Susana, tell us about your background, how did you end up being an activist working on financial reform and P2P/Commons Dynamics?

After becoming an economist, I worked for a long time in the internet business sector, but around 2003 I decided to undertake some research on the monetary system, and out of that came a book and other published works. I did this because I felt the need to. I wanted to understand, for myself, many of the dynamics that were taking place in the world, which mainstream economics were not explaining. When you understand the monetary and financial system, everything starts to make sense.

What does abundance mean to you?

Abundance is a new economic frame in which scarcity cannot be preserved. It’s funny to speak in these terms about scarcity, but it is appropriate. Economics used to be about managing scarce resources, but scarcity has turned out to be not a condition to overcome, but the Holy Grail to access monetary wealth for some. Meanwhile, it overlooks other types of scarcity, like our capacity to pollute the air without destroying the planet.

There is no economic value without scarcity. But scarcity is dying in the highest levels of innovation, in the very heart of the digital revolution. For the first time, the evolution of the economic system is not leading to higher productivity or sales, but just the opposite.

Economic evolution is leading to goods in new formats, with new ways of production that are extremely efficient and open by their very nature. That takes them very far from the scarcity context that creates economic value, sales, and profits. We need to adapt the way of organizing production and consumption to this new frame. I think it will be for the best. In general, I think that the end of scarcity is good news.

How can we create abundance in the material sphere?

I think the key to harnessing abundance is through a different monetary and financial system. But you have to bear in mind that this new trend is coexisting with the old trend of financialization and commodification, which goes exactly in the opposite direction. The centre of both of them is the monetary and financial system: it was the financialization that brought us to where we are now. Financialization started when the USA left the gold standard behind. It is only a new, deep evolution in the monetary and financial system that can allow us to adapt to this new economic frame in such a way that we can harness it to create prosperity for the majority of the people in an environmentally sustainable way.

Can you talk about the ongoing trend towards decommodification? Where do you think it will lead, and what are its advantages and dangers? Can we have ethical markets for sustainable livelihoods existing alongside non-monetary access to resources?

Technological innovation is bringing us to different scenarios of decommodification. One of the most important ones is when a corporation takes advantage of a certain innovation to destroy an industry, in order to create a competitive advantage for itself or weaken competitors. For example: Google created Android, a free OS for devices where Google products run smoothly, and destroyed the operating system business—for portable devices at least—where Microsoft and Apple were leaders.

But there is another decommodification trend, like Wikipedia, where voluntary contributors have created an online, free, collaborative encyclopaedia that has left the other ones behind as outdated, and has made it almost impossible to sell them in the foreseeable future.

I think that the disadvantages are that we need to change the way we were organizing the economy. People can’t depend on wages to live anymore, because wages are going to disappear altogether. The advantage is that we can get organized to produce and consume in a different way. In this new economic scheme, people won’t be divided anymore between workers or consumers. In this new units of production, people will have to provide funding, or endorsement for funding, labour and demand of the products. This is how the “prosumer” figure was born.

As Susan George said, we are used to seeing how companies look for the wealthiest markets to sell their products, and for cheaper countries to produce those products—but in reality, consumers and employees are the same people, wages turn into purchasing power, and this effort doesn’t lead to any situation that is sustainable in the long term.

We see this trend of commodities becoming commons and services becoming relationships as a positive thing. But what are the macroeconomic implications?

The macroeconomics implications are clear: we are going to see a reduction in income, in general. If the scarcity disappears, the value chain collapses. Business are no longer profitable and they stop paying taxes and wages…But it is very important to notice that it is not so clear that commodities will become commons thanks to the decommodification trend. For example, Amazon created a digital platform such as Kindle, so authors could publish their work in a “do it yourself” way. This has deeply disrupted the bookshop and publishing businesses, but books have not really become commons thanks to it. Epub format for digital books existed, it was a standard format, but Amazon decided to go with a non-standard format in a closed environment where you can only read these works if you are in their platform, in their apps, or reading with their devices. This way they can show adverts of their other products to you and put cookies in your laptop, to retarget you, so they can show you their adverts also everywhere when you surf the web. Monopolies are the only way scarcity can be maintained, but this won’t lead to a situation where wealth will be distributed at all. All of these global companies use fiscal optimization techniques that allow them to pay very little in taxes.

So, how can we avoid the hollowing out of a welfare state dependent on taxable income?

In my view, some public goods or services will need to start getting funded by a direct compensation, using an alternative means of payment. The people must be able to provide solutions to public needs and have it accounted as a public contribution. For instance, Prof. Bruno Theret from the Dauphine University in Paris has published a paper about how to introduce a time tax in order to fund political action. People would have to pay a time tax, payable with some kind of time money, and they would need to earn this time money by carrying out political participation in a decentralised way, or by paying for it in conventional money through a progressive scheme (the hour would be more expensive for those whose earnings are higher). There are two objectives here: to decentralise the political action so people carry out political action directly (instead of politicians), and to partly reduce the cost of political decision in conventional currency (political parties, consultants, etc.) There are many other currency schemes that can work to get to the same results, we can talk about what kind of currency we could use. We could even use euros, but euros created in a different way. Once this is proven to have worked with pilot projects, why not fund other expenses the same way? We could start with expenses that governments never have the money to undertake, like preventive medicine. That would save conventional state money expenditures in health care, as well as saving the suffering of the people.

As a social currency analyst, what is your opinion of cryptocurrencies? What do you think of the banking sector’s attempt to enter the cryptocurrency arena, will it succeed?

My opinion of currencies based on the block-chain technology is that they are a great invention. It is really interesting to explore what we can do with them. But the core of the transformation of the money system is not the technology of the payment systems, but the way money is created, and the way we build the confidence that underlies the monetary system. So, the social contract that underlies the money system. I understand that the banking sector enters the crypto arena, as Bitcoin, particularly, is designed to make redundant the whole banking system as electronic payment channel. There is a lot at stake for banks in this move; they understood it, and they are reacting quickly. I hope, in spite of this, that some new forms of money can emerge and nurture the creation of another kind of economy focused on people’s needs and the environmental limitations we really have. My only concern about Bitcoin is about the expectations it is creating. Bitcoin can best the banking system in its function of payment system, but it is not a solution for a money creation format that is linked to society. A money creation that is linked to society and its needs is a credit system, where money is created out of credit. A type of credit that will finance productive economy and not speculative bubbles, a different way of creating money out of credit than the one the banks carry out.

Som Energía, a solar, prosumer-oriented enregy cooperative operating in Spain

Tell us more about prosumers and self-provision. It’s also interesting to talk about this in the context of the Spanish state, and the slew of anti-P2P legislation it seems to specialize in, like the solar tax.

Well, the basis is that everybody has an asset which they don’t presently use to negotiate: their demand, their capacity to buy. Demand is scarce in the capitalist context. People should use their demand not only to get better prices, as we do now, but also to negotiate and get their share of income from the production process, in order to use that income to purchase the good that is being produced.

And do you see that could work in the public sphere as well?

The example of the time tax to fund political action that I just explained could be a case for it. That is, to self-provide political services by prosumer citizens. There are many ways in which people can collaborate to build means of production that will allow them to access the products and services they need. To offer the citizen the option to produce the capital for the commons (which is a way to own but without the right to sell or destroy), and be rewarded with a token that they can then use to pay for the service or product – this is going to be the key competitive advantage of a future without employment and without scarcity. People can collaborate to create solar energy plants, distributed factories, repair workshops, and almost any kind of means of production as a commons.

Is it like an economic closed circuit?

It doesn’t need to be closed. The circuits can be interconnected and the means of production can serve not only those circuits but also the market. The prosumer can fund the initiative, which they can do not only with their money but with their endorsement, too. If they can work to build it, and consume it with a self-made means of payments they have received for the work they have done to build it, such an initiative doesn’t need to fear global competitors, as the main part of their payment commitments will be paid in kind. For everything else, you should still have the market and the state, which you can also fund with a healthier form of money.

What do you mean by a healthier form of money?

I think the de-commodification trend needs to extend to the money itself. Most money is created by the banking sector out of lending. This is the commodification of uncertainty. I think uncertainty needs to be de-commodified by the self-provision of risk assumption in non-speculative projects. Credit risk needs to enter the P2P scenario, not only to provide credit in bank money as the crowdfunding platforms do, but also to create money out of lending, like banks do, for the creation of new kinds of money. This is the way many social and complementary currencies are created. It makes sense to split and spread the risk. It is not only a way of self-provision of the collaborative economy; it also brings about a much better financial system, free of systemic risk and speculative bubbles.

You’ve also examined possible scenarios for Basic Income. Do you think this should be based on fiat currency and taxation or on new money creation? How can a basic income be compatible with sustaining the provisions of a welfare state?

I see the basic income as a necessary means for a transition towards another type of system. Employment levels are never going to recover. People need to survive and basic income is a way forward. Its main advantage is that the beneficiaries of it can devote their time to building long term solutions to solve their needs, which many times won’t be achieved by getting a job, considering the jobs available. We need a different way of production and consumption but this takes time to get built. I think basic income would work if it is mainly paid in fiat or conventional currency. Basic income in complementary currency is being tested, for instance the social currency Moneda Demos, or the Universal Relative Dividend. I think this is definitely worth exploring. But where I think that complementary currencies could be of help the most is in providing a means of exchange for those new ways of production and consumption: for the self-provision of goods and services.

Continuing the conversation on Basic Income, tell us about Barcelona’s EU pilot project for Basic Income. How will it look like and what are your expectations?

The purpose of this project is to test basic income and its potential to take people out of poverty for good. Regarding the social currency project in Barcelona, the council is conducting research about its possible implementation in order to achieve the goals of the city’s government, as a tool that can serve the city’s productive model transformation increasing its sustainability, resilience and reducing its social and economic inequalities, which are among the highest in Spain and Europe.

What is your impression of the new city government a year and a half into the legislature? Do you think En Comú is really commons-oriented, although not overtly so?

I think it has been a very interesting period in which I have noticed the true aim of building bottom-up solutions with citizens. It has been a hard period, too, with some disappointments, projects that go too slow, etc. Facing reality is never an easy matter, but the important part of this is that the council is making an effort to face reality and listen to everyone. We will see if it is able to do it.

One of the things we’ve appreciated in the formation of the new citizen coalitions in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia is the incorporation of feminism and gender representation as a basic element. The P2P/Commons movement is sometimes characterized as being too male oriented; what can we learn from the post-15M political panorama in these “Rebel Cities”, and how do you see the gender question as it pertains to the Commons?

I think gender equality is important. As I have been able to notice, it is not only that women can access some environment like politics, or the commons, which is important of course; it goes further than that. I think the determination to integrate women changes the attitude towards “the others” in general. What I mean is that it changes the way men do things, too, making everyone more open, willing to listen, understand, and follow different people. This is key in many walks of life, but specially in politics. It makes everything richer.

Finally, how do you think we can achieve a real sharing economy, or a Commons Transition, as we like to call it?

It think the weak part of the commons is that very frequently it is not a business for anyone. So, nobody is interested in funding it. This is a real hurdle for its development. The solution is to create a new kind of money that can fund the commons. Conventional money taps into the scarcity. The new money that can help build the commons taps on the abundance.

SUSANA MARTÍN BELMONTE’S BIO:

Economist with a Bachelor’s Degree in Economic Theory from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (1993) and a Master’s Degree in Marketing Management from ESIC (1998). She was a market analyst in the Commercial Office of the Spanish Embassy in Mexico, as part of a Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade (ICEX) program for promoting foreign trade. Her professional career has been largely devoted to the new technology sector in private business, with an international focus. In 2003, she began research on the monetary system. The resulting work was published by the Spanish publisher Icaria, entitled “Nothing is lost: a healthy alternative monetary and financial system.” Since then, she has juggled her work in economic criticism, complementary currency development and developing the Institute for Social Money (of which she is co-founder). She is currently working in a research programe, with the council of Barcelona, on social innovation related to Basic income and a local currency.

Lead image by Alternativas Económicas

The post 100 women who are co-creating the P2P society: Susana Martín Belmonte on de-commodification and abundance appeared first on P2P Foundation.

 By Rachel O’Dwyer

Mayo Fuster Morell is the Dimmons director of research on collaborative economy at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open University of Catalonia. Additionally, she is faculty affiliated at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and at Institute of Govern and Public Policies at Autonomous University of Barcelona (IGOPnet). In 2010, she concluded her PhD thesis at the European University Institute in Florence on the governance of common-based peer production, and have numerous publications in the field. She is the principal investigator for the European project P2Pvalue: Techno-social platform for sustainable models and value generation in commons-based peer production. She is also responsible of the experts group BarCola on collaborative economy and commons production at the Barcelona City Council.”

ROD: What brought you to work in peer-to-peer?

MFM: The first time I heard the term peer-to-peer was from an “artivist” friend Leo Martin when we were travelling from the Geneva Contrast Summit to the World Summit of Information Society in Geneva in 2003. In other words, the Internet itself and its defense, and the network as a political metaphor for its decentralized character brought me to work on P2P. Commons appreciation came later.

ROD: What is ‘participative action research’? How have you used it? And what groups have you worked with?

MFM: ‘Participative action research’ refers to research that tends to inform a process in action or depart from explicit aims, and is developed in a participatory manner. This could refer to how the research questions are defined (they could emerge in the context of mobilization), the methodologies (more participative and egalitarian, positioning the researcher as facilitator more than owner of the process) and the distribution of the research outcomes (such as adopting open access and open data). There are different traditions and sensibilities. One of the first books and articles I wrote back in 2004 as part of the collective Investigaccio was on what at that time we called “activist” research and social movements. A later version of this article was published at: Interface: a journal for and about social movements Volume 1 (1): 21 – 45 (January 2009). Fuster Morell: Action research 21 Action research: mapping the nexus of research and political action http://www.interfacejournal.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/interface-issue-1-1-pp21-45-Fuster.pdf

My first action involvement was as part of the global justice movement with the Seattle and Praga mobilization against global institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and European Union. Through that experience I realized how we were generating useful data and how ICTs could contribute to systematizing the knowledge generated in social processes and democratizing access to that knowledge. This brought me to an action research framework.

ROD: You have developed some very interesting research on gender and the commons. In what ways can gender politics inhibit participation in commons-based peer production? And how can we become more aware of it?

MFM: I think it is not accurate to state that I developed research on the commons and gender. There are experts in gender, and gender studies is a specialized field, but I am not one. What happens is that commons theory and practice tend to be dominated by male voices (with the great exception of Ostrom), a lack of engagement with gender perspectives and feminist theories (see for example Bauwens’ work), and an emphasis on class as opposed to identity politics. Sometimes inequality dynamics are even worse than market dynamics (for example, only 1.5 % of FLOSS participants are women, while proprietary software has a 30% female involvement. So in that context, someone like me that has some gender sensibility and feminist appreciation – even if she is not an expert or very involved – becomes the ‘gender voice’ in the room. This makes me feel uncomfortable, because I do not know much and have not written much or made good contributions; my area of expertise is on governance of the commons and public policies for the commons.

ROD: At procomuns, an event that you helped to organize, there was an emphasis on the ways in which women’s contributions had been hidden from peer-to-peer practices. How can we challenge this?

MFM: Regarding how we can change the current gender inequality dynamic of the commons, I think the first step is to recognize that commons approaches have obfuscated reproductive work as much as capitalism. Commons is presented as a third mode of production distinct from the state and the market, but where is domestic work, families and reproductive work – mostly developed by women – in this equation? And where is nature? I really think commons can benefit a lot from engaging with ecofeminist perspectives – with authors like Cristina Carrasco or Yayo Herrero here in Spain for example. This connection can not only bring more justice to the commons but also be very powerful. I think one of the key insights which explains the rise of Barcelona en Comu is the combination of feminism and commons.

What is clear is that there is a lot to be done on gender. I contribute to a wiki for monitoring the inclusion of women in digital commons and ICT conferences, where there are also resources on commons and gender (see http://wiki.digital-commons.net). Conferences with less than at least 35% of women inclusion in the program are shame conferences. The lack of reference to women’s work in the academic literature and in the field literature is even more problematic.

ROD: What distinguishes the commons for you from other traditional hierarchical public and private forms of organization? And do we need a partner state to develop and protect the commons?

MFM: At this moment in time, yes. Neoliberal globalization has constituted an enclosure of global commons, and the expansion of the capitalist dynamic to new areas previously organized through commons and social logics. Digital commons were expanding with the Internet, but now certain layers of the Internet are controlled by corporations, resulting in the enclosure of the digital commons also (see for example the emergence of on demand /corporate collaborative economies and the enclosure of collaborative production online). In this stage of things, I think we need to gain political control over political institutions in order to create public-commons alliances to confront the commons enclosure. A private – public alliance has resulted in the kidnap of political institutions; together they are creating what I call (glossing feminist theory) the “glass ceiling”, working to ensure that the greater capacity for the commons to expand and gain centrality in the digital era is kept under control, and that commons are enclosed for profit purposes. But the process of organizing to gain political power in political institutions should happen in parallel with the reorganization of economic power under commons logic. We need external, social movements to push for policy change, and economical affinity activity in order to be able to perform political changes inside the institution.

ROD: In the last decade we are seeing a growing centrality of forms of commoning and commons-based peer production to capital, particularly in informational and digital spheres. You call this relationship ‘wiki-washing’. What strategies exist to protect forms of commoning from commercial expropriation? Or is this an inevitability? Or maybe not always a bad thing?

MFM: Regarding the case of the collaborative economy, commons collaborative economy was original to the internet with FLOSS, Wikipedia etc. Then we have witnessed several waves of incorporation of collaborative dynamics for capitalism innovation, with the case of platforms like YouTube and Flickr first, and now with the “collaborative economy” of Uber and AirBnb. These have popularized collaboration, but they have also emptied it of its empowering dimension. We should keep working on alternatives that scale (being aware that it is not only a matter of lack of ability, but a ‘glass ceiling’ that I mentioned earlier that ensure such efforts remain small). We must denounce the bad practices of unicorn modalities and their wiki-washing (for a discussion of the use of the wiki ethos to further corporate interests see my article The unethics of sharing: wikiwashing”). Still, we have also to be tactical and take advantage of the situation created – to play the game in our favor. For example, the European Commission did not get interested in commons production until the debate on the collaborative economy gained importance with the controversies connected to the disruption of Uber and AirBnb. I’m often asked to speak about the collaborative economy by organizations who have AirBnb and Uber in mind because they do not know anything else and I take advantage of these opportunities to explain that they were not the first to appear and that there are other running models based on commons logic which can favor a more inclusive economical “growth”.

The capitalist market adoption of commons creativity has ambivalences, and we should be tactical and practical in taking advantage of these depending on the period. This ambivalence of the market can also be applied to social networks. The appearance of Facebook and Twitter was a defeat to autonomous communication alternatives, but nowadays it has also become a tool for social mobilization, and it is right to use it as such. But we also have to keep in mind how we might gain them back for commons governance? There is, for example, a campaign to buy Twitter by the Twitter community and transform it into a cooperative. In sum, politics is done with “what there is”, advancing with the opportunities of each moment – not with great conditions that are not there.

ROD: What does the term ‘digital commons’ mean to you?

MFM: Commons is an ethos and an umbrella term that encompasses many practices and transformative changes. The commons emphasizes common interests and needs. It includes collaborative production, open and shared resources, collective ownership, as well as empowering and participative forms of political and economic organizing.

It is, however, a very plural concept with very diverse ‘traditions’ and perspectives. Some commons, for example, are connected to material resources (pastoral, fields, fishing etc.) and others to immaterial ones (knowledge etc.).

In the area of knowledge commons, the emphasis is on the conditions of access – open access and the possibility to access resources and intervene in their production without requiring the permission of others. It emphasizes knowledge as a public good, a patrimony, and a human right.

I proposed a definition of digital commons as “information and knowledge resources that are collectively created and owned or shared between or among a community and that tend to be non-exclusive, that is, be (generally freely) available to third parties. Thus, they are oriented to favor use and reuse, rather than to exchange as a commodity. Additionally, the community of people building them can intervene in the governing of their interaction processes and of their shared resources” (Fuster Morell, M. (2010, p. 5). Dissertation: Governance of online creation communities: Provision of infrastructure for the building of digital commons. http://www.onlinecreation.info/?page_id=338).

ROD: What do we need to do to cultivate and defend the digital commons?

MFM: The same that we have to do with any common.

At this moment there are, in my view, three key strategies and goals: 1) Create public commons partnerships. Push for political institutions to be led by commons principles and to support commons-based economic production (such as reinventing public services led by citizens’ participation, what I call ‘commonification’). Barcelona en Comu is providing a great model for this. 2) Reclaim the economy, and in particular develop an alternative financial system. 3) Confront patriarchy within the commons – in other words embrace freedom and justice for all, not just for a particular privileged subject (male, white, etc.) and help foster greater diversity in society.

ROD: What for you is the key difference between the digital and the material commons? Do these distinctions hold? Or are they holding us back?

MFM: Over time I think there is less and less of a distinction.

ROD: What do you think of proposals for new forms of technology that scale commons-based peer production such as distributed ledger technologies, the blockchain or new reputation and trustless systems? How do these fit within the broader projects of commons-based peer production?

MFM: Certainly, technological development is important, but much less that what is framed in the blockchain hype. For a period around the early development of the Internet, I thought – and I think this was a general collective feeling – that technological development and creativity towards decentralized modes would be the more effective strategy to gain commons space. I no longer think this (as I previously discussed, I think we have to combine several strategies: political, economical, technical and “genderal”). I think we were wrong. The evolution of the Internet is the best proof of this. This is why I am so surprised by the wave of naïve enthusiasm for the blockchain and its technological solutionism and apolitical vision. It assumes there are not also power struggles and asymmetries in networked and decentralized modalities.

ROD: Can you tell us a bit about your own work on infrastructure governance?

MFM: My doctoral thesis was on the governance of infrastructure for the building of digital commons (the thesis is available here). In this research I challenged previous literature by questioning the neutrality of infrastructure for collective action and demonstrating that infrastructure governance shapes collective action.

ROD: I’ve read that your research challenges the idea that oligarchy, bureaucracy and hierarchy are inevitable products of scaled forms of cooperation. How can we prevent these from kicking in? Are these always bad things? Joe Freedman, for example, writes of the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ and how the ostensible idea of no structure allows for more insidious forms of structural power i.e. gender/class/race to play a key role and to develop oligarchies.

MFM: The research I developed in my thesis provided an empirical explanation of the organizational strategies most likely to succeed in creating large-scale collective action in terms of the size of participation and complexity of collaboration. In hypothesizing that the emerging forms of collective action are able to increase in terms of both participation and complexity while maintaining democratic principles, I challenged Olson’s classical political science assertion that formal organizations tend to overcome collective action dilemmas more easily, and challenges the classical statements of Weber and Michels that as organizations grow in size and complexity, they tend to create bureaucratic forms and oligarchies. I concluded that online creation communities are able to increase in complexity while maintaining democratic principles. Additionally, in light of my research, the emerging collective action forms are better characterized as hybrid ecosystems which succeed by networking and combining several components, each with different degrees of formalization and organizational and democratic logics. Wikipedia is a great example of hybridism. Wikipedia kept its community decentralized, autonomous and allowed open models of organizing to scale, while at the same time having the Wikimedia Foundation with a more hierarchical and labor-based form. Each piece is necessary for the whole ecosystem to scale.

Regarding your question on the tyranny of structurelessness. It is an important question. I think the work of Ostrom questioning Hardin’s conception of the commons is in the same line of what I want to argue here. Ostrom critiqued Hardin’s piece on ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, because the example he used (farmers coordinating grazing rights) was not that of a commons organizational form, but an open field without a social contract around its use, as commons provide. So in this line, yes, there is the need for social organizing in order to preserve resources and organize equality and justice etc.; without structure there is no organization and no commons. Then, the question is what type of organizing, what type of structure and how to govern it. And here I want to recall that network forms are also an organizing structure. But its governance should be transparent and inclusive to all its members. Informality is one of the channels for injustice, such as male domination or corruption, and in this sense I agree with Freedman. It is ok to have open and networked forms, but their governance should be transparent and inclusive. By themselves, network decentralization does not assure power equality (this goes back to the debate on the blockchain).

At the same time, I think we have to go beyond Freedman’s critique and say that it is not that we need structure generally. Structure is not enough to solve inequality, but we need an explicit gender equality plan too. Without a specific set of norms and forms to confront the patriarchy, any commons is going to reproduce it – even reinforce it. The case of FLOSS is very clear here. Studies suggest that only 1.5% of contributors to FLOSS communities are women, while in proprietary closed software production, the proportion is closer to 30%. Similarly, communities that manage natural resources, such as fishing commons institutions in Albufera, Valencia restricted women’s participation until very recently. Equality regarding social and economical dimension is not the only aspect to have present, as it is quite common in commons approaches. Patriarchy is previous to capitalism, and to move towards a commons paradigm, as an alternative to capitalism does not assure a solution to a much deep violent system that works against women and diversity generally.

Finally, the third pillar is the preservation of nature. We have to overcome the current “commons” framework in order to create a new framework based on the confluence of the social and the commons, one that includes gender and diversity feminism, and nature and environmental preservation. Any approach that lacks any of these three pillars explicitly does not have much potential.

The post Women in P2P: Interview with Mayo Fuster Morell appeared first on P2P Foundation.