Republished from an email discussion by Pat Conaty:

“I think the issue of property rights is complex. I don’t think we can drop this and imagining some free space commons. History shows this leads toward authoritarian outcomes. The Commons require repair, renewal and stewarding and this all requires labour of diverse sorts. This value added needs to be understood and equitably paid and supported.

While Proudhon is remembered for his rallying cry that Property is Theft, he meant exclusive property or monopoly propoerty. He in fact favoured small property rights and a distributed system of assets to guarantee resilience and economic democracy foundations. So value generative property becomes a problem due to maldistribution or enclosure. The latter leads to the former. John Ruskin captured this well in his book, Unto This Last, in the 1860s. He talked about a political economy of art and saw this as a form of equitable provisioning. His analysis is the same or highly similar as my reading of what Marvin is advancing. Marvin’s argument is core. But I would say that provisioning involves a system of democratic property rights that is distributed and transparently fair and equitable and guarantees what Gandhi called Sarvodaya, the livelihoods, well being and the welfare of all. Gandh was heared inspired by Ruskin.

Ruskin inspired work on land reform and also the later Guild Socialist movement from 1906. Ruskin’s made an interesting point about sufficiency in property. He said you have too much when you cannot look after the generative property you possess. This implies that you need to hire others to help you here. But here is the nub, excess property like this indicates maldistribution and maldistribution requires wage labour or a class of properyless people without capital of their own.

This observation of Ruskin in the 1860s inspired thinking about co-operative commonwealth and access rights.

The problem we are at now is that we can call for alliances but all the generative assets are so concentrated in so few hands that we are at the point that Ivan Illich called Radical Monopoly. So concentrated that increasing numbers of global citizens are not able to feed, clothe and house themselves. Thus to avoid the wheels falling off the economy if and when we hit the skids, we have to forge Social-Public Partnerships. I think these maybe more likely to experiment and develop at the local government level at this time or as you say, in countries like Greece where new broad based political movements are taking shape.

Trade union, local government, civil society, NGO alliances are key, but there is not so much understanding in these sectors of how new political economy forms can be created. Hence why the Co-operative sector is so key. You will see this when you read John’s book but Mike Lewis also show this in our book viz. Co-op housing, Co-op energy, mutual finance development, social co-operatives, etc.

The interest in Quebec and in Italy in multi-stakeholder Co-ops is salient as these form of peer to peer and other ways to organise co-production between workers, consumers and service users, social investors, progressive forms of government, trade unions etc are vital for building the Pluralist Commonwealth that you indicate in your analysis of a Collaborative Economy and that also Gar Alperovitz points to. How we engage labour related pension funds will be key, but also forms of social capital within many other institutions.

Property rights need to become dynamic so the I part and the We part are in balance. Community Land Trusts and Mondragon and other creative co-op innovations have shown how this can be done and the Pirate Party issue viz artists and intellectual property can be resolved in Fair Trade and Just Price ways.”