Derek Wall: Almost every day, we learn of new horrors in the Middle East. Syria and Iraq are suffering from a brutal war. Fundamentalist groups like the so-called Islamic State and authoritarian leaders are murdering innocent citizens. Yet there is one sign of possible hope: in Northern Syria, the Kurdish people and their allies have established a secular, feminist and ecological republic, called Rojava, which means ‘the West’.

It would be easy to romanticise this – in a situation of conflict and war, it can be difficult to put high ideals into practice. Nonetheless, Rojava, with its organic agriculture, cooperatives, direct democracy and women’s leadership, is both fascinating and inspiring.

Most striking is the fact that Rojava is based on the teachings of a New York, working-class and Jewish-born green philosopher, Murray Bookchin. Bookchin, who died in 2006, is having a massive and massively positive effect in the Middle East. Ecology or Catastrophe is the unputdownable biography of Bookchin, which I am sure will be thought provoking to any member of the Green Party.

Bookchin was born in the 1921. His parents had emigrated from Russia and his grandmother had been a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries, a peasant- based radical organisation. From childhood, Bookchin was immersed in political activity and made a transition from socialism to anarchism to his own form of politics he called communalism.

He can be seen as an early advocate of radical green politics. His book, Our Synthetic Environment, published in 1962, discussed the dangers of pesticides. In the 1950s, he was already warning of the effects of climate change caused by fossil fuels. He campaigned against giant freeways that devastated cities and felt that cars were wrecking the environment.

Janet Biehl was Bookchin’s partner, and her book is honest, showing Murray’s flaws as well as his greatness. It is a very personal and sometimes sad book, but it is also political and philosophical, introducing the reader to important ideas.

Bookchin thought deeply about green politics, arguing that capitalism threatened our survival and that we need a democratic, ecological alternative. To challenge climate change and introduce a socially-just society isn’t easy, but Murray provides some ideas and inspiration we can learn from.

Reprinted blog by Derek Wall on Greenworld, you can see the original post here

Featured Image: “Kurdish YPG Fighters” by Kurdishstruggle is licensed under CC BY 2.0 

The post Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Charts the strategic thinking behind the movements challenging neoliberal globalization.

A Movement of Movements charts the strategic thinking behind the mosaic of movements currently challenging neoliberal globalization. Leading theorists and activists—the Zapatistas’ Subcomandante Marcos, Chittaroopa Palit from the Indian Narmada Valley dam protests, Soweto anti-privatization campaigner Trevor Ngwane, Brazilian Sem Terra leader João Pedro Stedile, and many more—discuss their personal formation as radicals, the history of their movements, their analyses of globalization, and the nuts and bolts of mobilizing against a US-dominated world system.

Explaining how the Global South and the experience of indigenous peoples have provided such a dynamic and practical inspiration, the contributors describe the roles anarchism and direct democracy have played, the contributions and limitations of the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre as a coordinating focus, and the effects of and responses to the economic downturn, September 11, and Washington’s war on terror. Their statements, at once personal and visionary, offer a dazzling new insight into the political imagination of the global resistance movements.

Available here: https://www.versobooks.com/books/170-a-movement-of-movements

The post Book of the Day: A Movement of Movements appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Darren Sharp: How do you create a viable business or organization without a hierarchy?

Enspiral, an entrepreneurial collective based in Wellington, New Zealand, has been working to answer this question since 2010. Started as a group of individuals doing contract work together, the community quickly shifted to launching companies focused on making its ongoing experiments in self-organization accessible to a wider audience. Successful projects include Loomio, a worker-owned co-operative that developed an open source app for consensus decision-making.

Distributed leadership has been key to the success of Enspiral and thousands of other sharing, open source and peer-to -peer communities around the world that rely on participation and networked governance to achieve outcomes for the common good.

Alanna Irving, who contributed to Enspiral’s new book Better Work Together: How the Power of Community Can Transform Your Business, has co-founded multiple startups, including Loomio, Cobudget, Enspiral, and Dark Crystal. She currently works as executive director of the Open Source Collective. We caught up with Irving to learn more about bossless leadership and her practical advice for how groups can both share power and tap members’ strengths to drive personal and social transformation.

Darren Sharp: What’s the book’s core message?

Alanna Irving: Better Work Together doesn’t give you a formula to instantly make your organisation collaborative, flat, or purposeful — because there isn’t one. In this book, we share what we’ve learned by pushing the boundaries of the future of work in a network of social entrepreneurs called Enspiral.

It’s not a book of theory, but a field guide by and for practitioners. As is fitting for a book about non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer, distributed practices, these stories are told through many voices, in many forms, like essays, toolkits, illustrations, exercises, and even a bread recipe. Sharing the failures is as valuable as sharing the successes. The truth is organic, emergent, and human. You can’t tie it all up neatly with a bow on top, or claim that everything fits into a clever 4-quadrant diagram.

We want to offer what we have learned to others, so they can make it their own and take it even further. We’ve gathered up the best insights and transformational experiences we’ve had while growing companies, networks, and ourselves in pursuit of truly meaningful work. The core message is: Join us on the journey.

Why was Better Work Together developed, how are people using it, and what’s its impact so far?

We’re doers, often too busy doing to reflect and communicate. Enspiral has never been great at marketing itself. We’ve never been good at productising or selling what we do, because that’s never what it was about. But whenever bits of our story got out, in talks or blog posts or podcasts, people clambered for more.

I think there’s a lot of abstract theory out there about new paradigms for human group dynamics, but a lack of real, unvarnished, on the ground lived experience. People are hungry for it. The book is a way for us to bring some structure to analyzing and communicating the ideas, tools, and practices we’ve developed, and offering them to the world in an accessible format. It’s our way of recognizing that we’re part of a much bigger worldwide movement, away from top-down, command and control structures, toward bottom-up, consent-based, shared power. The book is our contribution to the larger collective discourse.

It’s been truly amazing to see people respond to the book all over the world, excitedly realising that they are far from alone in this work, and how much further we can go by sharing our stories. A lot of people are telling us they want to go deeper, so now we’re developing workshops and courses based on the book.

Your contribution to the book is largely about distributed leadership in groups. Can you share what that looks like using examples from your personal experience?

Some people think that rid of bosses means there’s no need for leadership. I think just the opposite: It means you need to grow the leadership capacity of everyone. Personally, it took me a long time to reclaim the notion of leadership, because I felt uncomfortable with all the baggage it carried from coercive power hierarchies.

There is a name for this thing I do, and it’s called leadership, but it’s not about bossing people around. Once I was able to uncouple leadership from positional authority, I began to see it purely as a force that moves human groups toward coordination and velocity and away from entropy. It became clear that leadership is not contained in a specific role, but can and should be distributed among many people and processes.

This led me to questions like “How do I develop as a leader when there’s no ladder to climb?” and “How can I increase overall leadership capacity in my network?” I developed a framework for understanding these ideas, which is in a section of the book called “How to Grow Distributed Leadership”, which builds up from the base of shared power and self-leadership through leading others, leading leaders, and ecosystem leadership.

The framework has definitely helped me think more consciously about my own development, and how to mentor others who are intentionally developing leadership capacity in their own networks.

You use archetypes or personas to describe different types of leadership which have their corresponding shadow aspects. How can people become aware of their shadow aspects and make the most of them in group situations?

One of the chapters I wrote in the book describes a leadership development framework I created called Full Circle Leadership. In my work at Enspiral, I noticed an eight-step life cycle projects went through, and saw how projects fell over or fizzled if they missed some steps.

It partly came out of my annoyance that, as a network, we were great at coming up with new ideas but not as good at taking them all the way to completion. I needed to get the word “operationalisation” into our collective vocabulary. I also saw other organisations with the opposite dynamic: great at maintaining but struggling to innovate.

In parallel, as an operational leader, I went through a process of developing empathy for visionary leaders, and came to understand that we weren’t at two opposite ends of a spectrum, but part of a circle. Each of the eight steps represents its own unique kind of leadership, all of which are valuable and important.

This became a lens to better appreciate and nurture diverse leadership strengths. Equally, it’s a lens for awareness of the shadow sides. I got better at seeing my own shadows as a leader, and seeing both the light and dark sides of my collaborators. This is why working alongside diverse, respected peer leaders, who are different to you, is so important.

How can groups leverage people’s strengths and also take team members out of their comfort zone to learn new skills?

This work asks a lot of us. There is no way to keep engaging deeply, purposefully, and vulnerably in community without a lot of self-development. Sometimes we call that The Work. It never ends because humans are dynamic, complex, living beings, and groups of humans even more so.

On one level, it means always being out of your comfort zone. On another level, it means gaining a profound sense of purpose, confidence in you abilities, and unambiguous commitment to guiding values that stay steady in the face of enormous change. It’s great if you can be responsibly and safely held and guided by someone who “knows what they’re doing”, but really, no one knows what they’re doing when you’re charting new territory and constantly experimenting. It can be risky. You need a lot of self awareness and excellent boundaries.

My seven or so [years] at Enspiral felt like a never-ending stream of intensive challenges and growth opportunities. I learned so much about myself, at the same time I was learning about startups, facilitation, building technology, social impact, money, and everything else. It was incredibly rich — and, frankly, exhausting. I miscalculated and burned out multiple times.

There’s a lot in the book about self care, well-being, group processes for looking after each other, and strategies for avoiding burnout when you’ve got a fiery passion in your heart. The risk and challenge are inherent, so I’d definitely encourage people to regularly reflect and check in about how it’s really going. But to me, there is no question that it’s worth it.

Power dynamics are an inevitable characteristic of human groups. What advice do you have for groups for making them more transparent? When does it make sense to share power and what steps can groups take to get there?

The first step is to practice talking about power dynamics openly, regardless of their shape. A healthy culture means being honest about power. If you are a hierarchy, admit it. Own it! Sometimes hierarchies are the right shape for what you’re trying to do. You can have consent-based, ethical hierarchies. A lot of people actually just want to be told what their job is.

Talking about power dynamics will allow you to collectively ask important questions, like “How is our structure working for us? Could it be improved?” Sometimes groups that aspire to less hierarchy will treat power like a taboo, and try to pretend it doesn’t exist. This will not result in shared power, only in implicit, unaccountable power.

Power dynamics are an inherent property of human groups. Your collective task is to take ownership of your group’s power dynamics and make them work for you. One frame I often use is “align power and responsibility.” If people have responsibility for things they don’t have power over, or are exerting power over things they aren’t taking responsibility for, you’ve got a problem.

Sometimes that’s about an internal emotional boundary around what you will feel responsible for. Sometimes it’s about restructuring roles to give power over their scope of responsibility. Sometimes it’s about calling out unacknowledged power. It’s a frame I find useful to examine in a lot of situations.

Finally, consider how our work on power in the context of human society overall [is] inextricably linked to social justice. We need to consider how power dynamics function at every level, from the macro to the micro, to truly understand them.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Darren Sharp | Twitter

Darren Sharp is a leading sharing economy strategist, consultant and researcher.  As founding Director of Social Surplus he develops strategy and facilitates capacity-building using strength-based approaches including asset-based community development,

The post What Enspiral can teach us about how to run a company with no boss appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Knowledge, Spirit, Law is a de facto phenomenology of scholarship in the age of neoliberal capitalism. The eleven essays (plus Appendices) in Book 1: Radical Scholarship cover topics and circle themes related to the problems and crises specific to neoliberal academia, while proposing creative paths around the various obstructions. The obstructions include metrics-obsessed academia, circular and incestuous peer review, digitalization of research as stalking horse for text- and data-mining, and violation by global corporate fiat of Intellectual Property and the Moral Rights of Authors. These issues, while addressed obliquely in the main text, definitively inform the various proscriptive aspects of the essays and, via the Introduction and Appendices, underscore the necessity of developing new-old means to no obvious end in the production of knowledge — that is to say, a return to forms of non-instrumentalized intellectual inquiry. To be developed in two concurrent volumes, Knowledge, Spirit, Law will serve as a “moving and/or shifting anthology” of new forms of expression in humanistic studies. Book 2: The Anti-Capitalist Sublime will be published in Autumn 2017.

About the author

Gavin Keeney is an editor, writer, and critic. His most recent books include Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image (2012) and Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture (2014), both produced as part of PhD studies conducted in Australia and Europe from 2011 to 2014. He is the Creative Director of Agence ‘X’, an editorial and artists’ and architects’ re-representation bureau founded in New York, New York, in October 2007.

Photo by La caverne aux trésors

The post Book of the Day: Knowledge, Spirit, Law // Book 1: Radical Scholarship appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Beyond Disaster Capitalism — Jonny Gordon-Farleigh

“What if the expected responses during disasters either fail to occur or are only marginal? What if the temporary breakdown of social hierarchies allows for new ideas and systems to emerge? What if disasters resolve pre-existing conflicts? And what are the new political powers of this ‘community of sufferers’?”
The Blitz — Rebecca Solnit

“Some spread out to camp in forests, caves, and the countryside outside London. Many became so inured to falling bombs they chose to stay home and chance death for a good night’s sleep. Connelly says, “The people’s role in their own defense and destiny was downplayed in order to stress an old-fashioned division of leaders and led.”
Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change — Ashley Dawson

“Cities are not homogenous, though, they are sites of extreme class and race inequality — it’s always the most marginalised communities that are affected.”
ORDER HERE

Beside the Bombs: Building a New Life with Bare Hands
Jo Taylor

After the Angry Sea: Co-operatives Rebuilding After the Tsunami
Stirling Smith

EPIC Homes : Extraordinary People Impacting Community 
Nadhira Halim

The Mondragón Experience to the Preston Model
Julian Manley

Uneven Burns: California’s Climate-Fueled Wildfires
Robert Raymond

Book review: Crashed by Adam Tooze
Hanna Wheatley

The post Co-operating out of Crisis appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In 2011 Shareable organized the Share San Francisco conference to promote the city as a platform for sharing, which in turn inspired the “Sharing Cities” movement. The goal of Sharing Cities was to create horizontal linkages between local communities and serve as a platform to coordinate policies for encouraging the growth of sharing economies. Shareable itself, under the “Sharing Cities” tag, highlighted commons-based projects like open-source hailing platforms and other shared mobility projects, coworking spaces, participatory budgeting, multi-family cohousing/coliving arrangements, tool libraries, community land trusts, neighborhood gardens, shared renewable energy, municipalist projects like those in Barcelona and Jackson, hackerspaces and repair cafes, and many more.

Shareable created the Sharing Cities Network as a support platform for the project. According to the project’s website:

Fifty cities around the world began mapping their shared resources in October and November 2013 during Shareable’s first annual #MapJam. This was just the beginning of the Sharing Cities Network – an ambitious project to create one hundred sharing cities groups by 2015.

As of this writing, there are seventy-three cities worldwide listed on their Community Maps page, each one with a detailed map of sharing projects and assets. In addition, the movement led to a series of Sharing Cities Summits, the second of which in 2017 set up the Sharing Cities Alliance — which includes thirty-odd cities worldwide — as a standing body.

The book Sharing Cities is the outgrowth of these nine eventful years. Following an introduction by Gorenflo, in which he summarizes the background of the Sharing Cities movement, states its basic principles and assesses its significance, the book — a collaborative effort by fifteen people — provides over two hundred pages of case studies of local sharing economy projects in dozens of cities.

The case studies, organized topically into eleven chapters, offer fairly comprehensive and systematic coverage of sharing projects in pretty much every functional subdivision of local economies, including land ownership and housing, food, cooperative finance, micro-manufacturing, transportation — and, well, everything else.

As Gorenflo notes in the introduction, the commons “was part of, but not the core of,” the initial Share San Francisco meeting. This changed, he says, because of the realization that “sharing” functions could and would be coopted by the above-mentioned corporate Death Star model if the movement did not explicitly embrace open and commons-based models.

Even more so, it changed because of the Sharing Cities movement’s interaction and cooperative engagement with a number of other commons-based movements. From organizations like the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives (P2P Foundation) founded by Michel Bauwens, to scholar-advocates of commons-based municipal economies like Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione (the closest thing the municipalist movement has to organic intellectuals), and even actual large-scale municipalist policy efforts (those emerging from M15 in Barcelona and Madrid, commons-based movements in Bologna and Amsterdam, older movements like Cooperation Jackson and the Evergreen Initiative in Cleveland, and the efforts that have since proliferated in hundreds of other cities), the Sharing Cities project has drawn inspiration from many areas.

In addition this ecosystem of movements includes a number of Autonomist thinkers like Massimo De Angelis who emphasize the commons as the kernel of an emerging post-capitalist society. And the role of the city in post-capitalist transition has been a theme in the work of thinkers ranging from Murray Bookchin to David Harvey.

All these things coming together amount, between them, to Steam Engine Time for commons-based municipal economies. This is more true than ever in the last couple of years. As even nominally leftist governments like Syntagma in Greece show their impotence or unwillingness to act in the face of neoliberal assault, and fascist or fascist-adjacent leaders come to power in a growing share of the West, municipal platforms and networks of such platforms have become the primary base for popular empowerment.

The importance of the urban commons to cities today is that it situates residents as the key actors — not markets, technologies, or governments, as popular narratives suggest — at a time when people feel increasingly powerless. To paraphrase commons scholars Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione, the city as a commons is a claim on the city by the people. Furthermore, a commons transition is a viable, post-capitalist way forward….

And if the various strands of municipalism add up to an ecosystem, Shareable and Sharing Cities occupy a vital niche in that ecosystem.

On the purely theoretical side, commons-based scholars of post-capitalist transition (De Angelis, for example) have done superb work on the commons as a new mode of production growing within the interstices of capitalism. But aside from general recommendations like growing the commons by incorporating a growing share of the material prerequisites of physical and social reproduction into its circuit, they have been light on the nuts and bolts of institutional examples of such practice. And activists like Chokwe Lumumba and Ada Colau have done amazing work in building local municipal platforms to promote a commons-based model of economic development. But when it comes to developing the full range of tangible alternatives and integrating them into a cohesive commons-based economy, such local movements have been quite uneven in identifying the possibilities. For example Cleveland and Jackson have focused heavily on incubating cooperative enterprises under the inspiration of Mondragon, but have in my opinion failed to take advantage of the potential of open-source information and cheap open-source micromanufacturing machinery for community bootstrapping.

The combined and coordinated development of all the possibilities for sharing economies within a community’s discretion, to the full extent of its discretion, would be revolutionary beyond anything we have seen. What if a municipality incorporated all vacant municipal land and housing into community land trusts, and acted as a cooperative enterprise incubator on the Cleveland and Jackson models, and used the surplus capacity of city and public utility fiber-optic infrastructure to provide low-cost community broadband, and made the unused capacity of public buildings available as community hubs, and implemented participatory budgeting and citizen policy platforms, and facilitated the creation of open/cooperative sharing platforms as alternatives to Uber, and facilitated the creation of hackerspaces and repair cafes and Fab Labs and garage factories, and required government offices and public education facilities to use open-source software and mandated that all publicly funded research and scholarship be in the public domain? All at the same time? It would amount to an entire commons-based economy, comprising a sizeable core of the entire local economy, with synergies and growth potential beyond imagining.

This is where Shareable comes in, and where it has done more than anyone else to kick-start needed action. Shareable took the lead not only in encouraging municipalities to become platforms for supporting and facilitating local sharing economies. It also promoted concrete mapping projects in individual cities to systematically identify and catalog all the potential assets for incorporation into a commons-based economy, and publicized concrete examples of commons-based praxis in all areas of social, economic, and political life from around the world. The subsequent emergence of other efforts at urban commons mapping and commons-based development policies in specific cities around the world (particularly notable is the P2P Foundation’s efforts in Ghent) is arguably the fruit of a seed planted by Shareable.

If scholars like De Angelis point to the commons as the core of the post-capitalist economy, and Barcelona and Madrid point to the municipality as the primary locus for facilitating commons-based projects, then Shareable has taken the lead in cataloging and sharing the full range of specific examples of such projects and encouraging others to follow their example.

Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons embodies this cataloging and sharing project. Given the number of localities with municipalist movements, and the number of local activists and tinkerers worldwide developing commons-based projects, there are more projects on the ground than would fit into a thirty-volume encyclopedia, let alone one book. But the survey in Sharing Cities is a representative sample of the full range of what’s being done; every case study can be taken as a proxy for what others are doing in countless other communities around the world.

In short, this book is indispensable for anyone interested in what’s being done on the ground to build the society of the future.

The post Book of the Day: Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Giving both P2P and other visions their due space

You can support this “cultural provocation” in several ways, explained in the FAQ, but my main reason to present it here is another. As you can see yourself, the current list of suggestions, contains both too few, and at the same time too many P2P-related concepts.

The list contains too few P2P-related suggestions, because “P2P alternatives” is a really, really wide field. The concepts that the first participants have suggested so far only give a very partial idea of it. P2P advocates worldwide, but especially from Europe, please add your own suggestions!

When I say that the P2P-related suggestions are “too many”, instead, I simply mean that (SO FAR!)  they are too big a percentage of the total to make the whole list as comprehensive as it should be, to be of any help at all. This is just an obvious consequence of the fact that the first contributors mostly come from my own social circle,which likely contains much more P2P advocates than the average.

But no “foundation for a common cultural literacy” can be such, especially when assembled in a p2p-like way, if it is does not mentions concepts of as many different “categories”, human activities and points of view as possible. Even if the whole proposal is a provocation, with NO ambition to be THE best possible book of that kind… the more diverse its content is, the more  meaningful it becomes. But no single person, not even a new Leonardo da Vinci, which obviously I am not, could do a decent job alone. So I am here to ask everybody reading this post to please:

• just go and add your own suggestions (that is the only way to collect suggestions!!!). The bottom of this posts suggests one possible way to do it quickly.
• (above all) invite as many contacts as yours to add theirs, and spread the invitation

For any question, just email me. Last but not least, there is also a proposal for a “for-Italy-only” version of the same book, if you want to share that too!

THANKS!

Photo by angelaathomas

The post P2P (and other) visions in “5000 concepts for Europe” book appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Elinor Ostrom was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Economics. Her theorising of the commons has been celebrated as groundbreaking and opening the way for non-capitalist economic alternatives, yet, many radicals know little about her. This book redresses this, revealing the indispensability of her work for green politics, left economics and radical democracy.

Ostrom has often been viewed as a conservative or managerial thinker; but Derek Wall’s analysis of her work reveals a how it is invaluable for developing a left political programme in the twenty-first century. Central to Ostrom’s work was the move ‘beyond panaceas’; transforming institutions to widen participation, promote diversity and favour cooperation over competition. She regularly challenged academia as individualist, narrow and elitist and promoted a radical take on education, based on participation. Her investigations into how we share finite resources has radical implications for the Green movement and her rubric for a functioning collective ownership is highly relevant in order in achieving radical social change.

As activists continue to reject traditional models of centralised power, Ostrom’s work will become even more vital, offering a guide to creating economics that exists beyond markets and states.

Author Biography

Derek Wall is the author of numerous books including Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals (Pluto, 2017), Economics After Capitalism(Pluto, 2015), The Rise of the Green Left (Pluto, 2010) and The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom (Routledge, 2014). He teaches Political Economy at Goldsmiths College, University of London and was International Co-ordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales.

Endorsements

‘A fascinating insight into the only woman to win the Nobel Prize for economics. I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone interested in alternatives to the neoliberal consensus’ – Caroline Lucas, Co-Leader of the Green Party

‘An astute interpretative overview of Ostrom’s far-ranging scholarship on the commons: inspiration and guidance for a new generation of commons thinkers and activists’ – David Bollier, author of Think Like a Commoner, and Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics

‘The UK’s vote to leave the EU and the election of Donald Trump as US President are both signs that working people are rejecting the global economy. This makes the work of Elinor Ostrom, with its focus on common ownership and political empowerment, very timely’ – Molly Scott Cato, Green MEP for South West England

Contents

Acknowledgments
Rules for Radicals
1. Elinor Ostrom’s Radical Life
2. The Commons: From Tragedy to Triumph
3. Climate Change, Ecology and Green Politics
4. Beyond Markets and States
5. Deep Democracy
6. Feminism and Intersectionality
7. Trust and Cooperation
8. Science for the People
9. Transforming Institutions
10. Conflict and Contestation
Bibliography
Resources for Change
Index

Photo by Susan of Mad In Pursuit

The post Book of the Day: Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals,Cooperative Alternatives beyond Markets and States appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Each commons has its own distinctive character because each is shaped by its particular location, history, culture and social practices.  So it can be hard for the newcomer to see the patterns of “commoning.” The term commoning means to suggest that the commons is really more of a verb than a noun.  It is a set of ongoing practices, not an inert physical resource.  There is no commons without commoning.  This helps explain why the commons is different from a “public good”; the commons is not just an economistic category floating in the air without actual people.  There are no commons without commoners.

Getting a grip on the commons can be difficult, too, because there is no definitive canon of works. The particular commons that you inhabit and participate in will shape your view of what perspectives are noteworthy and explanatory. A commoner in Africa will see the commons in a different light than a European or an Asian or an American.  Context matters.  That’s why a universal, unitary “defintion” of the commons is problematic.  The phenomena of the commons are so segmented and fractal — yet related!

As this suggests, there is no substitute for spending a little time exploring the commons from many different angles. The concept cannot be understood in one sound bite.

My website/blog tries to help by providing some resources for getting acquainted with the commons.  You’ll find my blogroll to leading commons websites and blogs, a select bibliography, a college course syllabus, assorted reports, a listing of commons projects, and my various books and writings. To find more about a specific types of commons or explore a theme, click on the tag cloud in the upper right of the homepage, or search by a topic of your choice. 

Here are a few items that can help orient you to the commons as a paradigm:  

The Commons, Short and Sweet (two-page statement)

Eight Points of Reference for Commoning  (Ostrom’s eight principles as seen by participant-commoners)

VIDEOS

• Thom Hartmann interview with David Bollier, Part I (12:46) & Part 2 (11:53)
• How Does the Commons Work? (animated short, 2:33), Next System Project
• What Are Commons? (cartoon animation)
• The Commons (video overview, 3:47)
• This Land Is Our Land (feature film, 46:00), Media Education Foundation
• David Bollier talk at American Academy in Berlin, December 2012  Video.  Text.
• David Bollier interview with Chiari Somajni (47:39)
• David Bollier interview with iRights (Germany) (24:37)
• Dave Rovics protest anthem, “The Commons” (video, 3:04)

BOOKS

Good introductory books include:

• Think Like a Commoner (2014), by David Bollier
• Patterns of Commoning (2015), edited by Bollier and Helfrich.  Available free online.
• The Wealth of the Commons (2012), edited by Bollier and Helfrich.  Available free online.
• Our Common Wealth (2013), by Jonathan Rowe
• Common as Air:  Revolution, Art and Ownership (2010), by Lewis Hyde
• The Value of Nothing (2010), by Raj Patel
• The Magna Carta Manifesto (2008), by Peter Linebaugh
• Silent Theft:  The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth (2003), by David Bollier
• Governing the Commons (1990), by Elinor Ostrom
• Sustaining the Commons (2013), by John M. Anderies and Marco A. Janssen (free download)
• The Gift:  Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, by Lewis Hyde

….but also browse the select bibliography here.

SOME FAVORITE ESSAYS 

• Andreas Weber, “Enlivenment:  Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics,” published by the Heinrich Boell Foundation, May 2013.  Here’s my summary of this remarkable re-imagining of evolutionary science, culture and commons.

• Joline Blais, “Indigenous Domain:  Pilgrims, Permaculture and Perl” [on the underlying commons logic and unity of indigenous culture, permaculture and free software], in Intelligent Agent (vol. 6, no. 2), published by the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts. Here’s my gloss on a brilliant analysis of shared patterns of commoning.

• Ugo Mattei, “First Thoughts for a Phenomenology of the Commons,” in The Wealth of the Commons.  A profound meditation on the commons as a challenge to modernity and the modern liberal polity.

• Eben Moglen, “Anarchism Triumphant:  Free Software and the Death of Copyright,” First Monday, August 1999.  A seminal, insightful and witty essay on the commoning that lies at the heart of free software.

• David Bollier, “Commoning as a Transformational Paradigm,” essay for Next System Project, May 2016.

INTERNATIONAL EVENTS AND REPORTS

Some of the most focused insights about contemporary commons emerge from reports about conferences and workshops.  Here are a few:

• Economics and Commons Conference: video and report of Berlin conference, May 22-24, 2013.
• International Commons Conference: video and accounts of a landmark gathering in Berlin, Germany, on November 1-2, 2010.
• The Asian Deep Dive (report from October 2012 workshop)
• The European Deep Dive (report from December 2012 workshop)
• The Commons: Prosperity by Sharing (report by Silke Helfrich et al., October 2010).
• The Commoners at Crottorf Castle (report from a retreat of commoners, June 2009), Parts I, Part II, and Part III

Greece:  Ebook on commons and P2P:  Πέρα από το κράτος και την αγορά: Η ομότιμη προοπτική(May 2014).  Free download.

Photo by iwishmynamewasmarsha

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In Four Futures Peter Frase poses, as a thought experiment, an “anti-Star Trek”: a world that shares the same technologies as Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s post-scarcity communist society, but in which those technologies of abundance are enclosed with “intellectual property” barriers so that capitalists can continue to live off the rents of artificial scarcity.

“…[I]magine that unlike Star Trek, we don’t all have access to our own replicators. And that in order to get access to a replicator, you would have to buy one from a company that licenses the right to use it. You can’t get someone to give you a replicator or make one with their replicator, because that would violate their license and get them in legal trouble.

What’s more, every time you make something with the replicator, you also need to pay a licensing fee to whoever owns the rights to that particular thing. Captain Jean-Luc Picard customarily walks to the replicator and requests “tea, Earl Grey, hot.” But his anti-Star Trek counterpart would have to pay the company that has copyrighted the replicator pattern for hot Earl Grey tea.”

In such a world, earning the money to pay for the things will be a problem, since there is no need for labor to actually make anything. What remaining work there is will be a small pool of intensely competed-for jobs designing stuff, some amount of guard labor enforcing “intellectual property” against piracy and protecting the accumulated property of the rich, and an odd assortment of work in household service or hand-crafting luxury goods for those in the propertied classes who value the status symbolism entailed in such things.

This is the world of The Diamond Age. In Stephenson’s medium-term future, Star Trek’s matter-energy replicators are a reality (well, the food replication is considerably well below Star Trek standards). A world of plentiful sustenance for all, without money, is technologically feasible. But there the similarity ends.

The story is set at some indefinite point in the mid-21st century—presumably somewhere around the 2060s or so, given that a quite old lady reminisces about being a thrasher in the ’90s.

The world in this future is governed by the international order that emerged from a period of chaos—the Interregnum—following the collapse of most major nation-states that occurred when encrypted currencies starved them of tax revenue. The basic unit of organization is the phyle—a deterritorialized, networked opt-in community with associated support platforms, which is based on some shared point of affinity like ethnicity, ideology or religion.

The first phyle to emerge from the Interregnum was the First Distributed Republic, apparently an entirely pragmatic, non-ideological platform whose chief purpose—like the lodges in Poul Anderson’s Northwestern Federation (Orion Shall Rise)—was to keep the lights on and the trash picked up. By the time of the story, there are many scores of phyles. The largest and richest are the neo-Victorians (recruited largely from the Anglosphere) and the Nipponese, both governed by an intensively work-oriented and capitalistic ethos and making money through nanotech and other forms of engineering and design. The others—Mormons, Israelis, Parsis, Boers, Ashanti, Hindustani, Sendero Luminoso, etc., etc.—range widely in size. CryptNet is a phyle governed by a pirate ideology, and classified somewhere between subversive and terrorist by the mainstream phyles and their international order.

Depending on their size and wealth, the various phyles maintain territorial enclaves ranging in size from city-states to clusters of a few buildings in cities around the world, with the largest and most widely proliferated belonging to the neo-Victorians and Nipponese for obvious reasons.

Given the existence of technologies of abundance, the profitability of neo-Victorian and Nipponese industry obviously depends on patents and copyrights. And the post-scarcity potential of matter-energy replicators—“matter compilers”—is limited by the Feed. Feeds are long-distance pipelines of various volumes transferring feed stocks of assorted atoms to supply mater compilers. A Feed, in turn, is supplied by a Source—a facility which uses nanotech membranes and other nano-filtering mechanisms to sort out the various elements from seawater and air and store them in separate holding tanks. The major Sources are located in, and operated by, enclaves of the most technically advanced phyles.

The combination of “intellectual property” and the dependence of matter compilers on the Feed severely hobbles the potential for abundance. Some basic minimum of essential life support—fabricated staple foods, clothing, blankets—is available for free from public matter compilers. Everything else has a price, often steep. The “thetes”—a large underclass of people, perhaps a majority of the Earth’s population, unaffiliated with any phyle—stay alive through a combination of casual labor for members of the rich phyles and access to free stuff from the MCs. A considerable burden of high-interest debt, enforced in the last resort by workhouses for defaulters, is apparently the norm among this population.

This system of artificial scarcity is maintained through an international regime called the Common Economic Protocol (CEP). The CEP is enforced by the joint military forces of Protocol Enforcement. Constable Moore, himself Scottish, is a retired Brigadier who served with the Second Brigade of the Third Division of the First Protocol Enforcement Expeditionary Force—largely recruited from the American, British, Ulster Protestant and Uitlander lumpenproletariat, and other thetes of the Anglosphere. Mention is also made of a Nipponese division. The primary purpose of Protocol Enforcement is to enforce “intellectual property” law and secure the Feeds against attack from disgruntled local populations in the territories they pass through.

Although David De Ugarte‘s adoption of the term “phyle” for neo-Venetian platforms like the Las Indias Group was obviously an homage to The Diamond Age, the capitalist phyles in the story are nothing like De Ugarte’s vision of networked platforms incubating cooperative enterprises for commons-based peer production. The neo-Victorians, the only phyle whose internal workings are described in much detail, adhere to a social regime based—as their name suggests—on intense social hierarchy and strict sexual mores. The majority of their members are salaried laborers in the engineering firms like Machine-Phase Systems Limited and Imperial Tectonics Limited that produce most of the phyle’s income. The phyle itself is a giant corporation governed by “Equity Lords” with ownership stakes of various sizes (earl-level, duke-level, and so forth).

The main geographic setting of the story is the southern coast of China—the coastal city-states and the neo-Victorian clave of New Atlantis—along with the regional successor states of the Chinese interior. The relationship Stephenson depicts between the capitalist phyles, Protocol Enforcement and the various Chinese states is reminiscent—deliberately so, obviously—of the era of the Open Door and gunboat diplomacy, with the Rape of Nanking thrown in for good measure.

At the time of the story, the disemployment of hundreds of millions of peasants in the Chinese interior by newly developed synthetic rice from the MCs has resulted in a radical uprising—the Fists of Righteous Harmony—obviously based on the Boxer Rebellion. Peasant armies are marching southward, preparing to invade the coastal city-states and phyles, and burning Feeds along the way. Protocol Enforcement is fighting a losing war against them and gradually retreating southward.

Meanwhile, a coalition of CryptNet, other dissident phyles, and local mini-states allied with the Fists is at work developing a genuine post-scarcity alternative to the Feed, which will destroy the material foundation of the CEP’s global order. This rival technology—the Seed—will use self-assembling nanotech to compile food, tools and goods of all kinds from ambient matter on-site, independently of Feed lines.

The various subplots of the novel involve, directly or indirectly, the complex intrigues between New Atlantis and Protocol Enforcement, which are trying to thwart completion of the Seed, and the coalition struggling to complete it. Central to the latter coalition is the Celestial Kingdom, a city-state in the Greater Shanghai area governed by a caste of Mandarins with a Confucian ideology. Their leadership sees the Seed, a producer-centered technology amenable to village economy, as a way to restore the dignity of the peasantry and create an independent society with an organic social order independent of the CEP’s international order.

The attitude of the capitalist phyles and Protocol Enforcement towards the Seed is, understandably, one of revulsion. John Hackworth, an artifex (senior engineer) in one of the New Atlantan nanotech firms, describes it from his point of view:

“CryptNet’s true desire is the Seed—a technology that, in their diabolical scheme, will one day supplant the Feed, upon which our society and many others are founded. Protocol, to us, has brought prosperity and Peace—to CryptNet, however, it is a contemptible system of oppression. They believe that information has an almost mystical power of free flow and self-replication, as water seeks its own level or sparks fly upward…. It is their view that one day, instead of Feeds terminating in matter compilers, we will have Seeds that, sown on the earth, will sprout up into houses, hamburgers, spaceships, and books—that the Seed will develop inevitably from the Feed, and that upoin it will be founded a more highly evolved society….

Of course, it can’t be allowed—the Feed is not a system of control and oppression, as CryptNet would maintain. It is the only way order can be maintained in modern society—if everyone possessed a Seed, anyone could produce weapons whose destrucive power rivalled that of… nuclear weapons. This is why Protocol Enforcement takes such a dim view of CryptNet’s activities.”

The real reason for his horror—of course—is that the Seed would “dissolve the foundations of New Atlantis and Nippon and all of the societies that had grown up around the concept of a centralized, hierarchical Feed.” More specifically it would, by enabling people to meet all their needs for free and without limit or permission, destroy the wealth of those who lived by claiming ownership over the right to use ideas.

The Mandarins of the Celestial Kingdom, on the other hand, envisioned a high-tech neo-Confucian order in a China “freed from the yoke of the foreign Feed,” in “the coming Age of the Seed.”

“Peasants tended their fields and paddies, and even in times of drought and flood, the earth brought forth a rich harvest: food, of course, but many unfamiliar plants too, fruits that could be made into medicines, bamboo a thousand times stronger than natural varieties, trees that produced synthetic rubber and pellets of clean safe fuel. In an orderly procession the suntanned farmers brought their proceeds to great markets in clean cities free of cholera and strife, where all of the young people were respectful and dutiful scholars and all of the elders were honored and cared for.”

The book ends, as the victorious Fists surge through the coastal claves, with the destruction of the near-complete design for the Seed. The clear implication is that, absent any alternative to the Feed, the Fists’ uprising will collapse and the hegemony of the CEP will reassert itself over China. At the same time there is also a hint—but perhaps this is just my wishful thinking—that the setback to development of the Seed is only a temporary postponement.

Photo by torbakhopper

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