Written by Dana Brown, Director, The Next System Project. Article reposted from The Next System Project

They are our collective heritage as a species—both those resources which we inherit from previous generations and those which we create—managed in such a way as to preserve shared values and community identity. The commons are the collective resources themselves, and the practice of collective economic production and social cooperation used to steward those resources—as well as the values of equity and fairness that underpin them—is often referred to as commoning. Many resources can be managed as commons (though often there are attempts to privatize or “enclose” many of those same resources). These can include knowledge, urban space, land, blood banks, seed banks, the internet, open source software and much more.

Potential Impact

The commons are pervasive and as such, often go unnoticed. However, their thriving existence alongside forms of private and public ownership provides a framework for understanding and creating social value beyond the confines of conventional economics.

The rich traditions and successes of commoning provide models for how to push back against privatization and enclosure, ensuring common resources are protected for future generations. Meanwhile, political economist Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning work has disproved the enduring “tragedy of the commons” hypothesis that collectively managed natural resources would necessarily be overexploited and destroyed over the long term.

Taxing the private use of common resources, combined with
redistribution or other efforts to formalize “commons trusts” to ensure their sustainable stewardship, could help stem the tide of privatization and extraction. The tax proceeds could be used as a form of reparation to communities that have traditionally borne the brunt of extraction of their common resources, and to restore those resources when depleted.

Transformative Characteristics

Commoning is a generative and “value-making” process that can decommodify land and other resources, and demonstrate that communities can manage them effectively without private control or state governance. It asserts a different “universe of value” and worldview from capitalism and unfettered consumerism, and helps communities break free from the scarcity mindset of capital. “The commons does not compete on p rice or quality, but on cooperation,” says commons activist and author David Bollier. It “‘out-cooperates’ the market … by itself eliciting personal commitment and creativity and encouraging collective responsibility and sustainable practices.”

The commons, and related peer-to-peer production models, offer concrete, replicable, and dynamic frameworks for sustainably managing existing resources and creating new ones. They also offer a model for deciding what not to produce in order to most effectively protect our global common resources.

Examples

WIKIPEDIA

Wikipedia is a form of online knowledge commons, “a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and based on a model of openly editable content.” It contains more than 5 million encyclopedia entries (a shared resource), created and edited by its authors and editors (a community) with a set of community-determined content and editing guidelines (rules). Wikipedia displaced once-expensive bound encyclopedias to become one of the world’s largest reference websites, attracting hundreds of millions of unique users per month and engaging over 140,000 active users—a group that anyone with an internet connection can join—in creating and editing content in almost 300 languages.

EL PARQUE DE LA PAPA

Peru’s “potato park” is a community-led conservation project that preserves traditional customs and indigenous rights to the “living library” of genetic information contained in the over 900 varieties of potato found in the Inca Valley region. The native Quechua peoples bred and cultivated these potato varieties for centuries, but biotech and agricultural corporations moved to appropriate the genetic information in the seeds and take commercial control without the consent of the Quechua people. They then forced the Quechua to pay for the seeds their ancestors had worked so hard to breed and protect. Indigenous representatives organized and successfully negotiated the repatriation of the potato varieties and the rights to conserve them in a 32,000-acre potato park. More than 8,000 community members now collectively manage the park  to “promote the cultivation, use and maintenance of diversity of traditional agricultural resources” and to ensure their traditional agricultural resources do not become subject to private intellectual property rights.

Challenges

Most people are not aware of the pervasiveness and enduring nature of the commons and don’t understand commoning as a viable alternative to consumption-driven and competitive economics. The increasing enclosure and privatization of the commons is erasing our collective memory of many enduring commoning practices. For example, control of the majority of the global seed market (a resource once managed as a commons in many communities) is now concentrated in a handful of multinational corporations. Furthermore, scarcity of some common resources may intensify competition for control in the coming years, while others lack adequate infrastructure support and are therefore vulnerable to privatization.  

More Resources

• The Commons Transition Primer:  https://primer.commonstransition.org

• News, analysis and resources on the commons: www.bollier.org

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Our intention with this site is to make the ideas of the Commons and P2P accessible and attractive to commoners and communities worldwide. The site is organized into several sections:

1. Short: Q&A-style illustrated articles presenting some of the P2P Foundation’s main positions
2. Long: In-depth, longer articles
3. Library: Downloadable PDF versions of P2P Foundation research publications
4. More: Video, audio and other content, plus site information and other links

We’ve built some other useful features into this site, too. In the Short articles, Key Concept pop-ups offer definitions of specialized terminology. Case Studies outline the practices of existing commons communities, often adapted from our own research publications. Infographics and illustrations have sections of their own, for easy sharing. To keep things light, we’ve added a tab with a “TLDR” summary (internet slang for “too long/didn’t read”, if you didn’t already know), plus a tab for Resources which links to source and reference materials for the specific article.

This website was produced with the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and is an outgrowth of our previous Commons Transition and P2P Primer in print form, which was co-authored with Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis and produced in cooperation with the Transnational Institute (TNI). It will be followed in 2018 by a publication from Westminster Press titled Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto and written by Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis and Alex Pazaitis. We’d like to thank Heike Loeschmann, Joanna Barelkowska and Joerg Haas of the Böll Foundation for their consistent support and feedback during the process.

The Commons Transition Primer website project was coordinated, edited and/or co-written by Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel (except where other authorship is noted). Elena Martínez Vicente led the design and UX, Mercè Moreno Tarrés provided the illustrations while Javier Arturo Rodriguez took care of the technical details and backend. Thanks are due to David Bollier, Vasilis Kostakis and Rajesh Makwana for reviewing the texts in the “Shorts” section. Special thanks are also due for the technical expertise and last-minute interventions of our colleague, Lisha Sterling.

We offer thanks to the growing, worldwide P2P Foundation community for continuing to enthusiastically share, research, promote and experiment with the ideas and tools of the Commons and P2P. We hope you enjoy this site (and your feedback is welcome!)

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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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The commons is….

• A social system for the long-term stewardship of resources that preserves shared values and community identity.
• A self-organized system by which communities manage resources (both depletable and and replenishable) with minimal or no reliance on the Market or State.
• The wealth that we inherit or create together and must pass on, undiminished or enhanced, to our children.  Our collective wealth includes the gifts of nature, civic infrastructure, cultural works and traditions, and knowledge.
• A sector of the economy (and life!) that generates value in ways that are often taken for granted – and often jeopardized by the Market-State.

There is no master inventory of commons because a commons arises whenever a given community decides it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with special regard for equitable access, use and sustainability.

The commons is not a resource.  It is a resource plus a defined community and the protocols, values and norms devised by the community to manage its resources.  Many resources urgently need to be managed as commons, such as the atmosphere, oceans, genetic knowledge and biodiversity.

There is no commons without commoning – the social practices and norms for managing a resource for collective benefit.  Forms of commoning naturally vary from one commons to another because humanity itself is so varied.  And so there is no “standard template” for commons; merely “fractal affinities” or shared patterns and principles among commons.  The commons must be understood, then, as a verb as much as a noun.  A commons must be animated by bottom-up participation, personal responsibility, transparency and self-policing accountability.

One of the great unacknowledged problems of our time is the enclosure of the commons, the expropriation and commercialization of shared resources, usually for private market gain.  Enclosure can be seen in the patenting of genes and lifeforms, the use of copyrights to lock up creativity and culture, the privatization of water and land, and attempts to transform the open Internet into a closed, proprietary marketplace, among many other enclosures.

Enclosure is about dispossession.  It privatizes and commodifies resources that belong to a community or to everyone, and dismantles a commons-based culture (egalitarian co-production and co-governance) with a market order (money-based producer/consumer relationships and hierarchies).  Markets tend to have thin commitments to localities, cultures and ways of life; for any commons, however, these are indispensable.

The classic commons are small-scale and focused on natural resources; an estimated two billion people depend upon commons of forests, fisheries, water, wildlife and other natural resources for their everyday subsistence.  But the contemporary struggle of commoners is to find new structures of law, institutional form and social practice that can enable diverse sorts of commons to work at larger scales and to protect their resources from market enclosure.

Open networks are a natural hosting infrastructure for commons.  They provide accessible, low-cost spaces for people to devise their own forms of governance, rules, social practices and cultural expression. That’s why the Internet has spawned so many robust, productive commons: free and open source software, Wikipedia and countless wikis, more than 10,000 open access scholarly journals, the open educational resources (OER) movement, the open data movement, sites for collaborative art and culture, Fab Labs that blend global design with local production, and much else. In an age of capital-driven network platforms such as Facebook, Google and Uber, however, digital commons must take affirmative steps to protect the wealth they generate.

New commons forms and practices are needed at all levels – local, regional, national and global – and there is a need for new types of federation among commoners and linkages between different tiers of commons.  Trans-national commons are especially needed to help align governance with ecological realities and serve as a force for reconciliation across political boundaries.  Thus to actualize the commons and deter market enclosures, we need innovations in law, public policy, commons-based governance, social practice and culture.  All of these will manifest a very different worldview than now prevails in established governance systems, particularly those of the State and Market.

This infographic was produced for Commons Transition and P2P: a Primer, a joint publication between the P2P Foundation and the Transnational Institute.

Originally published in Bollier.org. Photo by Dykam

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Peer production is on the rise as a new pathway of value creation, where peer-to-peer infrastructures allow people to communicate, self-organise and co-create digital commons of knowledge, software and design. Think of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia, the myriad of free and open-source projects such as Linux, or open design and hardware communities such as Wikihouse, L’Atelier Paysan, Sensorica or Farmhack.

The commons ecosystem

At the core of this new value model are the ‘productive communities’, which include both paid and unpaid labour. Around these commons, an economy of products and services that are based on the commons pools, but also adding to them, is formed. This is done by enterprises that create ‘entrepreneurial coalitions’ around the commons ecosystem and the productive communities.

These contributions to the digital commons are enabled by collaborative infrastructures of production, and supportive legal and institutional infrastructures, empowered by ‘for-benefit’ (as opposed to for-profit) associations. These foundations may create digital commons depositories, protect against infringements of open and sharing licenses, organise fundraising drives for infrastructure, and assist knowledge-sharing through local, national and international conferences.

Typically, the non-profit foundations of free and open-source communities, such as the Mozilla Foundation, manage and enable the infrastructure of co-operation. They defend the use of open licenses, sometimes provide training or certification, but overall their task is to enable and empower co-operation. These institutions generally function with formal democratic procedures, such as elections.

From communities to societies

These foundations operate as the ‘polis’, i.e. mini-states of the commons-based peer production ecosystems. Moving from what we can see of the existing practice at the micro-level, to the vision of a full social form, we can see that there is also a need for a ‘state form’.

In our vision, a commons-centric society would ideally have:

• a productive civil society that would contribute to the commons,
• a generative market that would create added value around the commons,
• a partner state, which is emerging prefiguratively in some urban practices, such as the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons or some policies of the Barcelona En Comú citizen platform.

In this vision, the partner state would be the guarantor of civic rights, but also of the equal contributory potential of all citizens. Without this function, communities could have unequal access to resources and capabilities, perpetuating inequality. In our vision, the state form would gradually lose its separateness from civil society, by implementing radically democratic procedures and practices.

Public-good institutions like these are necessary in the face of rising individualistic political philosophies, such as anarcho-capitalism or libertarianism, that only see individuals making contracts with each other. Society needs its specific forms of expression. The state is one of them. And the state imaginary we argue for, synchronised with the special characteristics of digital technologies, could be that of the partner state. Watch this space.

Michel Bauwens is the founder of the P2P Foundation. Vasilis Kostakis is a senior researcher at Tallinn University of Technology and a research affiliate at Harvard University.

Lead image: Wikihouse is an open-source library of house-building plans. Photo: Wikihouse Foundation

Originally published in Red Pepper.

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Commons include not only the gifts of nature,like water and land, but also shared assets or creative work, such as cultural and knowledge artifacts. Commons are a shared resource, co-governed by its user community, according to the norms of that community. Considering the historical depths of the Commons, it’s difficult to agree on one definition that encompasses its full potential for social, economic, cultural and political change. The Commons is not the resource, the community that gathers around it, or the rules of how is is managed, it’s the evolving interaction between all these things. Why is the Commons steadily gathering attention as a concept and practice? And what happens next?

The hollowing out of the welfare state has resulted in an increased mistrust in political parties and representative democracy in many parts of the world. On one extreme, the void is being filled by far-right narratives that satisfy the disillusioned by offering over-simplified analyses and demonisation of the “other”, the most vulnerable and least privileged among us, often refugees and marginalized peoples. In contrast, a barely reinvigorated left has seen many of its potential solutions proven unworkable, whether through bureaucratic excess, institutional blockages, or a simple lack of popular commitment.

Meanwhile, the institutional crises of our time persist. Our current world system also suffers from a deeply counterproductive logic. This system, based on infinite growth within the confines of finite resources, was enabled by the false concept of abundance in the limited material world. A second false concept of scarcity in the infinite immaterial world gave rise to legal and technical restrictions on social innovation through the use of copyrights, patents, etc. Overturning these false principles will be key priorities for a sustainable civilization. To this end, we must recognize that our natural resources are indeed limited, and base our physical economy in this recognition to achieve a sustainable, steady-state economy, and at the same time facilitate free, creative cooperation by reforming copyright and other restrictive regimes.

The livelihoods of roughly two billion people worldwide depend on some form of commons, yet many of these commons remain unprotected and vulnerable, in danger of privatization or sale. Similarly, it is not unconceivable to expect that an analogous number of individuals are co-creating shared resources online. These potentially massive affinity networks lack a common identifier or unifying vision, yet we recognise the logic of commoning as a shared thread.

We use the phrase “Commons transition” to describe a process of facilitating open, participatory input across society, prioritizing the needs of those people and environments affected by policy decisions over market or bureaucratic needs. The protection and empowering of existing commons, along with the creation of new ones, are keystones. A Commons transition will also require the creation of a commons-centric economy within the existing capitalist system, but seeking to transcend it with commoners at the helm. This implies uniting the forces which support the commons, generative and ethical markets, and the development of an enabling and empowering state which enables the social production of value, ie: “commoning”. It also means discovering synergies among the prefigurative forces that create the new economy, finding political expressions for them, and enabling them to act at the political level along with other emancipatory social and political forces.

A broad societal transition, different from the classic left narratives of previous centuries, is possible through the integrative strategy of a Commons transition. Why would this strategy be effective?

History shows that political revolutions do not precede deep reconfigurations of power, but rather complete them. New movements or classes and their practices precede the social revolutions that make their power and modalities dominant. How does that relate the idea of a Commons transition? There is ample data to support the kind of prefigurative existence of a growing number of commoners who could form the basis of a historical subject at the forefront of this phase transition — a very strong start.

Factor in the changing cultural expectations of millennial and post-millennial generations, and their requirements for meaningful engagements and work, which are hardly met by the current regime. The increasing vulnerability of work under neoliberalism drives the search for alternatives, and the cultural force of P2P self-organizing and corresponding mentalities fuels the growth of commons-oriented networks and communities.

Also, commons-based peer production is a model that could create a context of truly sustainable production. It is almost impossible to imagine a shift to sustainable circular economy practices under the current intellectual property driven, privatizing regime. The thermodynamic efficiencies needed for sustainable production may be found in the systematic applications of the principles inherent in the commons-centric economy. The watchwords are free, fair and sustainable, the three interrelated elements needed for a shift to more reasonable economy, polity and, ultimately, culture.

Finally, the crisis of the left itself, now relegated to the management of the crisis of neoliberalism itself, points to the vital need of renewing the strategic thinking of the forces that aim for human emancipation and a sustainable life-world. All of the above form a strategy for a multi-modal commons-centric transition, offering a positive way out of the current crisis and a way to respond to the new demands of the commons-influenced generations. The Commons and the prefigurative forms of a new value regime already exist. The commoners are already here, and they’re already commoning; in other words, the Commons transition has begun.

This article is based on A Commons Transition and P2P Primer, a short publication from the P2P Foundation and the Transnational Institute examining the potential of commons-based peer production to radically re-imagine our economies, politics and relationship with nature.

Written by Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, Stacco Troncoso, Ann Marie Utratel for the P2P Foundation. The P2P Foundation (officially, The Foundation for P2P Alternatives) is a non-profit organization and global network dedicated to advocacy and research of commons oriented peer to peer (P2P) dynamics in society.

Photo by Paul-Vincent Roll on Unsplash

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How bad is our present political landscape? Let’s take stock. The crush of “lesser-evilism”? Check. Alt-right’s metastatic spread? Check. Once-radiant left options (like Syriza or Podemos) now tarnished, in part by their inability to make good on promises? Check. Overall, pretty bad.

The excesses of neoliberal capitalism may have finally eroded any remaining trace of its intellectual credibility. However odious, these excesses had become comfortable for many people, offering a false sense of security and predictable margins of action. Prolonged austerity politics and the pillage of the welfare state have left large numbers of people frustrated, hopeless, and angry, though, and the awakened right-populist movements have exploited this with alarming consequences. But without an apparent alternative, political engagement can seem limited to a pointless choice: scramble on loose rocks over the familiar but shifting ground of globalized capitalism, or hitch one’s wagon to a careening carload of 21st century hubris, i.e. Brexit, Trumpism, the alt- or far-right. Is it time to give up on the representative democracy experiment, or are there any active models for more humane, participatory politics?

The political context described above has been outlined in a good many contemporary books and articles, but sadly, there are seldom any viable alternatives offered to stem the tide of inevitable ruin. This article describes an attempt to reimagine our political systems emancipated from rollercoaster markets and bureaucracies. Based in existing, effective political movements that have been winning elections in a variety of locations, this is an account of radical innovations in governance, production, care work, the stewardship of our cultural, digital and natural heritage, and of a politics that lays a bedrock for bottom-up system rebuilding. This is the politics of the commons and peer to peer (P2P), an expansion on the shared creation and management of common resources, and its recent successful eruption in municipal governments.

Commons in the Time of Monsters

As Gramsci said (or didn’t say ^[1]), “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”. After nearly 40 years of progressive neoliberalization and social decomposition, contemporary politics has been very publicly upended by a misogynistic, xenophobic and financially privileged “new right” intent on coupling its politics of hate onto the apparatus of state power.

So, where is the margin for action, if change from within is effectively blocked by the structural constraints of statist politics and the electoral arena? The Leninist notion of achieving state power with or without popular consent, and as a certain precursor to equitable and lasting social change, has proven misguided: the next system won’t just fall into place at the pull of a lever.

Amid this increasingly bleak political landscape, affinity-based networks and communities using P2P dynamics and building commons have been taking action. Small-scale innovations in many fields are paving the way for true, sustainable resource management and grounded social cohesion. In governance, food growing, service provision, science, research and development, education, even finance and currency, these community-enabled developments demonstrate how differently our lives could be organized. Many of these place-based efforts are being documented and replicated worldwide through the Internet, in the process re-seeding the knowledge Commons from which they draw. This is done through commons enabling, aka P2P (peer-to-peer, person-to-person, people-to-people) technologies, which are gaining momentum as forces for constructive change. They enable small group dynamics at higher levels of complexity and enable the reclamation of power.

Unfamiliar with the Commons? Click here to enlarge.

With this power, people can create innovations in production, open book accounting, and the stewardship of natural, cultural or digitally derived commons — but also in governance. Together, all of this forms the building blocks of a truly bottom-up system. Could all this really coalesce into something that, in the future, might be called “post-capitalism”? Only if those who identify as commoners recognize, promote and develop these systems and increase their cultural and, vitally, their political influence, while remembering that there are other players already on the field using similar means towards very different ends.

Prefigurative social arrangements and provisioning approaches are some of the key components for constructing sensible alternatives, but they are not developed in isolation. Instead, they are built within the constraints of existing systems. Likewise, whether through the enclosures ^[2] brought on by neoliberalism or through authoritarian, exclusionary hate politics, the ‘normal’ conditions people expect or aspire to will undoubtedly shrink. This would affect things people have taken for granted to some degree, including job security, pensions, unemployment, sensible working hours and conditions, fairness. As an effect, the ‘wiggle room’ assumed for the operations of those productive communities will inevitably compress.

Seen from outside the Western context, this wiggle room could be considered as ‘privilege’. Under the market-maximizing dictates of Brussels, such privileges seemed like they were on their way out in the EU. But the man behind the curtain was revealed in 2008, and a sudden flare of counter-political activity reached its peak of public attention in 2011. In 2017, the question is not theoretical, but hands-on practical: how do we build the new world in the shell of the old – and before the shell squeezes shut.

The post-2011 protest movements never quite got it together, politically speaking, well or quickly enough to counter the rising hate wave from the right. The contemporary European political landscape shows a populist reaction against global capitalism, but by harking back to a past that never was. Adding insult to injury, we see these xenophobic constructs have built their social base not just with deft internet and social media skills, but also by using P2P tactics. That’s a bit of salt in the wound, given that P2P tactics and tools have largely been promoted by people working for a more inclusive and just world, not one that seeks to “otherize” and exclude.

We cannot afford to forget that financial interests will always favor extreme right wing or fascist options that safeguard their stake, and that any redistributive political options will be harshly and publicly ridiculed, or worse. With the noxious spirit of the thirties rebounding, there’s not a moment to spare; patience now would be a deadly strategy. It’s time to occupy the collective cultural imagination with compelling and practical political alternatives and expose the normalization of neoliberalism as deadly propaganda; to expose the numbing spectacle (Brexit, Trump, etc.) as yet another synthetic opioid addiction.

This is why it’s time for the Commons movement to become more overtly politically active. Beyond self-organized production, care work, ecological stewardship, even beyond ethical generative markets, it’s time for more effective political engagement, not only to protect the essentials of the welfare state model, but to transcend it with a radically reimagined politics that facilitates social value creation and community-organized practices. There are models for this commons-oriented political engagement in Spain’s municipal movements, which the rest of this article will outline. To be clear, “political” describes not only political representation, but also the actionable rights of all those affected by political decisions – the public sphere. There’s a false dichotomy between wanting to build new alternatives now and wanting to enable change by hacking existing political channels. Both approaches, prefigurative and institutional, can work together.

Vanguardism: a 21st century cautionary tale

Now it’s time to look back at the origins of a particularly visible political party, one that offered the promise of a more inclusive, commons-oriented political process, but which eventually failed to deliver. The spirit of the commons was present in its nascence, though, in public assemblies. This factor is one to keep in mind while considering the eventual rise of municipalist parties.

In January 2014, a group of political science professors from the Autonomous University of Madrid found themselves gaining some popularity on Spanish national television. They announced the formation of a new political party, one that would demand:

“…a politics that goes back onto the streets that talks like the majority of people who have had enough. (…) Our demand for a greater generosity from representatives, for a greater horizontality and transparency, for a return of the republican values of public virtue and social justice, for the recognition of our plurinational and pluricultural reality is more real than ever. It is decades since our desire for making our own decisions and answering our own questions was so real.” (Mover Ficha Manifesto)

In the European Elections four months later, the new party won 5 seats in the European Parliament with more than 1.2 million votes.

Of course, that party is Podemos, whose trajectory indicates what a commons-oriented political party can — and more pointedly, should not — do. Their early months impart what is politically feasible in urgent circumstances, and show the power that can be harnessed by appealing to people’s’ hopes while articulating their needs and desires. The early success of Podemos is due to their work on two distinct-yet-related levels: mass media and network media.

Having cut their teeth on prime-time TV debates, Podemos’ most visible figures (chiefly male) made for great entertainment, clobbering the arguments of the chronic political class, which they dubbed la casta (“the caste”, a jibe implying a privileged class).

It wasn’t all show business. They were savvy enough to capture the networked, horizontalist politics of the 15-M movement. A staggering number of geographical- and interest-based assemblies (called “circulos”) were enabled and bolstered online through tools like Reddit, Loomio and others.

With its legion of tactics, Podemos became a totem appealing to many types. One type is the once politically apathetic actor, who sees in Podemos’ secretary general, Pablo Iglesias, a contrarian avatar through which to channel their disdain for the middle-class destroying “casta”. Next would be the old guard leftist, disenchanted with the Social Democrat (PSOE) party’s devotion to neoliberalism and austerity politics. Similarly, there are those who had been disillusioned after placing their bets on the more leftist outgrowths of the Spanish Communist Party. The last type, obvious but worth mentioning, is the activist, who found or rediscovered their political voice in the squares during 15-M and/or the preceding alter-globalization movement.

Of course, we’re not here to tell the story of Podemos. That story has turned darker and duller over time. Once high on the taste of popularity and leadership in the polls, the Podemos ruling committee slanted towards becoming a vanguardist “electoral machine”, taking power on behalf of those left behind. It began to look like Podemos would win the elections at all costs and bring liberation to the silenced masses — whether the masses wanted this imposed from above, or not.

Three years later, the results are plain to see. Surpassed by both the Social Democrats and the somehow-still-ruling Popular Party (a den of Franco apologists and Brussels bootlickers), Podemos failed to make “fear change sides”, as once they boasted.

Meanwhile, across the Mediterranean, Greece proffers another cautionary tale: SYRIZA, the party from the “little country that said ‘no’”. Except that, after saying ‘no’, the little country’s political representatives, now disconnected from the social movements that lofted them to power, kept on playing the rigged game rather than build one fresh.

The story does not end here. A new political milieu arose between 2014 and 2015, led by the third profile mentioned above: the post 15-M activists, stepping up and into politics. They wanted to be the creators of representative politics, not its recipients, and to act as facilitators for many other voices to be included. The genesis of Spain’s municipalist coalitions tells a new story, describing keys to a successful commons-based political strategy that creates tangible change.

Proclamations of a movement’s death, greatly exaggerated

The origins of this other story lie in the apparent decay of the 15-M movement. The word “apparent” is key here – as long as we are speaking of visibility, we must acknowledge the Occupy movement as part of this disappearing act.

In 2011, Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” was not Donald Trump, but the protester. This marked the apex of media-visibility for the networked movements demanding attention by standing their ground and announcing their presence through encampments, which provided a compact mass of human profiles against a mainstream media-friendly backdrop. Here, we should draw a distinction between how the 15-M and Occupy encampments disbanded and were disbanded.

In Spain, the activists took a page from the Art of War and voluntarily dispersed their large-scale occupations, decentralizing them into neighborhood assemblies. In the US, the FBI coordinated with the Department of Homeland Security, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, private sector players (notably banks), local law enforcement, and mayors of several prominent cities to first infiltrate and then violently dismantle the occupations. If we limit the import of Occupy to those few, highly visible months in the squares, we can see that it had not so much “died” as it was assassinated.

In both Spain and the US, the media — behaving as if geospatial proximity is the only thing holding affinity networks together— rushed to pronounce these and all their sister movements worldwide to be defunct. So much for the person of the year in 2011! This was not a natural passing but a brutal attempt at disappearing a large movement. However, to paraphrase Mark Twain, “proclamations of the movement’s death have been greatly exaggerated”. If these movements still live and breathe, though, we must ask ourselves with whose complicity and consent they have been labeled “failures”.

Think of a sugar cube. Held in your hand it is compact, with a recognizable shape and texture, easy to measure and describe. Drop the sugar cube into a coffee cup and stir that around. Magic! The cube has disappeared. Take a sip, though, and you’ll agree that the flavor has changed.

In a nutshell, this describes the argument that the 15-M/Occupy/Syntagma/various local movements are alive and well, albeit in distributed and less immediately apparent ways. For those willing to look, their effects are readily identifiable. Remember that not even six years have passed since the occupations; this is not a tale of hippies turning into yuppies. This is the story of a movement that refuses to take the news of its own demise as a binding contract.

In the US, you can perceive how Occupy infused the Bernie Sanders campaign (also undermined by entrenched interests), and recently we can see its influence in the Women’s Marches, strikes and parts of the anti-Trump movement.

In Spain, however, these activists, people with real memories and lived experiences, chose to politically organize, and they actually won – not once, but multiple times in multiple locations.

The Rise of the Urban Commons

In the spring of 2014, spurred on by Podemos’ success in the European elections, a group of activists met in el Patio Maravillas, one of Madrid’s most prominent occupied social centers. “We’re going to win this city”, they announced. They began organizing, enabling unprecedented levels of citizen participation and facilitating a common space for previously unaffiliated and disaggregated political actors. Anyone who agreed with the basic principles and wanted to be present could propose him or herself as a candidate on fully open and participatory electoral lists.

A month or so earlier, activists from Barcelona launched a manifesto to invite existing social movements and political organizations to converge around four fundamental objectives:

1. Guaranteeing the citizenry’s basic rights and a decent life for all,
2. Fostering an economy that prioritizes social and environmental justice,
3. The participative democratization of institutions,
4. To meet an ethical commitment towards citizens.

The call for convergence was an astounding success, and Guanyem Barcelona, publicly represented by anti-eviction and right to housing campaigner Ada Colau, begins its yearlong mutation into Barcelona en Comú, an “instrumental” electoral coalition comprising a variety of actors from social movements and anti-establishment political parties working together to take back the city.

Ignored or decried in the popular media, these coalitions, much like the 15-M and Occupy encampments, replicated themselves in other locales, forming alliances and swarming around shared values and beliefs. The process was messy, effervescent and busy. No one had tried this before and there is no instruction manual; in practice, it can only be written together.

Against poll expectations, a hostile media, and entrenched political interests, these parties overwhelmingly won in Spain’s main cities, not only Madrid and Barcelona, but also in Valencia, A Coruña, Zaragoza, and Cadiz. Podemos, although a participant in many of these coalitions, chose to run the regional (as opposed to the city) ballot on their own. The result? Zero victories in all the places where the citizens’ coalitions had triumphed. In the city of Madrid, where the same census group could vote for the city (Ahora Madrid) and regional (Podemos) ballot, Podemos got just half the number of votes won by Ahora Madrid.

Image by Maria Castelló Solbés. Click here for more on the origin of Spain’s municipalist movements.

Spain’s municipalist coalitions were the result of a number of movements representing changes in cultures, mindsets and relations to power. The most notable among these is 15-M and, unlike Podemos, the coalitions can be considered its true political byproducts. Prior to the 2014-2015 electoral cycle, 15-M had also developed strong transversal relations with movements around housing, public health and education and culture. Known as “las mareas”, or “citizen’s tides”, these were characterized by self-organized protests and capacity building that, although inclusive of traditional actors such as labour unions and political parties, were truly multi-constituent in nature. For example, the public health marea would include healthcare professionals, patients, civil workers, health reformers, hospital staff, specific disease-focused associations and help groups, etc., as well as all supporters of the public health service. 15-M itself was also a product of already existing tendencies, with people who had been working in digital activism, free culture, de-growth, the commons and a host of other movements.

Today, the municipalist platforms coordinate among themselves to share resources and best practices, functioning as trans-local affinity networks. Although mainly focused on providing real world solutions to their constituencies, the coalitions share a number of notable features. One of the most refreshing is that their attitude towards political discourse is considerably more feminized, a contrast to the old guard and masculine attitudes typically found in institutional politics.

The municipalist focus on participation and radical democracy, honed through many street assemblies, has been refined into a shared “código ético” or ethical code, which shapes the platforms behaviors within the institutions. The code acts as both a glue and draw for the participants, again not limited to party staff, but to all who want to feel involved. The main features are as follows:

• No revolving doors (no cycling through public/private positions)
• Salary cuts
• Participative program
• Open primaries — no party quotas, and open to anyone
• Voluntary/citizen self-financing, and rejection of institutional or bank financing

Beyond their local concerns and trans-local alliances, all the municipalist platforms have their eye on the transnational dimension in order to form a network of “Rebel Cities”. This, as a practice, mirrors the locally embedded but globally networked practices of P2P productive communities. In addition, the multi-constituent approach seen in the citizen tides is mirrored within the coalitions, which, although inclusive of established political parties, are notably non-partisan as they all reflect the interests of wide breadth of civil society actors.

And they lived happily ever after? Of course not: the activists-turned-political representatives face an unwaveringly hostile media environment, which exaggerates their blunders (or invents them when convenient) while burying their achievements. After four years of precarity and engaged activism, these individuals face 60+ hour workweeks while clashing against the entrenched realities of horizontalist bureaucracy, holding minority seats within electoral alliances with Social Democrats. The pluralistic nature of the citizens’ coalitions have unsurprisingly led to incoherencies and gaffes and, perhaps worst of all, a noticeable abandonment of direct-action tactics and counter-power building efforts. Still, they soldier on, and the list of benefits and advances (cancellations of public contracts with multi-nationals, participatory budgeting, more gender-balanced literature and representation, increased public spending, anti-gentrification strategies, basic income pilots, direct-democracy mechanisms…) is plain for all to see.

The best of the truly good news is that Spain’s municipalist coalitions are not alone. Progressive cities worldwide are enabling and empowering the act of commoning. Rather than directing what the citizenry can do for itself and its environments, these “Rebel Cities” or, “Fearless Cities” as a recent event called them, are listening to commoners’ voices and creating spaces for ordinary people to roll up their sleeves and manage those matters that concern them most directly. Cities like Ghent, Belgium; Bologna, Italy; Amsterdam, Holland; Frome, England; Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Naples, Italy; Montreal, Canada; Jackson, USA; Lille, France; Bristol, UK and Valparaiso, Chile are examples. Their people are increasing transparency, enabling participatory budgeting, turning empty lots into community gardens, co-creating skill and tool sharing programs, and facilitating the creation of social care co-ops among many other actions relevant in their local contexts.

Beyond the city level, we now also find pan-European efforts to bring the practices of commoning to the institutions, while not losing sight of the necessary mutual recognition needed for the Commons movement to emancipate itself from markets and state as it radically re-imagines these. In November 2016, a group of 150 commoners from all over Europe gathered in Brussels to lay the foundations for a united and strong movement, and the European Commons Assembly was born. Building on several weeks’ collective work in policy proposals, the Assembly sat in European Parliament to explore the ECA as a platform and the commons as a powerful paradigm for policymaking.

Commons Transition: Building the political lexicon of social governance from below

The lexicon and practices of commoning are evident in how these coalitions, Rebel Cities and transnational assemblies have formed and are articulating their governance. With a focus on transparency and citizen participation, and taking advantage of open-source P2P technologies, they prefigure many aspects of the politics of a better future. The challenge ahead lies in applying the network logics that have been so successful in Spain to recover the latent power of Occupy and 15-M and build resilient, more feminized and ethically coherent, transnational political movements.

In the same way that prefigurative strategies incorporate social and environmental priorities into their informal constitutions, without waiting for markets or state to deal with such ‘externalities’, the municipalist ethical code can form the kernel of a set of political guidelines to be hard-coded into commons-oriented coalition principles, bringing fresh accountability to contemporary politics.

Potential success is also about keeping it real and relatable. The old left has traditionally communicated in abstracts, which tends to create rather than solves problems. At the same time, the “new” populist left of Syriza, Podemos and Bolivarian Socialism seems satisfied making grand paternalistic promises, resorting to throwing blame rather than proposing participatory, unalienated and feasible actions. In a culture where the elderly self-organise affinity groups through social networks and informal, participatory communities emerge to address the shortcomings of a decaying welfare state, people are demonstrating that they want to have a say in how things are run. They do not want to have someone paid exponentially more to say it on their behalf. Can a Commons politics address and support this shift towards self-organization?

The vision is to develop the emerging commons and P2P political movement at higher levels of complexity — the regional, national and transnational levels — while preserving the characteristics of local, real-place dynamism. By engaging the creativity and input of those communities most affected by political processes, commons-based practices can nurture a sense of identity that can be harnessed for effective political action. The integrative narrative of the Commons invites citizens’ direct political engagement outside the restrictive bureaucracies of the market state and economies.

Imagine a radically reconfigured and democratically accountable structure. One that, while preserving the more desirable characteristics of the Welfare State — social and public health provision and large infrastructure management and upkeep — radically democratizes them. It would do away with the State’s cozy symbiosis with market entities, while deconstructing its pernicious monopolies over money creation and exchange, and property and judicial rights. A second radical set of measures would prohibit the structural enforcement of inequality and the often violent repression of emancipatory alternatives. This structure would function in much the same way as foundations do in the Open Source software economy: providing the infrastructure for cooperation and the creation and upkeep of commons but not directing the process of social value creation and distribution. In other words, it would empower and protect the practice of commoning.

This enabling metastructure — often referred to as “The Partner State” — would also take on new functions derived from already existing P2P/Commons practices. Among these, we would see a promotion of real, needs-oriented entrepreneurship, bolstered by explicit recognition and support of bottom-up productive infrastructures, such as Open Coops, mesh wireless networks or community renewables through public-Commons partnerships. It would allow commoners to repurpose or take over unused or underutilised public buildings for social ends while giving legal recognition to the act of commoning, whether through copyleft-inspired property-law hacks or through a longer process of gradually institutionalizing commons practices. Its grassroots democratizing ethos would create new financing mechanisms and debt-free public money creation, which, alongside social currencies, could fund environmentally regenerative work and the creation of new, distributed Open-source infrastructure. These would be supported by taxation schemes favouring the types of labor described above, while penalizing speculation, parasitic rents and negative social and environmental externalities. The overall system has to be kept in check through a pervasive culture of participatory politics — made feasible through its attendant pedagogy — to involve a newly enfranchised citizenry in the deliberation and real time consultation of political and legislative issues and budgeting. In issues of power, the Partner State shifts to being a fluid facilitator to assist and emancipate the bottom-up counter-power that keeps it in check.

Is this narrative Utopian? No more than the “what are their demands…?” proposals of Occupy and 15-M. In fact, many of the Partner State practices described above are already being enacted by the Fearless Cities. Accusations of utopianism are used dismissively to enclose the commons of the imagination. People need courage (and encouragement) to imagine something better in human nature, more than inevitable conflict and self-interest. History, despite its observable patterns, is not deterministic. Nothing suddenly materializes from detailed concepts into fully formed realities; there was no group of wise men sitting around in 15th century Florence proclaiming: “…and we shall create Capitalism! And it will progress through creative destruction! And we shall have high frequency algorithmic trading!” or any such nonsense. Instead, if we look, we can identify various socio-technological trends including the rise of the merchant class, the printing press, double book accounting, all of which would proceed from the 18th century to form what we recognize now as “capitalism”.

Back in our present-day chaos, applying a Commons Transition to the field of politics entails creating a new, inclusive political narrative that harnesses the best practices of three distinct progressive trends: Openness (e.g. Pirate parties), Fairness (e.g. New Left) and Sustainability (e.g. Green parties). The optimal game plan for building a new political vision fit for the challenges of our time involves building bridges between these three trends, precisely what the municipalists have achieved and translated into political and legislative power.

This vision for a new politics must also promote other underplayed concerns such as race, gender, and reproductive justice, and radically diversifying political representation in response to increased interest in balance — at the least, being sure that the representative picture is not always and only straight, white men, particularly in leadership roles. Take into account that women spearheaded the municipalist candidacies that triumphed in Barcelona and Madrid.

There is a need for deeper respect towards rural and deindustrialized areas, where P2P dynamics can usher in workable solutions and grounded, bio-regionally based political engagement. Inclusive by nature, the Commons as applied to politics can enable grassroots political participation by affected individuals and communities. However, this new narrative must be grounded in scalable, existing best practices that are accessible to change makers and civil-society organizations, not only to existing institutions.

Taken together, these successful municipalist occupations of power structures show that the logic of the Commons, coupled with democratic, participatory relations enabled by P2P systems, can reinvigorate and instill a new sense of purpose in today’s political field. If we can imagine a commons-oriented future including a commons politics, it practically becomes a moral imperative to do everything in our power to bring that better future to reality. In this fight in the time of monsters, the fight between David and Goliath, why not be David?^[3] He won after all and, after seeing what the municipalists had to overcome, perhaps so can we.

This article expands on themes showcased on Commons Transition and P2P: a Primer, a short publication from the P2P Foundation and the Transnational Institute examining the potential of commons-based peer production to radically re-imagine our economies, politics and relationship with nature. Download it here.

Images: Francisco de Goya, Choon Goon, Melissa Stanley, TOr ghEH, Elena Martínez Vicente, Barcex, Time Magazine, Maria Castelló Solbés, Ars Electronica, Scott Webb,

Footnotes

^[1] Did Gramsci actually say that? This hotly contested quote nonetheless captures the current world juncture.

^[2] From 1776 to 1825, the English Parliament passed more than 4,000 Acts that served to appropriate common lands from commoners, chiefly to the benefit of politically connected landowners. These enclosures of the commons seized about 25 percent of all cultivated acreage in England, according to historian Raymond Williams, and concentrated ownership of it in a small minority of the population. These “lawful” enclosures also dispossessed millions of citizens, swept away traditional ways of life, and forcibly introduced the new economy of industrialization, occupational specialties and large-scale production. Nowadays we use the term “enclosure” to denounce heinous acts such the ongoing privatization of intellectual property, the expropriation and massive land grabs occurring in Africa and other continents, the imposition of digital right management digital content, the patenting of seeds and the human genome, and more. This modern tendency towards enclosures and turning relationships into services, and commons into commodities, has been described by Commons scholar David Bollier as “The great invisible tragedy of our time”.

^[3] This idea was originally voiced by anti-fracking activist Sandra Steingraber.

Originally published at commondreams.org

The post Commons in the time of monsters: How P2P Politics can change the world, one city at a time appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The beautifully designed fifty-page booklet does not dumb down the topic; it simply makes some of the complexities associated with commons and peer production more accessible to the general reader in a single document. The primer explains the basics of commons and peer-to-peer production (P2P), how they interrelate, their movements and trends, and “how a Commons transition is poised to reinvigorate work, politics, production, and care, both interpersonal and environmental.”

The short video above explains that “the commons are a self-organized system by which local communities manage shared resources with minimal or no reliance on the market or the state.  P2P means collaboration, ‘peer-to-peer’, ‘people-to-people’ or ‘person-to-person.’  P2P is a type of non-hierarchical and non-coercive social relations that enables a transition to a fairer economy for people and nature.”

Besides introducing the commons & P2P, the booklet suggests five practical guidelines, with examples, for achieving a transition to a commons/P2P-based society:

1.  Pool resources wherever possible;

2.  Introduce reciprocity;

3.  Shift from redistribution to predistribution and empowerment;

4.  Subordinate capitalism; and

5.  Organize at the local and global levels.

Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, notes that because previous social revolutions have not always succeeded so well,

“what matters is the reconstruction of prefigurative value-creating production systems first, to make peer production an autonomous and full mode of production which can sustain itself and its contributors; and the reconstruction of social and political power which is associated and informed by this new social configuration.

The organic events will unfold with or without these forces, ready or not, but if we’re not ready, the human cost might be very steep. Therefore the motto should be: contribute to the phase transition first; and be ready for the coming sparks and organic events that will require the mobilization of all.”

Kudos to Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel for the text of the primer as well to designer Elena Martínez for its attractive look.

The post A New Primer on the Commons & P2P appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Commons are a shared resource which is co-governed by its user community, according to the rules and norms of that community. Commons include not only the gifts of nature, such as water and land, but also shared assets or creative work, such as cultural and knowledge artefacts. The Commons is a concept and practice that has been steadily gathering increased attention. Deeply rooted in human history, it’s difficult to settle on a single definition that covers its broad potential for social, economic, cultural and political change.

The Commons is neither the resource, the community that gathers around it, nor the protocols for its stewardship, but the dynamic interaction between all these elements. An example is Wikipedia: there is a resource (universal knowledge), a community (the authors and editors) and a set of community-harvested rules and protocols (Wikipedia’s content and editing guidelines).

So how do we bring about a Commons transition?

1) Pool resources wherever possible

Commons-based peer production communities and their contribution-based technical systems of production can be characterized as open contributory systems, mediated through a number of filters to ensure high quality contributions. This allows commoners to freely contribute to one or more commons of their choice.

Pooling both immaterial and material resources is a priority. This capacity to pool productive knowledge is a key characteristic to obtain both “competitive” and “cooperative” advantage. Pooling — or in other words “the commons” — should be at the heart of the productive and societal system.

2) Introduce reciprocity

The mutual coordination characteristics of commons-based peer production have proven quite successful in the production of digital commons, but their inherent non-rival status (i.e. non- depletable, easy to reproduce and distribute) does not carry over to physical production, which is characterized by depletable assets, including human labor. To ensure the wellbeing and continuation of these assets, material production demands the principle of reciprocity, and the way to ensure it is by advocating for Open Cooperativism. Like an ecosystem, an economy does not work in isolation. Open Cooperativism seeks to enfranchise all participants in the economic value chain, not just those within the cooperative’s membership. This includes affective and reproductive labor, the creation of commons, and other forms of currently “invisibilized” work. This can be achieved through open contributory accounting systems, open supply chains and collaborative planning, as well as through the pooling of physical resources, mediated through special property regimens (where all contributors are participants in, and owners of).

3) Shift from redistribution to pre-distribution and empowerment

We need something beyond the welfare state’s logic of redistribution; we need a state that would create the conditions for the creative autonomy of its contributing citizens. This would require pre- distribution of resources rather than redistribution after the fact. The commons-based peer production ecosystem, as described above, comprises productive communities, coalitions of entrepreneurs, and for-benefit associations as the “management” or “governance” institutions. Broadened to the wider society, this structure gives a vision of a productive civil society which contributes to the commons. This would be supported by a predominantly generative market creating added value around the commons and protected by a partner state, where public authorities play a sustaining role in the direct creation of civil value.

The partner state, as well as being the guarantor of civic rights, would also facilitate the contributory capacities of all citizens. It would empower and enable the direct creation of value by civil society through creating and sustaining infrastructures for commons-based peer production ecosystems. Such a state form should be one that would gradually lose its separateness from civil society, by implementing radical democratic and even rotational procedures and practices.

While capitalism takes inequality as the cost of doing business and leaves its mitigation to an inefficient state, a commons approach builds in fairness from the start. The aim is to incorporate distributive actions in the generative enterprises and through their direct relation to the commons.

A partner state approach would transcend and include, not oppose, the welfare state model. It would retain the solidarity functions of the welfare state, but eliminate bureaucracy in the delivery of its services to citizens. The social logic would move from ownership-centric to citizen-centric, and the state should de-bureaucratize through the commonification of public services and public-commons partnerships.

4) Subordinate capitalism

Under capitalism, the markets are dominant and everything tends to be commodified. Capitalism is an extractive, profit-maximizing relationship. It exploits workers and gorges on the free labor of free and open-source software and open design workers, while cannibalizing the gifts of nature. But is the intention to get rid of markets altogether? Markets would continue to exist in a commons-oriented society, but they would be predominantly generative as opposed to extractive. By this we mean that markets would serve the commoners. Commons-based peer production participants today struggle to create livelihoods as they produce commons. While they could be supported by a partner state through basic income and subsidies, commoners can also create new market entities to facilitate the sustainability of their contributions and allow them to keep contributing to the commons.

One way to achieve this is through the use of CopyFair Licenses. In this approach, the free sharing of knowledge — the universal availability of immaterial commons — is preserved, but commercialization is made conditional on reciprocity between the sphere of the capitalist market and the sphere of the commons. This approach would enable the ecosystems of commons-oriented entrepreneurial coalitions to pool immaterial (and ultimately even material) resources to benefit all participants.

Commons Based Reciprocity Licenses (or “CopyFair” licenses) provide for the free use and unimpeded commercialization of licensed material within the Commons while resisting its non-reciprocal appropriation by for-profit driven entities, unless those entities contribute to the Commons by way of licensing fees or other means. A first working example of a CopyFair license is the Peer Production License, in effect a fork of a Creative Commons Non-Commercial License which permits worker-owned cooperatives and other non-exploitative organizations to capitalise the licensed content, while denying this possibility to extractive corporations.

5) Organize at the local and global levels

Progressive coalitions at the urban, regional and nation-state levels should develop policies and laws that increase the capacity for the autonomy of citizens and the new economic forces aligned around the commons. These pro-commons policies should be focused not just on local autonomy, but also on the creation of transnational and translocal capacities, interlinking the efforts of their citizens to the global commons-oriented entrepreneurial networks currently in development.

Historically, commons have had a problematic relationship with conventional law, which generally reflects the mindset and priorities of the sovereign (monarch, nation-state, corporation) and not the lived experiences and practices of commoners. Still, in grappling with political, economic and legal realities, commoners often find ways to secure control over their common wealth, livelihoods and modes of commoning. It is also what is spurring many commoners today to invent creative new types of policy and law — formal, social, technological — to protect their shared interests, assets and social relationships.

The number of civic and cooperative initiatives outside the state and corporate world is rapidly increasing. Most of these are locally oriented, and that is absolutely necessary.

Today, there are movements operating beyond the local, using global networks to organize themselves. A good example is the Transition Town movement, and its use of networks to empower local groups. But this is not enough. A further suggestion is the creation of translocal and transnational structures that would aim to have global effects and change the power balance on the planet. The only way to achieve systemic change at the planetary level is to build counter-power, i.e. alternative global governance. The transnational capitalist class must feel that its power is curtailed, not just by nation-states that organize themselves internationally, but by transnational forces representing the global commoners and their livelihood organizations.

The Commons is now demonstrating its power as a “key ingredient” for change in diverse locations and contexts around the world.

This article is based on A Commons Transition and P2P Primer, a short publication from the P2P Foundation and the Transnational Institute examining the potential of commons-based peer production to radically re-imagine our economies, politics and relationship with nature. It was originally published in TNI’s Medium blog.

For more perspectives on the Commons see Ferananda Ibarra, Andy Williamson, Mike Essig, Keith Parkins, Tíscar Lara, Ksenia Chabanenko, Alina Siegfried, or Creative Commons

The post Five Practical Guidelines for Achieving a Commons Transition appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Click on the image to download

Commons Transition and P2P: a Primer

This short primer, co-published with the Transnational Institute explains the Commons and P2P, how they interrelate, their movements and trends, and how a Commons transition is poised to reinvigorate work, politics, production, and care, both interpersonal and environmental. Drawing from our ten year + history researching and advocating for P2P/Commons Alternatives, the Primer is structured in a Q&A format, providing answers to questions such as “What are the Commons, what is P2P and how do they relate together?” “What are P2P Economics?” “What are P2P Politics?” and, more important, how these different factors can combine together at higher levels of complexity to form a viable transition strategy to  solid post-capitalist system that is respectful of people and planet.

The Primer features explanations for some of the key concepts we handle, as well as various case studies and infographics. It was co-written by Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel and designed by Elena Martínez, from the P2P Foundation.

The Commons Transition Primer is a year-long multimedia project/campaign aimed at making the world of the Commons and P2P more comprehensible and attractive to commoners worldwide. This publication will be followed up by a website, video material and events. In 2018 we will culminate the process with a full-length publication on the Commons Transition co-authored by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis.

Click here to download Commons Transition and P2P: a Primer

BIOS:

Michel Bauwens, co-founder and core team member of the P2P Foundation, is a Belgian Peer-to-Peer theorist. An active writer, researcher and conference speaker on the subjects of technology, culture and business innovation, he is the Vision Coordinator for the P2P Foundation.

Vasilis Kostakis is the founder and coordinator of the interdisciplinary research hub P2P Lab that investigates the socio-economic and political impact of free and open-source technologies. He was the Research Coordinator and is now a core team member of the P2P Foundation.

Stacco Troncoso is a core team member and Advocacy Coordinator for the P2P Foundation. A co-founder of Guerrilla Translation, his work in communicating commons culture extends to public speaking and relationship building with prefigurative communities, policymakers and potential commoners worldwide.

Ann Marie Utratel is a core team member of the P2P Foundation working in advocacy and infrastructure. She is also a co-founder of Guerrilla Translation and contributes narrative storytelling and collaborates in strategic alliance building for the larger P2P/Commons ecosystem.

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