One of the great things about the commons tradition is that every instance is local and idiosyncratic and requires that we make it up as we go along. But do we have to reinvent the commonweal? Yes – probably we do, but what might be generic? What might be learned by sharing the experience? This article tells of how a group of practitioners in the UK developed what subsequently turned out to be commoning, and have sustained it for over 20 years.

Prologue

Commons have a long history, contested now as in the past. Around a thousand years ago in Europe, feudal and later seigeuries began to enclose land for arable and livestock exploitation that had previously been freely available for collective nourishment. Echoing this, today’s neo-feudal corporate seigneuries have enclosed the world’s materials and hearts and minds for exploitation, enclosures so comprehensive that there appears to be no outside – TINA, ‘there is no alternative’ has become an article of neoliberal faith. Just as for many centuries in Europe, there was no ‘outside’ to Christian faith, now, to envision an ‘outside’ to neoliberal economic hegemony amounts to heresy.

Neoliberal righteousness can take many forms, and recent decades in the UK saw psychology walling off its expertise in professional enclosures and attempting to have the credibility of these enclosure validated through state regulation. Practitioners seemed slow to see this as primarily a commercial initiative; there was little sense of the danger of putting psychological definitions of the human condition in the hands of the state; too few practitioners cared that, as with other forms of faith, there was to be no ‘outside’.

Evidence of actual harm or risk assessment was missing from the claims that the UK public needed to be protected from rogue psychologists. This was entrancing and difficult to contradict. Did ‘public protection’ constitute window dressing? Was state regulation primarily an instance of the psychological therapies seeking enhanced professional status? Was a ‘public good’, as with hindsight we would now call it, being compromised?

Yes answers to all these questions meant that resisting this social vandalism seemed inescapable, a life choice. Did we deny the stirrings of social conscience or did we act on them? The not-infrequent accusation that non-believers in state regulation (such as yours truly) were ‘charlatans’, and a growing list of ethical objections to it, fed resistance; two conferences were held; the creative juices of opposition began to flow and shortly afterwards came the birth of a network of psychological ‘heretics’.

In 1994, Em Edmondson, a practitioner in Leeds, came up with a single page proposal for a network of therapists, later ‘practitioners’, that would be based on their lived knowledge and experience as practitioners. We were about to step aside from the dominant professional psychological elite, in a heretical denial of the true faith that state regulation of the psychological therapies was both essential and inevitable. We were about to begin commoning. Prologue over.

Enter the Independent Practitioners Network (IPN).

The IPN founding proposal

IPN founding proposal 1994  – select the image for a readable version

Em Emondson’s proposal called for a network of small independent groups; each group, of at least five practitioners, would take whatever time with each other that was necessary to be able to ‘stand by’ each other’s work. How this was done was to be the business of the group. When the ‘standing by’ had been achieved, the group was required to establish links with two other groups whose task was to validate the ‘standing by’ process. In a further requirement, when this was in place, each group was to develop and agree an ethical statement and post it to the network.

Alongside the network of independent groups, the founding meeting kicked off a series of meetings that eventually became IPN National Gatherings which provide a forum for the overall governance of the network.

Civic accountability

Let’s step back for a moment – I was slow to see it but I eventually saw the social task of IPN as the peer production of ‘civic accountability’, (and not just a good enough alternative, but an exemplary one). I’ll come to it in more detail shortly. Why would a commons structure be better at providing and sustaining ‘civic accountability’ for ‘psychological practitioners’? Is the usual professional ‘qualification’/credentialisation route inevitable?

The ‘qualification’ route is typically a single gate-keeping operation ending with the assignment of a diploma, a degree, a masters, or PhD academic award. Sustaining the credibility of the qualification awarded is at the discretion of the practitioner. While there may be requirements for supervision and Continuing Professional Development (CPD), in both of these, engagement with the quality of life of the practitioner can be moderate or minimal. A deterioration of their life circumstances, or the often challenging impingement of the emotional work can be concealed or remain out of sight. How, under this system is practitioner malpractice discovered? The answer, regrettably, is via client complaints.

For IPN, ‘civic accountability’ means seeking to proactively eliminate or minimise malpractice – harm to clients – and in the twenty years of IPN, I know of only three formal complaints by clients. How did we achieve this?

At the root of the IPN purpose is the presumption that the tricky challenges of the human condition are likely to affect psychopractice practitioners as well as their clients. IPN practitioners handle this through supervision, sustained support and mutual scrutiny of each other’s work, including where we are in our lives. ‘Standing by’ is not a once and for all decision, it is a continuing process – so that a significant distortion of our lifework that might be harmful for clients will become apparent and can be attended to. Clients benefit but so also do practitioners, through participation in the mutuality, reciprocity and deep sharing of human unfoldings in an ongoing community,

IPN commoning – structure and culture

When introducing IPN to newcomers I often find it useful to say that it can be seen at least as much as a culture as an organisation.

1. Participation in IPN is open to any counselling, psychotherapy or allied practitioner. Entry is through either joining an existing group or forming a new group. While this may seem unduly open, keep in mind that a practitioner has to convince several other practitioners face to face, that they are competent for the client population they work with and sufficiently stable in themselves to be able to sustain this work.
2. Participant status, supported by attendance at gatherings and via newsletter information, represents a permeable boundary for entry into the IPN culture; Forming group and full member group boundaries are clearly delineated, entry and exit is through face to face affirmation and negotiation.
3. IPN makes the presumption that practitioners as educated persons, are, with others, competent to assess and sustain their own credentials as practitioners. This requires a considerable level of developed self-direction and ethical acuity which, along with peer to peer culture, keeps IPN responsive to local needs and conditions. Practitioners used to conventional hierarchical organisations can be alarmed to find that in IPN, ‘no one is in charge’.
4. IPN is intrinsically peer-to-peer. The network’s accumulated Principles and Procedures published on the IPN website, document and define the network. Within them anyone is free to take network-wide or other initiatives, which may or may not be supported. While no one is entitled to speak for IPN, it is OK to speak from IPN, this article being an example of the latter.
   All IPN participants are entitled to attend triennial national gatherings which are currently free and for which travel is re-imbursed. A recent revision to the Principles and Procedures recommends that one practitioner from each group attends all Gatherings and that each practitioner attends one Gathering a year.
5. IPN participants’ prominent role in the debates about professionalisation and regulation ensured that state proxies for regulation and other professional bodies respected IPN’s ethical stance and independence.
6. The ‘standing by’ process of IPN’s forming and full member groups involves continuing scrutiny of practitioner work and just as important, where they are in their lives. The validation of this process by two link groups is intended to interrupt any drift towards collusion.
7. In the event that a group fails to be able to ‘stand by’ a practitioner’s competence or lifework situation, they will request/require that the practitioner takes action to resolve or correct this loss of support. Continuing failure to remedy the situation implies departure from the group.
8. IPN decision-making is by pluralistic consensus. Major decisions are taken to subsequent national gatherings for ratification. While local hierarchies of experience and expertise are honoured, coercion and domination are comprehensively deprecated.
   Note: ‘Pluralistic consensus: an ongoing process which considers all options available, listens to all views and supports a variety of outcomes being pursued simultaneously.
   This approach implies an emphasis on issue identification, exploration and a ‘sense of the meeting’ rather than on adversarial proposals and counter-proposals. Unresolved issues are held open for further discussion and all decisions remain subject to subsequent modification’.
9. Dispute resolution between IPN participants is a matter for their group and/or the triennial gatherings. There have been so few instances of disputes between practitioners and clients that IPN custom and practice in this area remains relatively informal. Typically a regional reference person is expected to initially field the complaint, they find a ‘process watcher’ to take on the role of scrutinising how the participant’s group handles the complaint against their member, and report to the network on it resolution/outcome.
10. The IPN ‘commons resource’ is the peer production of civic accountability. Overall governance is vested in the triennial gatherings. No one ‘runs’ IPN, there is no administrative centre; and volunteers organise the three annual national gathering; maintain the IPN web-site; and publish a triennial newsletter, NetCom.

People familiar with Elinor Ostrom’s academic research into commoning will perhaps see that IPN’s naive, bottom up development of a commons and commoning detailed above, echoes the key elements of commons management that she identified. Do we need the endorsement? Well no, IPN has very little ownership of its evolution as a commons but our example suggests that there will be other instances of naive commoning that have been arrived at in similar empirical fashion.

The IPN commoning experience

The IPN ‘Leonard Piper’ group – May 2014

What may be missing from this account is the human richness of IPN commoning, the mix of warmth, humour, delight and confrontation of sustained long-term face-to-face contact with valued colleagues – conversations where there are no no-go areas. While there has been some turnover, in the group I belong to, more than twenty years of this mutuality, reciprocity and equipotency has provided a secure enough foundation for the belief that cooperative commons structures can work sustainably and provide a rich enhancement of the lifework balance and civic accountability.

We meet for half a day around every six weeks.

Colleagues arrive, three people have travelled for over two hours for the meeting, tea is made and served, food to share is parked in the kitchen; the meeting opens with a ‘check in’ in which current personal/practitioner preoccupations are shared. After the ‘check in’ an agenda is built: on-going topics, including IPN network decisions, reports on relevant events, people electing to take time in the group about practice issues, and travel costs. A richly varied potluck lunch follows. For the rest of the half day we work through the agenda: someone describes the dynamics of a complicated client/parent relationship for comment and feedback; we discuss a potential psychopolitics development; someone declares a potentially hazardous client situation; we explore how to recruit another member for the group.

More tea and cakes are eaten.

We arrange a date and venue for a future local gathering; we discuss objections to the previous meeting’s group process; we arrange dates of future meetings; we pay each other the shared travel costs for the meeting and leave to catch buses and trains.

Such meetings are intense infusions of rapport, chat and learning from experience, a continual baking afresh of belonging.

Conclusion – a few more shares

If you were just beginning or were already up to your neck on commoning what else might we share from the IPN experience that you could find useful?

• Perhaps the most vital learning from IPN is the need for a clear initial statement of the territory of the commoning, the social need that is being met, and a good-enough outline of principles and procedures.
• The peer-to-peer, non-hierarchical culture of commoning seems undoubtedly heretical. It challenges scarcity economics and psychologically it also challenges, as does feminism, the righteousness of the belief that dominance is natural and inevitable.
• The label of ‘common goods’, as a European Parliament intergroup has shown, may be a handy way of staying under the radar of neoliberal scrutiny and rejection, a transitional compromise with corporate values, if you need one.
• Is the IPN commoning process reproducible? For non-hierarchical social arrangements such as cooperative householding and particularly where there is an outward-facing public role demanding civic accountability, such as social activism, social work, health care and medicine, a version of the IPN commoning process may well provide a very rich form of infrastructure. The IPN ‘standing by’ process requires a considerable amount of personal disclosure, if someone in a proposed group has an employer role re other participants, such as promotion/salary/hiring/firing, this seems likely to provide a significant obstacle to the formation of viable and sustainable commoning.
• IPN experience suggests that the sustainability of commoning past the initial flushes of enthusiasm requires a level of emotional competence that is up to the demands of ongoing group relations. Emotional competence includes being adequately aware of our patterns of conditioning and expectation, a capacity to be patient, sometimes very patient with disorder, dislocation and uncertainty, coupled with an acutely tuned awareness of power relations, so that coercion, threat, manipulation and bullying are held to be unacceptable.
• Facilitation skills, being able to stir and still the non-hierarchical pot while remaining a participant are very important. It seems essential that a peer to peer culture should seek to find ways of including hierarchies of skill and experience.
• Showing up: a commitment to being present may be more effective than a bouquet of concepts.
• ‘Free-riding’: there are likely to be people who will want to belong without participation and contribution. To be expected and planned for.
• Promote and give time for reflexivity – adequate awareness of our strengths and weaknesses; of the light we contribute and the shadow we cast. Plus the rhythms of in-breath and out-breath, of proliferation and convergence.
• Commoning can be a form of living from love – love defined as seeking the flourishing of the ‘Other’, along with our own flourishing and that of the group. Taking responsibility for holding this path and returning to it when we stray, may be the essence of commoning.

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The core elements of the psyCommons proposal are rapport, the quality of felt contact with others, chat, and learning from experience. This inevitably tentative handle on the human condition accounts reasonably well for our capacity to survive, recover and even flourish as a persons. And yet…

And yet… rapport can dry up, chat can oppress, and experience can teach us to hide.

What we bring to the world of work and living together can be facing the same way as our intentions but sometimes we face west when we intend to move east. And the best of intentions can be in collision with the unforgiving intransigence of time, capital and other people.

Other people. People also with intentions and beliefs, and likes and dislikes. When we sit in a room with a group of other people seeking to sharpen the focus on a task, perhaps a commoning task, what helps and what hinders agreement? Or if it is more relevant, creative destruction?

There is no single or simple answer. Complexity unfolds in both familiar and unexpected ways, can we shake out a few ingredients that go into the group mix? This is what the two images below propose. They present two takes on a psychosocial field.

After we meet and greet, when an event begins, whether it is commoning or a papal enclave or a G7 summit, as we come to order, an instance of the psychosocial field flows out of the ingredients we each bring with us. Each person at the meeting brings with them some version of the basic ingredients. After we turn up the heat in the groupwork and bake ourselves afresh, does the meeting have the aroma of freshly baked bread? If not, why not?

Let your intuition loose on the two versions of the psychosocial field below and see what you find.

Click the images for readable, downloadable versions.

The post Messages from the Immaterial Commons: 3) The Psychosocial Field appeared first on P2P Foundation.

First published in Asylum

Commons, commoning and common goods, apart from their intrinsic value, can wake us up to the extent to which valuable human resources have been enclosed for exploitation or social control. Enclosures such as copyright, land, patenting (and bottled water), have surged into view. Less apparent but equally important are the enclosures of some of the emotional, intrapsychic aspects of the human condition. Advertising, branding and marketing will have to wait for another day, what follows is an outline of how the enclosures of professionalized psychology demean, damage and exploit the common resources of the human condition.

Origins

I have long been active in the resistance to state regulation of counselling and psychotherapy. I wrote and published well over 300,000 words on the eIpnosis web site plus a couple of books, (Postle 2007, Postle 2012) opposing what I saw as the capture by the state of counselling, psychotherapy and psychology.

I was intermittently aware that over a long period, sustaining dissidence can result in the unconscious absorption of the ethos and even the methods of what is being opposed, that we could come to mirror what offended us. A devotion to critique can defend us from the awkward realities of devising and implementing a positive programme

I made one or two half-hearted attempts to quit but the momentum of the rush to regulate tended to pull me back. My 25+ years of effective practice, framed in a rigorous form of civic accountability (Independent Practitioners Network) counted for nothing; the Health Professions Council was set on preventing people like me from practising.

However as with any headlong political campaign, a pause is as good as a rest and a couple of years back I woke up to a realisation that my vantage point on the psychological professions, some sectors of which are still seeking the endorsement of their expertise by the state, was from outside. I had quit. A quite painful collapse of solidarity has followed.

I had long seen the UK psychology organisations, UKCP, BPS, BACP along with the BPC as walled gardens of professionalized therapy, gated communities with a very high price for entrance. But now this vision reversed direction, I saw these professions, not as oases of nourishment and care, but as something deeply problematic, they were enclosures, enclosures of a commons of ordinary wisdom and shared power, that enables three quarters of the population to get through life without the help of the psy professions. I called it the psyCommons,

The psyCommons

In recent years confidence in the state and markets has increasingly looked misplaced.

Whether it is at home, at work, or in local and national government there have to be better ways of organizing ourselves than those we presently struggle with.

They seem daily more and more toxic, inequitable and unsustainable.

One promising option is to look beyond Markets and the State and to revive and revalue the idea of the commons – the atmosphere, the oceans, rivers, forests, seeds, the internet, and our genes – our common heritage, and one that comes with some well understood Commons-style governance.

The psyCommons, a self-sustaining feature of the human condition, is an addition to this list of commons.

The psyCommons presently identifies two human capacities: rapport, the combination of eye contact, gaze, gesture and body language on which relationships ride; coupled with the phenomenon of learning from experience. – how we change, survive, recover and flourish. Feedback from a colleague suggested I add chat – what we say to each other and to ourselves – how we make sense of what is going on in our lives

Between them these three capacities generate the shared power and ordinary wisdom we need to be psysavvy, to be able to shape how, and with whom we share our lives.

The psyCommons initiative seeks to build a framework for the validation and promotion of ways in which we can all become more psysavvy.

That said, it is important to remember that, as I mentioned earlier, something like forty five million people in the UK get through life without needing help from the psychological professions. However, becoming psysavvy doesn’t yet receive the attention that we give to physical fitness

In recent decades, we have greatly benefited from better nutrition, better public health and a much more aware approach to bodily self-care.

Tens of thousands of people are capable of running the 26 miles of a marathon, over twenty thousand cyclists capable of riding a hundred miles, recently passed the end of my street.

Huge numbers of other people run a little, cycle a little, swim a little, dance a little.

The body part of the bodymind is increasingly well taken care of. We are living longer.

This article argues that becoming psysavvy, psychologically savvy, is as important as paying attention to physical fitness.

But there are obstacles in the way of this.

Enclosures

As daily life unfolds, our psyCommons of ordinary wisdom and shared power meets innumerable influences that shape how we relate to each other and how we do or don’t learn from experience. For example: Religion, Science, and Capitalism.

While much of what was for centuries taken to be god-given, such as sin, has moved towards being seen as a human construction, the absolute truths of religion still have wide appeal.

Science, despite the narrowness of its remit, continues to be perceived as a source of truth rather than as a very highly specialised form of learning from experience.

Alongside this, capitalism rewards monetary value, and denigrates and ignores local ‘use value’. Market fundamentalism blinds us to alternatives, and dismisses the social damage it causes as ‘externalities’.

While these contribute work, technology, wealth for some and a place to hold our wedding, they also tend to deform and distort the daily life of the psyCommons.

But more on them another day, because there are also the professions: The law, the military, academia and medicine; portfolios of expertise about our ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ and ‘have to’s.

All the foregoing create and sustain Enclosures of the psyCommons. They define territories of the psyCommons, patent them, copyright them, privatize them, academicize, bureaucratize them. They build fences, install gatekeepers and charge for access.

The psyEnclosures owned and operated by the psychological professions that are the focus of this article have a central role in the life of the psyCommons, I believe they impoverish and demean and damage the psyCommons.

How so?

psyEnclosures

As the grip of heritage religion on the psyCommons loosened, the medical profession began to replace it, and some doctors began developing psychological knowledge. To protect and promote their knowledge and expertise, psychiatry, psychoanalysis and psychology built professional enclosures.

These psyEnclosures, owned and operated by professions that had branched from medicine, brought with them the medical ethos – illness, deficit, dysfunction, diagnosis and treatment.

Unavoidable aspects of the human condition such as bereavement, anxiety, attraction, disappointment and resistance to oppression and even sexual diversity, were seen as ‘illnesses’.

The idea of ‘mental illness’ and its mirror image, ‘mental health’ was born.

Privileged access to countless meetings with clients enabled the psyprofessions to mine the psyCommons and to extract and process the raw material they found. This raw knowledge was then refined into a variety of expert systems for dealing with the mental illness that the professions had discovered. Or had created?

All of this extraction and refining was, and still is, held in the tightly policed professional enclosures of psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy and counselling. As occupations they work hard to be indistinguishable from the professions that enclose them.

These psyprofessions claim exclusive ownership of the expert systems they have developed. In the UK and elsewhere they have sought, and mostly succeeded, in having the state endorse their possession and stewardship of this knowledge.

While there are undoubtedly lots of caring, generous practitioners, what matters here is the downside of the psyprofessions. They install a widespread belief in the rest of the population about the nature of human condition difficulties.

That they are a dangerous territory.

A wilderness, full of mystery and threat. Monsters lurk and swamps can trap the unwary.

If we have taken up residence in this psywilderness, or look to be about to do so, the community resilience and resource of the psyCommons tends to be evaporate; ‘qualified’ ‘expert’ help is likely to be sought via referrals to the gated communities of the psyprofessions.

This presumption of danger, and the need for rescue is very important, it generates a society-wide taboo about valuing and understanding the emotional and imaginal aspects of the human condition.

People know, we all know, that a diagnosis of ’mental illness’ in our medical records invokes a near impossible to erase stigma. Unsurprisingly, human condition difficulties are commonly denied or concealed.

Because of this, access to professional psy knowledge and expertise is usually the result of, and often requires, a crisis.

A crisis that may often be prolonged and consolidated by the treatment.

There are many exceptions but the gaze of the professional psypractitioner, especially those in the NHS and allied services, has been trained to see deficits, dysfunction, pathology and illness. ‘Evidence-based’ normalcy measurements are likely to be followed by diagnostic ‘category fitting’, and biochemical treatment of symptoms tends too often to follow

The psyprofessions tend to ensure that as clients and patients – we enter their enclosures as supplicants. Passive acceptance of the psyexpert’s gifts is presumed. Power sharing is absent. Professional expertise rules.

This is not to deny its capabilities but to underline how paradoxically; it contributes to the impoverishment of the psyCommons of ordinary wisdom and shared power.

Capturing and holding knowledge about the human condition in the psyprofessions and the shame and secrecy due to contact with, or entry into their Enclosures, inhibits the diffusion of this knowledge back into the psyCommons.

So far as we ensure that human condition distress is seen as illness rather than as pointing to a need for community support, for re-evaluation, or political change – we can expect to find dependency and despair.

And there is another downside to the psyprofessions enclosures. Psychological service provision from them can never match the amount and cost of human condition distress that is likely to be manifest in this or any other psyCommons.

The professions who have built and who live in, and off, the psyEnclosures, seem content to maintain this condition of scarcity.

Why is not hard to find, it sustains political and economic leverage.

As we heard earlier, physical fitness, being savvy in knowledge and practice about the body part of the bodymind, is increasingly commonplace. Complementing this achievement with a matching increase in psy-fitness, becoming psySavvy, seems timely and achievable.

Through dissolution of the psyEnclosures and taking back the psy knowledge that came from us, that belongs to us, the psyCommons could become abundantly psysavvy.

Let’s do it.

References

Postle, D. (2007) Regulating the psychological therapies from taxonomy to taxidermy PCCS Books

Postle, D. (2012) Therapy Future: Obstacles and opportunities – introducing the psyCommons Lulu.com

Independent Practitioners Network http://i-p-n.org

eIpnosis http://ipnosis.postle.net

Video version of this text: The psyCommons and its Enclosures – Professionalized Wisdom and the Abuse of Power. http://youtu.be/pxuFnUuLqyc

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At some point in our lives, all of us are likely to find ourselves facing human condition difficulties, challenge, loss, critical choices, disappointment, success, poverty, illness, fame, stress, discrimination, wealth, ageing, abuse, burnout.

How well we cope with any of this seems dependent on our beginnings, the mix of vulnerability and resilience that we have learned or absorbed – how psySavyy we are.

For an introduction to psySavvy  and 40 instances of self-help, peer-to-peer, grassroots organisations supporting and building resilience, read on>>

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As we gathered for it, this European Parliament Common Goods Intergroup meeting, promised to be intriguing… was the Parliament about to embrace the commons as a template for a more participatory politics?

It was indeed a political meeting, with the banners of the four parties who had come together in support of it prominent behind the podium, a coalition that, as Sophie Bloemen details in her excellent account of the intergroup’s formation, had required the mutation (dilution?) in its title, of ‘commons’ into ‘common goods’.

Such concerns were quickly overshadowed by the mix of culture shock, optimism, contradiction and sheer linguistic struggle that Europe-wide mutuality turned out to entail. But then this is 28 nation politics and I was new to it.

Lets start with the downside and get that out of the way.

European Parliament Building Brussels

Shock and awe at the huge scale of the Brussels European Parliament building and the hushed modernity of its vast interior – the Charlie Hebdo effect piled onto the Bin Laden effect meant the whole place seemed imprisoned in that other aspect of modernity, security. There were also the twin Britshocks of realising during the meeting that what I was hearing were the voices of southern Europe, Italy, Spain, Portugal and France, and that of the 50-60 participants, I was apparently the only Brit. Coupled with this was the reminder that however good the four-language interpretation was, it put a huge burden on attention, and being able to grasp what was being said – Italian man speaking in the room – English woman interpreter in the ears.

The meeting started half an hour late, which despite effective facilitation put all the speakers under pressure. And speakers there were in plenty, arrayed in one-to-many conference style. There were repeated calls for ‘the need for debate’ but debate was overwhelmingly subordinate to a series of charismatic and often vociferous presentations mostly from the podium, peppered with multiple exhortations that the commons and common goods ‘were a good idea’, ‘we must…’ ‘we need…’ ‘we have to…’ etc., etc. Lot’s of talk about commons not much apparently from commons. When I spoke to ask the other delegates ‘who we were’ and how many had direct experience of commoning, around a third of the audience put up their hands, an indicator perhaps that less preaching to the converted would have been appropriate.

This was an inaugural meeting, so uncertainty and clumsiness can be excused, however on balance the presentations had a lot to say about common goods resources, i.e. a city’s water supply and much less about commoning, often a fragile flower growing out of peer-to-peer governance, commitment and emotional competence. The meeting certainly seemed in no doubt that a wider extension of the common goods theme might be one way to shape a new and very necessary politics. As Marisa Matias the impressive Portuguese MEP who had convened the meeting said at the end of her introduction, ‘the Left is lost’.

Was this a meeting then, as it perhaps seemed, where the old left was trying to befriend a new and promising flavour of the political month? There was no coffee break and apart from casual chat before the meeting, no interaction between the assembled delegates –the old paradigm of a representative polity?

And yet… in her introductory remarks Marisa Matias outlined two agenda items, ‘how to think outside the logic of the state’ and ‘how to handle the management of the commons’, both radical contradictions of neoliberal preferences. Perhaps this Common Goods Intergroup event was a way of introducing to an old politics, news of political innovation that was proving unexpectedly and improbably successful.

Only days before, Barcelona and possibly Madrid had elected officials with a ‘commons’ agenda; and… Anne le Strat outlined the successful Eau de Paris return of the Paris water supply to municipal ownership (paralleled by at least one other commune I know of in the Ardeche); There were several references to commons rights progress in Spain, and in Italy a supreme court decision had opened constitutional protocols to commons forms of organisation, along with the adoption of ‘beni comuni’ as a legal concept. Alongside this, as Benjamin Coriat outlined, in Barcelona the recovery of the commons appeared to be afoot.

A delegate from Transform made a reminder that there was a continuing need for recovery of the many public goods had been given to exponents of capital, she also argued for the establishment of a federation of commons. Paoli Napoli from CENJ, a French judicial research centre argued convincingly in favour of questioning the validity of state monopolies as a way of discovering commons. Ricardo la Fuente a Portuguese Free Culture activist drew attention to the scale of the capture of the internet commons by Facebook and Google, US dominated vertical monopolies that threaten the integrity and freedoms of the internet. He argued that safe-guarding access to the public sphere of the internet was a vital aspect of the commons agenda.

Michel Bauwens, A long-time peer to peer exponent, spoke about the digital commons, a driver of the unprecedented social change that underlies the commons movement. Bauwens outlined three digital commons institutions, one: the huge numbers of people who are contributors to the building of open public goods such as Linux, Arduino and Wikipedia etc (not to mention the countless millions of blogs like this!); secondly: the digital enterprises that feature peer-to-peer governance and transparency, he gave as examples: Loomio, Inspiral etc.; and third: for-benefit foundations such as the P2P Foundation and many others.

Bauwens warned that digital innovation presently tends to be compromised, since to pick up the resources to expand and develop an innovation, means becoming a ‘start-up’ with the likelihood of capture by venture capital. Devising alternative ways of financing commons innovation, he seemed to be saying, will be a vital part of an emerging commons economy. Bauwens left early to talk to the mayor of Ghent about another current proposal – Assemblies of the Commons – he also mentioned generating Chambers of the Commons, mirroring, at least in the UK, the ubiquitous ‘chambers of commerce’ and lastly the need, as he put it, to develop an ‘operating system’ for the commons. All welcome news.

In conclusion: Encouraging evidence from across southern Europe that there were a variety of instances of participatory politics inspired by, or already implementing commons/common goods. Great resources: the whole meeting was streamed live and by the following morning a video of it had been posted by the EFDD group with English interpretation.

And… the meeting had a classroom format – people sitting in rows facing expert speakers. As a groupwork facilitator I long ago learned that such a format inhibits or prevents the kind of face to face (and peer to peer) cooperation and communal knowing that commoning requires. This is not a minor matter, conversations are shaped by context. If this is the only Parliamentary format for commons/common goods discussion/negotiation/interpretation, I’d be concerned that this infrastructure could inadvertently exclude the intended benefits.

And yet… perhaps too much should not be expected from a body such as the Parliament which is devoted to scrutiny and correctivity, not usually a recipe for innovation. The European Parliament is an extant political forum, it mends and bends the proposals of European institutions. Diemut Theato, an MEP I happen to have met, some years ago demonstrated this when, due to her leadership and financial perspicacity, the entire European Commission had to resign. The Parliament’s potential ability to bounce back European legislation that ignores, compromises or damages the common good is very welcome. With regard to the common good, every little helps!

NOTES

Intergroup members: the Greens, the left group GUE, the Social Democrat party (S&D) and the EFDD (joint president Nigel Farage) and which now includes Beppe Grillo with his Cinque Stelle party.

The Common Goods Intergroup and this meeting was facilitated by Elisabetta Cangelosi and Pablo Sanchez Centellas

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