

"The CIC’s objective is to generate a self-managed, post-capitalist society based on P2P [peer to peer] principles and environmental and social realities."

"The easiest way one could describe the internal organization of the CIC is as a collection of about a dozen committees, each one with its own field of responsibility. For example, the Economic Management Committee, as its name implies, is responsible for the economic management of the cooperative, the Legal Committee is entrusted with legal matters, the IT Committee deals with the IT infrastructure and so on. In consequence of this division of labour, committees work largely autonomously from each other.

"To coordinate their activities, the cooperative holds assemblies (the so-called ‘permanent assemblies’ which are held once a month), where committee members make decisions collectively based on consensus. In line with the principles of cooperativist and anti-authoritarian organization, these assemblies serve to collectivize the managerial process, thereby ensuring its participative and inclusive character.[10] That is, in a nutshell, the way the CIC is organized: the ‘core’ of the organization is made up of a dozen committees which coordinate their activities collectively and anti-hierarchically through frequently-held assemblies.

"From close up, the first thing that stands out about committee members is how they are not motivated by reasons of financial or professional advancement. On the contrary, the character of participation in the committees is clearly activist: committee members do not consider themselves to be working members of a conventional cooperative. For them, the CIC is not just a cooperative, but an activist project in which they are heavily involved.

"However, in contrast to activist projects manned by unwaged volunteers, the activists of CIC committees receive a kind of salary from the cooperative, known as ‘basic income’, which has the purpose of liberating them from the need to make a living by working somewhere else, thus allowing them to commit themselves full-time to their work at the CIC.

"An interesting feature of that form of remuneration is that it is made up of both euros and ‘ecos’, that is, the alternative currency used by the forty or so local exchange networks that exist in Catalonia (we will discuss the eco and the local exchange networks in more detail in the context of CIC’s economic ecosystem in chapter 6)."