In week 39 of The Shift there were many instances of ‘the people’ rising against old established orders, each with a different focus and wildly varying outcomes. In Russia, unprecedented numbers of citizens are protesting against the imprisonment of President Putin’s most visible critic Alexei Navalny, who has only recently recovered from an attempt to poison him while travelling overseas.

Russian police are arresting people en masse – 4000 so far – but the people keep turning up on the streets. In Poland women have been protesting for the fourth day running against strict new abortion rules that makes it illegal for a woman to have control over her own body. Like the women in Belarus rising up in November, there seems to be a breathtaking refusal to back down out there, despite the dangers of repercussions from the state.

A different kind of ‘uprising’ entirely was the upset to the financial markets caused by a group of amateur traders investing in GameStop shares on the US market. At first this looked like a friendly attempt to boost the share value of GameStop, in the face of hedge funders ‘shorting’ the stock. For those of us not familiar with financial practice, this means that a professional trader agrees to sell other people’s stocks in a company they don’t rate, at the current high price, causing their value to drop. Then the same trader completes their transaction by buying them back at the now devalued price, thereby making an engineered profit out of a company’s decline. Grimace.

Using the intentionally named Robinhood App, the group of amateur traders which had gathered on community network platform Reddit decided to not follow the prompt of the hedge funders to sell their stock and cause a rush to the bottom. Instead they held onto their now precarious stocks to prevent the drop. As more and more from the Reddit group joined in the game, the price has only kept going up – meaning that when the hedge funders buy back, they’ll make a serious loss.

However, even as the amateurs kept driving up the price – some becoming very rich on paper at least as stocks changed from $20 to over $400 per share – the Robinhood app suddenly stepped in to halt the transactions, citing fears of a full scale disruption of the market. American politicians are up in arms on both sides.

Meantime the energy amongst the amateurs has become something akin to a gold-rush. Listen here to the internal Babel on their conversation platform, hardly distinguishable from the sounds of Wall Street itself. Or maybe these newcomers are even more driven as the desire to wreak revenge upon the hedge-funders takes hold. While there is some satisfaction for anyone watching the contrived profits of the hedge-funders take a tumble, is this the change we’ve been waiting for? Groups of (mostly) guys at war with each other: some for advantage but others intent on destruction?

Some people however can see the glowing coals of a new possiblity. Check this tweet stream from Iranian political philosopher Reza Negarestani who imagines not only the survival but the future reconstitution of this group as a thriving co-op:

I suppose that my main takeaway from this is that r/wallstreetbets has enough collective consciousness to constitute something like a loose investment coop, something between a building society and an independent stock traders union. Robinhood have just poked this new beast.

Having said that, he is not overly optimistic:

I don't want to speculate about the future of this gamification paradigm of trade, but ultimately, I personally think of what is emerging as a system of ‘legal market assassination technologies’ rather than a revolutionary/participatory schema.

Innovation in the world of currency throws up similar challenges. While inventions such as block-chain - and within that the currency bitcoin - were designed to create a new level playing field for investors that might eventually rival the $, it hasn’t delivered a more fair and just financial system. Individuals with more resources may be more transparent in their actions but that doesn’t stop them dominating this new market in the same way they dominated the old one. A level playing field does not alter the law of the jungle!

Some new currencies are clearly doing much better at creating an altruistic market that rewards planet-friendly behaviour. The Seed platform for example lends itself to local currencies that can help generate a local economy, using rules agreed by the wider community. However it is yet to be seen how, once the currency develops a wider market linking up these global communities, the rules – and ability to respond - can continue to be driven locally. Or whether those higher up in the design process will be obliged to set the rules as, in fact, they have already done.

For those of us immersed in the new democracy movements – rather than those calling for them from a distance – we would claim that there is both a new spirit of collaboration and persistent old ways of behaving dragging us back. As people use the new tools that enable better listening, complex dialogue and active openness to previously excluded voices and cultures, new solidarities arise. Even so, old enmities and rivalries persist – assumptions about class, gender and privilege that dehumanise members of our communities, prevent many people contributing. While wholeness is evoked, there is often, still, partiality.

Some of this is driven by historic social trauma that people don’t have the capacity to overcome in themselves, while the broader society continues to uphold injustices. Some of this takes a simple form, like the continuing predominance of men in decision making and the reliance on women for the admin or relationship aspects of a project. Other challenges are more complex, like the cultural homogeneity of groups – both white / middle-class and mono-culture / working class – that cannot move out of their bubbles.

In an event on the Feminisation of Politics we chaired on behalf of Flatpack Democracy on Saturday 30th Jan, Laura Roth – who cut her activist teeth in Barcelona En Comu – took pains to describe the radical nature of that term. Feminisation, as it is being developed within the municipalist movement does not simply mean adding more women. There are endless examples, she described, of women entering into the old politics and behaving just like the men because the systemic culture permits nothing else. Instead, ‘feminisation’ means reclaiming politics for the people – all of them.

In a paper from the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation entitled Feminise Politics Now! there are dozens of clear points about the shift from one kind of political culture to another (also outlined in an earlier blog, here). Here are two stand outs for our new democracy movements, wherein feminisation:

..enables us to see politics as a realm that can serve to create communities, empowering people to take care of themselves, their peers and others.

… provides extensive food for thought on our own practices, biases and unacknowledged assumptions, with inbuilt mechanisms designed to prevent reproducing stereotypical divisions of labour and responsibility.

Taken together, these two insights challenge everything about the way we do power in the places we live. Feminisation reimagines a politics responding directly to the needs and capacities of community life and also their autonomous will to create well-being for each other. If taken seriously this would convert the voluntary sector – traditionally women’s work - into a new economy in which everyone could participate.

To say we are not there yet is not a negative thought: in fact it acknowledges a certain honesty about the current reality, alongside the commitment to keep going towards a vision for something genuinely new that is shared by more and more people. Getting clearer every day.

As we enter into February, our eyes scanning for the next people’s uprising, we’re hopeful.

Alternative Editorial: What Changes Behaviour?