The economic aspect is not just about money, it’s related to spirituality, to emotions, to physical things, with all the movement of tangible things and non-tangible things too. Having the ability to make those types of flows visible, the economy is just a way of quantifying that. That’s why I think that projects like this should have as an essential basis the capacity to produce and reproduce; production in the sense of generating, creating, reproduction in the sense of nurturing, but with a strong base of belief, with a vision, that’s why it’s “crear, criar y creer” (create, nurture, and believe). They are the three economic bases that can be used in these sorts of transition projects. – Fabrizio
On the wall in the entrance to the Casa is a mural: El Objectivo es la Felicidad – The Goal is Happiness. The ‘economy’ is deeply tied into how we spend our time, and how much we enjoy what we do – it’s not just about money, but about the generation of various forms of wealth, including happiness.
Across the world alternative economy projects are springing up, finding different ways to place value on what we do with our time, what we produce, and how we relate to one another within a new economic vision. The Casa de los Ningunos is part of this wider global movement, and draws its inspiration for its economy from alternative economic theories, Andean philosophy, and its own community values.
The basis of economy: human relations
When we think of economy, we might think of the job market or profit-driven business. This is the capitalist economy, and in order to function it relies on many economic activities that are not considered profit-making, and therefore are mostly not considered deserving of a wage: childcare, cleaning the house, or preparing food to share. Without these life-sustaining but mostly unpaid activities other, profit-generating, activities couldn’t happen. One of the goals of the Casa de los Ningunos is to find new ways of shaping economic relations – everyone’s work should be valued.
Aside from only valuing certain types of labor, and some far above others, conventional economics can’t put a price on so many valuable elements of our day to day lives. How can we quantify in monetary terms the worth of the benefits of the loving, supportive relationships between members of the Casa? Or the impact the Casa has on the beliefs and behaviors of the people who come to Comida Consciente?
And the relationships between people are very valuable in economic terms. An exercise in which 300 economists researched six ‘future economy’ projects such as community-supported agriculture and online sharing platforms concluded that: “One key lesson that emerges about these innovations is the importance of good, old-fashioned, face-to-face relationships in developing strong place-based initiatives. If some of the old economy’s hallmarks are faceless call centers and centralized headquarters, successful future economy initiatives are investing in human relationships.”
Collaboration, not Competition
Working together in community is a fundamental principle of the Casa. It’s one of the bases of their economy too, as Apniuq explains:
In the new society you won’t just have workmates, but sisters and brothers that are walking together towards a better future. You won’t have companies competing but collaborating. We are building in ourselves values of ‘servers’ in the new era. We work from those values.
While capitalism creates artificial scarcity and hence competition between people and organizations, future economy projects like the Ningunos try to operate through collaboration.
The Casa faces a challenge though: as much as they might want to collaborate, not compete, we do all still live in a competitive capitalist system. As a community in a large and complex urban space, the Casa has to balance developing alternative economic relations while also generating enough conventional income to sustain the community – there are bills to pay, and members are buying the house with monthly payments over time. As Gadir said, the project “doesn’t survive on love! It survives because there is concrete work done with an economic aspect.”
Paying the bills
When the project first began, the Casa started running the Comida Consciente Thursdays as an activity that would simultaneously generate income and promote their values. As the lunches became more popular, this work expanded into a catering service, which was soon formalized into a social enterprise called Rúcula (Rocket, the salad green). “The company was an instrument to generate economic stability,” according to Fabrizio. While the company obviously had to operate with conventional monetary exchange, the profits were reinvested into the Casa – a social enterprise. As such, members were able to run it in accordance with their values: serving comida consciente, and using the platform of their food stall to educate people about the environmental impacts of how food is produced.
The necessity of functioning in the capitalist economy, especially as you try to step out of it, can be difficult: the income from these catering initiatives was sufficient to pay for the costs of the house itself, but not to create any individual income for those working on the project. As their personal savings were being depleted, the community acknowledged that they would need temporary financial support while the project grew. So, determined not to turn to funding from large institutions, they began to seek support from their local circles, and an individual from the wider community of the Casa who shares their values offered to support the project through the foundation that he administrates. Currently, their financing covers close to half the costs of running the Casa – monthly payments on the house, bills like water and electricity, and wages.
The Casa is working to become self-sustaining and to shift towards alternative economic relations, but in the meantime it is interesting to see how the sources of the Casa’s finance do also embody alternative economic principles. For example, thanks to the fact that the supporter who provided the loan for buying the house deeply values the intangible benefits of the work done by the Casa, they in return offer very flexible conditions on that loan, thus creating a reciprocal arrangement. As Gadir explains:
The relationship we have is not that of someone who only comes to ask us for the money, it is a person who understands the situation… There is a very different relationship than if it were some far off lender: “If you don’t pay me you can leave tomorrow! Why should I be interested in you if there’s no love? I want your money, I don’t care about you! I’m not interested in you as a human being!” But because there’s a relationship of love, because we have built bridges of love, this changes, and there’s much greater tolerance.
The Casa’s members earn a basic income for the different jobs they do – organizing Comida Consciente, overseeing the renting out of the guest room and workshop space, gardening, cleaning, administrative work, and more. Their income is set at the Bolivian minimum wage, around 1,600Bs or $240 a month. Everyone earns no matter what they ‘do’, tying into the idea of a basic income – an unconditional income to be granted to all on an individual basis. Angela explains that her minimum wage is enough because: “I don’t have to pay rent, I don’t have to pay internet, water, electricity, all of that is included. In that sense I earn well, I don’t need more. The idea of the Casa has never been to profit.”
The privilege see-saw
Living in a community setting and working out these (often monetary) practicalities together through participatory decision-making is tricky, as Gadir told us: “In the practical sense of how to earn money to pay at the end of the month, there were many contradictions, many doubts; no-one had the answer. It was really difficult to deal with…and that had to do with power relations between us.”
The project could only begin thanks to Gadir, Apniuq and Fabrizio having the cash in hand from their previous jobs to pay the rent – in other words, the Casa’s origins arise because of the privileges of its founding members; privileges that create power relations. On the other hand, precisely the point of the Casa is to challenge and undo the class and inequality dynamics of the capitalist system that created these unfair power dynamics.
A large part of the work of undoing those dynamics between members of the Casa lies in participative decision-making. But challenges arise due to power relations, which closely align with the Casa’s gender divide. Yumey, one of the two women at the house, remembers:
To begin with decisions were difficult. As well as understanding everything, they [the male members of the house] had absolute clarity. Even those who had put more money towards the company carried more weight, or had been part of the project from the start. But we had to remind them that at the same time that they were getting involved in the project, others of us were doing things for free as volunteers, giving our time, and our affection.
These dynamics of inequitable weight in decision-making can arise as people step out of the traditional workplace, where the norm is for economic decisions that affect workers’ income and well-being to be made by managers, corporate board members, and bankers. In other words, those with authority make the rules. The Casa is democratizing their economy by placing decision-making power in members’ hands – but just as it’s not easy to run a business without a profit motive in the capitalist economy, it’s not easy to work together in ways that challenge power relations and privilege when we’ve been taught that the norm in work settings are hierarchical relationships. As Angela explains:
There are other things (about the project) which are very much from the (capitalist) system, because we’ve worked in institutions, in NGOs, because we’ve grown up in schools with the chairs lined up in tidy rows, we’ve learnt that way and those are the structures we all have… We are trying to break away from this a bit, to find alternatives, but it’s difficult too, still being in the middle of the city, running a company.
The reciprocity economy
Despite the tricky parts of dealing with privilege, the relationships between people at the Casa are a fundamental base of their economy. Fabrizio estimates that around 30-40% of the house’s economic flow depends on voluntary contributions, both donated items and people’s work. For example, each week at Comida Consciente a different person is the volunteer “invited chef” and many people help out in the kitchen, and receive a plate of lunch in exchange; visitors are also given the option to work in exchange for staying in the guest rooms.
Some of these contributions are forms of barter and exchange, and some are part of the “reciprocity economy”. Reciprocity forms one of the bases of Andean indigenous communities’ philosophy (as part of the concept of Vivir Bien) and goes beyond barter: it is giving for the common good and trusting that you will receive in return. It’s not about expecting an immediate return. It also implicitly promotes principles of non-accumulation and distribution. The Peruvian indigenous philosopher Palomino Flores Salvador explains: “[Reciprocity] makes human interactions collective, it promotes the redistribution of goods, it avoids the accumulation of resources in the hands of the few, it provides resources to those that need them, and it creates justice, by incentivizing as a behavior the attitude of “giving back in equal proportion to that received” and “receiving as a return for what has been given”.”
The reciprocity economy is a vision that the Casa shares with other organizations – Wayna Tambo, a popular education and youth center in El Alto, works on revalorizing Andean knowledge and has developed ways of quantifying the value of reciprocal exchanges. Directly challenging capitalist logic, their indicators for valuing contributions take into account differences in conditions and privilege, so for example the time of somebody for whom it is difficult to obtain formal work is valued more highly than that of a person with a stable salary.
Wayna Tambo and the Casa make up the ‘Reciprocity Network’ together with other organizations. As Fabrizio explains, the idea of the reciprocity economy is to build networks that are resilient to crises in the capitalist system: “One big group can help along many small groups, and when these small groups grow, they will also be able to help along many other small groups, so the functionality of the reciprocity economy is to weave networks.”
Again, this is the antithesis of the capitalist logic, where the goal is to become bigger than other organizations in order to get ahead of them, rather than favoring solidarity between groups in similar or complementary fields.
The economy is the mobilization of energies that are shared in order to be converted into specific things, specific activities. If we understand the economy from that perspective, then it can really help to generate reciprocity and complementarity. – Fabrizio
Gifting
The reciprocity economy has also been called the gift economy. Philosopher Charles Eisenstein says that gifts create circles: “Because if you have more than you need, you share it with somebody, you give it to somebody who needs it. And that person will feel gratitude, maybe toward you, maybe toward the community. When that person has more than they need, they’ll pass it on to somebody else, and eventually it comes back to you. And you see that happening, so you understand that somebody else’s good fortune is your good fortune as well. And you’re not in competition.”
Seen in this light, the community values of the Casa – that you work with and for others – are very much part of the economy. Angela says: “I try to help generate these capacities in others, from things I’ve learnt that I can share, that I can teach and work to improve with others, so that they can do the same things.”
These reciprocal relationships in the Casa, of sharing knowledge with one another, create a type of circular economy. And the work that people put into the Casa comes back in more than money too:
Youth in Bolivia is the worst paid sector, with the least stable jobs, the most informal. So I think that’s one of the things we’re trying to resolve in some way. Here when you’re young you’re asked for so many years experience to get in to a job, but when you go to ask for a job and you’re new, there’s not much chance to get that experience, even as an intern or without being paid, there are a lot of contradictions. It’s what we’re trying to do here, to generate the possibility that young people can have paid jobs… even if they’re not large or ideal salaries…the learning is much greater than the money we can offer. – Angela
El Objectivo es La Felicidad – the Goal is Happiness
In contrast to the capitalist system, where youth struggle to find work without having ‘experience’, the Casa offers young people the chance not only to earn a basic income, but the learning that can be gained from working closely with others in community.
The capitalist economy doesn’t place value on these types of relationships or activities; in fact it sidelines them, according to Charles Eisenstein:
The logic of separation says: It couldn’t make a difference because you’re just a separate little being and change is governed by the laws of physics, the laws of force. How could it make a difference – anything that you do? Especially if it is taking care of a puppy, or taking care of a sick person. How’s that going to change the world? But, again, that’s the mind and the logic that we’ve received, but our hearts know that those are all significant acts.
Operating with reciprocal values and participative decision-making in a profit-driven, hierarchical society brings challenges. But people in the Casa de los Ningunos know in their hearts that what they do is significant. They are building people-driven alternatives to the root cause of multiple global crises: capitalism.