A note on the post-capitalist strategy of the P2P Foundation

How to create a Post-Capitalist strategy? As expressed in our previous posts —  where we describe the work of Kojin Karatani—  we agree that the present system is based on a trinity of capital-state-nation, and that this reflects the integration of three modes of exchange. Capital represents a particular market form based on the endless accumulation of capital. The state is the entity that keeps the system together through coercion, law and redistribution (Karatani calls this function ‘rule and protect’), and the nation is the ‘imagined community’ that is the locus of the survival of community and reciprocity. A post-capitalist strategy must necessarily overcome all three in a new integration.

Disrupting Capital Accumulation

Overcoming the capitalist form of the market calls for a disruption in capital accumulation. This can and must be done in two ways:

First of all, as the capitalist market requires labor as a commodity it then follows that overcoming capitalism means refusing to work for capitalism as commodity labor. This is why we strongly advocate for Open Cooperativism: entrepreneurial vehicles where commoners work for themselves and the common good of the larger community and society. This work takes place in democratic associations that create autonomous livelihoods around commons which are, in turn, protected from value capture through membranes such as reciprocity-based licenses. These organizations, focused on commoners and their livelihoods, rather than engaging in capital accumulation, foster cooperative accumulation in service of the commons, through mechanisms in which individual, collective and societal interests converge.

Commons-based open contributory systems are designed so that commoners’ personal motivations can actively contribute to the creation of a common good; as opposed to this being the hypothetical and accidental derivative of generalized selfishness. Measures like a basic income — in conjunction with “commonified” social services— would also substantially remove the compulsion for workers to sell their labor power, while strengthening the capacity to create alternative economic entities. However, in the meantime, we must proceed with the reality that exists today, and create our own funding and resource allocation mechanisms.

The second way to withdraw from capitalism and capital accumulation is by removing our cooperation as consumers. Without workers as producers and workers as consumers, there can be no reproduction of capital. As consumers, we need to design and implement new forms of consumption derived from the creation of open cooperatives. When workers and commoners mutualize their consumption in pooled market forms such as community-supported agriculture and the like, they are not buying products which bolster capital accumulation. Instead, the contribute to the cooperative accumulation discussed above. Therefore, to the degree that we systematically organize new provisioning and consumption systems outside of the sphere of capital, we also undermine its reproduction and capital accumulation. In addition, we create ‘transvestment’ vehicles, which allow for the inclusion of capital but subordinated to the new commons and market forms developed through peer production; this creates a flow of value from the system of capital to the system of the commons economy. Faced with a crisis of capital accumulation, it is entirely realistic to expect new streams of value seeking their place within the commons economy. Instead of the cooptation of the commons economy by capital, in the form of the netarchical capitalist platforms which capture value from the commons, we co opt capital into the commons by subjecting it to the rules of the Commons. Current examples of transvestment strategies are the capped returns model pioneered by Enspiral, or the open value accounting system created by Sensorica.

The Post-Capitalist State

We can also achieve similar transvestment effects with the state! Our strategy for a ‘partner state’ is to ‘commonify’ the state. Imagine that we are able to transform state functions so they actually empower and enable the autonomy of the citizens as individuals and groups. As such, they’d have the tools to create common resources, instead of being passive ‘consumers’ of state services. We abolish the separation of the state from the population by increasing democratic and participatory decision-making. We consider the public service as a commons, giving every citizen and resident the right to work in these commonified public services. We make public-commons agreements so that stakeholder communities can co-govern the public services that affect them. But we don’t ‘withdraw’ completely from the state because we need common good institutions for everyone within a given territory, institutions that create equal capacities for every citizen to contribute to the commons and the ethical market organizations.

From Nations to Commons

In a previous article we have argued that the capital-state-nation trinity is no longer able to balance global capitalism, because it has created a very powerful transnational financial class, which is able to move resources globally and discipline the state and the nations that dare rebalance it. Our answer is to create translocal and transnational civic and economic entities that can eventually rebalance and counter the power of the transnational capitalist class. This is realistic given that peer production technologies create global open design communities which mutualize knowledge on a global scale, and because global and ethical market organizations can be created around such communities. Even as we produce locally, we can also organize trans-local productive communities. These trans-local productive communities, no longer bound by the nation-state, project the need for and require forms of governance able to operate on the global scale. In this way, they also transcend the power of the nation-state. As we explained in our strategy regarding the global capitalist market, these forces can operate against the accumulation of capital at the global level, and create global counter-hegemonic power. In all likelihood, this will create global governance mechanisms and institutions that are no longer inter-national, but transnational (while also avoiding the patterns of transnational capitalism).

The New Integrative Trinity

In conclusion, our aim is to replace the dysfunctional capital-state-nation trinity with the creation of a new integrative trinity: Commons – Ethical Market – Partner State. This new trinity would go beyond the limitations of the nation-state by operating transnationally, transcending the older and dysfunctional trinity and avoiding global domination of private capital. Citizens could develop cosmopolitan subjectivities through these processes, as well as an allegiance to local and transnational commons-oriented communities of value creation and value distribution.”

• This is the third in a series of articles by Michel Bauwens exploring the current thinking of the P2P Foundation. To see the rest of this series, click here. To read more of our original writing, see our original material category.

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Part One – Analyzing the global situation

One of the best books I have read in the last ten years is undoubtedly, The Structure of World History, by Kojin Karatani.

Karatani focuses on world history as an evolution of ‘modes of exchange’, i.e. how humans produce, but most of all, ‘exchange’ value. Like Alan Page Fiske, in ‘Structures of Social Life’, Karatani recognizes four basic ways of doing this, and these modes exist at all times and in all places. For example, while the dominance of capitalism is new, markets have existed since very early times; or, if the dominance of the state was new after the replacement of tribal systems, distribution depending on rank pre-existed its dominance. This insight is very important because it allows us to recognize that any political and economic system is not just one modality, but an integration of modalities. As Dmytri Kleiner says, ‘we live in a multi-modal world’, and ‘if the capitalists won, its because there were capitalists already’.

It is quite different to see capitalism as a mere mode of production, and then to declare the state and the nation as mere epiphenomena of capital (as marxists used to do), or to insist (as Karatani does) that capitalism is really a triarchy combining Capital-State-Nation. Though ‘capital’ dominates, the two other modalities are just as essential for the survival and organization of the system as a whole.

The reason that the present system is so strong, therefore, is that these three act in concert, and whenever one is endangered, the two other sub-systems mobilize to its rescue. What I want to do now is to interpret Karatani’s insight by adding another layer of analysis, that of Karl Polanyi, expressed in his landmark book, The Great Transformation.

Polanyi’s book is a history of the emergence and perpetuation of capitalism from the late 18th century to the 1940s, in which he sees a double movement at play. In some periods, the market forces are dominant (the ‘Smithian’ capitalism of the 19th century) but by being dominant, they actively subvert the order of society and dislocate it, putting many people in danger; thus, eventually, society reacts through mobilisations and forces the market back into a more ‘social’ order. For example, the post-war so-called ‘Fordist’ system – think of how in that Fordist period, the labor movement forced a re-alignment of society around the welfare state, and how the counter-revolution of the 80s again deregulated these social protections in favour of the 1%. Since the 1980s we have again seen a impoverishing of the workers and the middle classes in favour of the oligarchic elites. Now let’s recount this dynamic in Karatani’s scheme.

When capital becomes too dominant in the Capital-State-Nation system, the nation, the locus of what remains of community and reciprocity dynamics, revolts and mobilizes, and, if successful, it forces the state to discipline Capital.

Many observers were puzzled that, despite the systemic crisis of 2008, there seems to be a lack of such an expected counter-movement, but that was just social inertia at play. Now, in 2016, we are in the midst of a Polanyian backlash nearly everywhere. Both Trump and Sanders in the current US electoral cycle represent the Polanyian double movement, and are reacting against the effects of neoliberalism and its destruction of the U.S. middle class. Trump represents the ‘national’ business interests, trying to mobilize behind their interests the declining white middle class and workers, while Sanders represent the new generations of workers who are suffering from precarity. The signs of this Polanyian counter-movement are visible nearly everywhere. The U.S. right now is an exciting place to be, where all kinds of social movements are being revitalized, such as the struggle against structural racial bias (Black Lives Matter), the $15 dollar minimum wage movement and its successes, and vibrant anti-gentrification and rent control revival movements. Nevertheless, there is a bug in the (Polanyian) double movement!

And the bug is that ‘Capital’ has developed a trans-national logic and capacity. Globalized and financial neoliberalism has fundamentally weakened the capacity of the nation-state to discipline its activities.

Faced with a all-powerful transnational capitalism, the various nation-state systems have proven pretty powerless to effect any change. Dare to challenge the status quo and paralyzing capital flight is going to destroy your country! This is one of the explanations of the deep distrust that people are feeling towards the current political system, which simply fails to deliver towards any majoritarian social demand.

Look at how the moderately radical Syriza movement in Greece was put under a European protectorate and had to abandon Greek sovereignty; or look at how the more antagonistically-oriented Venezuelan government is crumbling, along with other progressive governments in Latin America. So, while the electorate may vote for parties that promise to change the status quo and eventually bring to power movements like Podemos, a Labour Party under the leadership of Corbyn, or a Democratic Party strongly influenced by the Sanders movement, their capacities for change will be severely restricted.

Our own ‘political’ recommendations in the P2P Foundation, following our work on the Commons Transition, is that progressive coalitions at the city and nation-state level should first of all develop policies that increase the capacity for the autonomy of citizens and the new economic forces aligned around the commons. Simply initiating left-Keynesian state policies will not be sufficient and will, in all likelihood, be met with stiff trans-national opposition from the financial oligarchy. These pro-commons policies should be focused not just on local autonomy but on the creation of trans-national and trans-local capacities, interlinking the efforts of their citizens and ethical and generative entrepreneurs to the global civic and ethical entrepreneurial networks that are currently in development (*). What we are suggesting is that progressive coalitions should focus on post-capitalist construction first and foremost.

To be realistic, except in very rare locales (perhaps in Barcelona under the En Comú coalition or in Bologna), the current progressive movements are still very much wedded to the old industrial Keyneisan models, but as they discover the limits of this strategy, openings towards commons-supportive policies should emerge.

Part Two: Our Necessary Response, from inter-national to trans-local

What necessarily follows from the above analysis, is that the current p2p and commons forces must also focus on the creation of trans-local and trans-national capacities.

What can we do?

Currently, there is an exponential increase in the number of civic and cooperative initiatives outside of the state and corporate world, as documented for example by Tine De Moor in Homo Cooperans for the Netherlands. Most of these initiatives are locally oriented, and that is absolutely necessary and legitimate. It is vital that citizens transition here and now to new models of food and energy provisioning (and any other domain that needs to be changed); from an extractive model that is destroying the environment and undermining society, to generative models that create added value to the shared resource base that citizens are co-constructing everywhere. Ezio Manzini has already taught us that in the networked age, there is no such thing as pure locality, and that these are all SLOC initiatives, i.e. they are Small and Local, but also Open and Connected. We also know that today there are movements that operate beyond the local and use global networks to organize themselves. A good example may be the Transition Town movement, and how it uses networks to empower local groups.

But this is not enough, at least in our opinion. What we are thinking and proposing is the active creation of trans-local and trans-national structures that actively 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 which may organize themselves inter-nation-ally, but by transnational forces representing the global commoners and their livelihood organizations.

How can we do this?

Las Indias, a trans-national hispanic community, has introduced the notion of ‘phyles’, inspired by cyberpunk literature and specifically from the book The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.

Phyles are trans-national business eco-systems that sustain a community and its commons. They are already successful for certain ethnic and religious communities that operate on the global level, such as the soufi ‘mourabite’ communities from Senegal, and the indigenous communities of Otovallo in Ecuador, where the trans-migrant income-generating systems are said to represent one third of GDP. These globally operating networks are described in the book by Alain Tarrius entitled, Etrangers de passage. Poor to poor, peer to peer (Editions de l’Aube, 2015).

My argument is that we need to construct phyles for peer production communities. Remember the structure of commons-based peer production most commonly consists of three institutions. One, the contributory community co-creating the shared resources (the open source communities); two, the entrepreneurial coalitions creating livelihoods around those shared resources (the third institution is the ‘for-benefit association’ which manages the infrastructure of cooperation on behalf of the contributors and entrepreneurial coalition; see below). At the P2P Foundation, we favour ‘generative’, ‘ethical entrepreneurial coalitions’, which strengthen commons and their contributory communities and create an economy for them. These generative, trans-local, and trans-nationally operating coalitions already exist. Amongst the best known are Enspiral (originally based in New Zealand); Sensorica (originally based in Montreal, Canada); Las Indias (mostly based in Spain but with many hispanic members from Latin America); and the Ethos Foundation (based in the UK). We believe this new type of trans-local organization is the seed form of future global coalitions of generative entrepreneurs, sustaining global open design communities. Our work in this trend is the eventual creation of a United Phyles Organization, which is represented at the local level by the territorial Chambers of Commons.

We also believe that global civic organizations from the commons sphere should do the same. Our working name for these are the United Transnational Republics.

We are fully aware that these are at present science-fictional notions but if we don’t build them, it will be the extractive multi-national organizations of capital that will rule our world, destroy our planet, and reduce the world population to generalized precarity.

This construction is by no means impossible, and we can see already the construction of many globally nomadic structures as well as global civic mobilizations such as those against climate change. But we can’t just protest and ask the ‘state’ and ‘states’ to do our bidding; we cannot just rely on the weak inter-national structures such as those of the United Nations. We must build ‘counter-hegemonic’ power at the global level. This means building global open design communities, and the global phyles that go with it. At the production level, this means replacing neoliberal globalization, which is destroying the biosphere, with cosmo-local production coalitions. These follow the rule, ‘what is heavy is local, what is light is global’. They combine global open design communities, global open cooperatives and phyles, i.e. organizing coordination systems at the trans-local and trans-national scale, with relocalized distributed manufacturing.

At the political level, this means building territorial assemblies for citizens, the Assemblies of the Commons, and assemblies for generative entrepreneurial entities, the Chambers of the Commons, and to scale them at the national, regional and global levels. This continuous meshworking at all levels is what will create the basis to create systemic change, i.e. power to change, at the level where the destructive force of global capital and its predation of the planet and its people can be countered.

Let me stress that this does not mean a destructive, all-out conflict. Dmytri Kleiner has proposed a strategy of trans-vestment, i.e. the transfer of value from one modality to another. Enspiral has created a vehicle, based on ‘capped returns’, which is able to accept external investments, which are then ‘subsumed’ to the values of the generative coalition. At the P2P Foundation, we have proposed reciprocity-based licenses, which allow the commercialization of open source knowledge on the basis of reciprocity, creating a protective membrane around the ethical phyles. The Assembly of the Commons in Lille is discussing a trans-vestment vehicle for the state, called a General Political License, which allows the assembly to work with the world of politics and government while maintaining the autonomy of the commoners.

This has been done before. ‘If capitalists became dominant, it is because there were capitalists’. The reason our current market society came about is that Europe, being at the margins of Empire, was never able to consolidate centralized power, allowing independent cities where the merchants could exist and expand their power, and this social force became dominant after the fall of the absolute monarchs.

Commoners exist; there’s three billion of us in digital commons, and likely just as many relying on physical commons. They have to follow the same multi-modal strategy, i.e. prefiguratively building their power and influence at all levels, trans-vesting state and market forces to strengthen the commons. Of course, just as laborers did, for this we have to develop a consciousness that we are commoners. Anyone participating and co-constructing shared resources without exploiting them is in fact a commoner. And as the current global system becomes increasingly dysfunctional, more and more of us have to rely on the commons, and not on the market and the state, for our very survival.

If the world of the merchants became the world of Capital-State-Nation, an integration of various modalities under the dominance of the market forces, then the world of the commoners will be a new integration: Commons – Ethical Economy – Partner State. Because we live in a multi-modal world, it does not make sense, and is impossible, to create a ‘totalitarian’ commons world, but we can aim for a commons-centric world in which market forces and state functions (rule and protect, plunder and distribute) are ‘disciplined’ at the service of the commons and the commoners. Like capital did before us, we must build our strength within a multi-modal world. Paradoxically, I believe it is because the ‘extractive’ model is incompatible with our survival that the time for a ‘generative’ transition will come and is in fact not just indispensable, but likely.

The commons is civil society, where citizens contribute to the commons and choose where they invest their care for the common good of their communities, the planet and humanity; the ethical economy consists of the livelihood organizations of the commoners, where generative market practices add value for the commoners and the commons; and the ‘state’ of the commons, presently prefigured by the for-benefit associations which manage the infrastructures of cooperation of the open source communities, is the ‘partner state’ which enables and empowers the capacities of individuals and communities to participate and contribute to the commons of their choice.

This fundamental transformation of our social, political and economic systems requires more than a local approach, it requires trans-local practices and forms of organization.

Let’s get to work!

Notes

• (An interesting parallel would be the ‘Silent Revolution’ in the High Middle Ages, as described by Tine De Moor, which saw an explosion of civic autonomy in the form of city-based guilds and rural land commons agreements, in coalition with the autonomous city authorities and protected by social charters that forced feudal lords to abide by them.)

Photo by Rob de Vries,

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Should commons be non-property ?

There is a strong tendency in contemporary thought, to be anti-property and to define Commons as being non-property.

For example, in this otherwise excellent keynote of Yochai Benkler at the Ouishare conference of 2016 ([1]), listen to the first ten minutes, it would seem he counterposes the commons against the idea of redistributing property, seeing property as inevitably tied to its concentration and hence to oligarchy. This argument is also made by Negri/Hardt in the Empire/Commonwealth trilogy and more recently, in the book, Commun by Dardot and Laval.

I do not agree with this tendency and would like to explain why.

If we look at the enclosures we see that people’s with no property or common property, were considered to have no property (terra nullius) and were therefore appropriated, as were the lands of the indigenous people colonized by the West. This is also often done with immaterial resources such as knowledge and culture, which are appropriated and then copyrighted or patented (the biopiracy of traditional Indian seeds for example). We also have the very strong tradition of totalitarian state-socialism, where so-called collective public property created absolute power in the state and its managerial class. Although property was the instrument of monopolisation by private or state forces, non-property was clearly not a protection against this.

On the other hand, if we look at the successes of the contemporary commons movement, in free culture, in free software, in open design; and the relative success and staying power of cooperative ventures, they are all done by ‘hacking’ property or distributing property. The GPL license for free software is a form of common property, protected by law; Creative Commons similarly protect the sharing of cultural goods by law. In the case of cooperatives it is done by distributing shares and guaranteeing one share, one vote.

What this tell us is that actual property-based and law-based protections are absolutely vital for the commons, and hence, the commons should not be counter-posed in a simple way to private or state property as non-property, but rather as a new form of property.

There is another very important issue, which concerns the balance between individual and collective power. It is very common for collective property to be hijacked by elites within the community. In such a context, if there is no protection of individual property, it is very easy for power-over, in the name of the community but in fact by an elite within the community, to develop power-over instead of power-with.

This is why it is so vital to develop redistributed individual property. In free software and open source, the individual can contribute or not, can fork or not, but his access to the resource is always guaranteed, because it is a ‘immaterial’ resource. But for material resources, this is not so easy to achieve, since the resources are rival, it is therefore absolutely vital that individuals retain their sovereignty over the property that they freely allocate to the common projects, but can leave and recuperate as well. This requires strong property protections.

For all these reasons, I would argue that they are actually the condition for each other. A truly free and non-oppressive form of commons can only exist, if individuals retain the freedom to withdraw their support and hence, withdraw their property from the common pool, in order to be free to create another which corresponds better to their wishes. We need to be able to fork material commons, just as we achieved forking in immaterial commons.

Hence, the commons is also property, while at the same time being some form of non-property. In the same way, the collective territorial common good in a commons economy, requires a state, that is at the same time a non-state because it is no longer separate from society. Commons property belongs to a collective or to all, and in this sense may be non-property, but it is at the same time ‘property’ because the constituent parts can be withdrawn.

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Different historians and anthropologists have posited the existence of dominant social forms, which evolve over time, though should not necessarily be seen as a univocal evolution.

For example, David Ronfeldt has developed TIMN theory, which sees a succession of social forms that are the locus of power, respectively Tribes (T+), Institutions (I+), Markets (M+) and Networks (N+). See this graph for more details, as well as other overview graphs here.

Alan Page Fiske, in his book ‘The Structures of Social Life’, has described a relational grammar consisting of four types of relationships, related to the allocation of resources in society, which have existed in most times and regions, but with different relations of dominance amongst them. In his relational model he distinguishes Communal Shareholding (pooling with a totality), Equality Matching (the gift economy based on reciprocity), Authority Ranking (allocation according to rank) and Market Pricing.

Kojin Karatani distinguishes four modes of exchange:

• mode A, which consists of the reciprocity of the gift; but he distinguishes the pooling of nomadic bands and the reciprocity-based gift economy of tribal systems;

• mode B, which consists of ruling and protection;

• mode C, which consists of commodity exchange; and

• mode D, which transcends the other three.

So, there seems to be a more or less broad agreement that:

• we have (had) societies based on small nomadic bands and the pooling of resources (Communal Shareholding);

• we have (had) tribal societies (T+) based on reciprocity, existing in more or less localized mini-systems in which tribes relate to other tribes (and other forms in their margin);

• we have state-based, tributary, Authority-Ranking systems based on rule and protect, plunder and redistribute principles (I+), existing in a broader system of interlocking world-empires (and other forms in their margin);

• we have market-based ‘capitalist’ societies (M+), consisting of a trinity of an interlocking Capital-Nation-State, based on Market Pricing for exchange, and existing in a global world-market (i.e. world capital-nation-state system)

Historically, we can already discern:

• a shift from nomadic pooling (Communal Shareholding) societies to tribal, sedentary reciprocity-based gift economy societies;

• a shift of tribal societies to Empires, i.e. state-based class societies; and

• a shift of the latter to capitalist societies.

Today, we see the emergence of the network form (N+), and in our hypothesis a new phase shift towards a system of world-networks, which will reconfigure the other modalities that always also exist, but in a new configuration. David Ronfeld sees the emergence of N+, and Karatani sees the emergence of Mode D.

P2P Theory therefore, tries to answer the more modest question: What institutions arise in the phase shift from market domination to network domination, to use the TIMN language, i.e. from M+ to N+; in Fiske’s language, a society based again on Communal Shareholding as the dominant form; for Karatani, the shift from Mode C to Mode D.

We expect this type of network society, Karatani’s Mode D, to be ‘dominated’ by the institutional form of the Commons, based on peer to peer relational dynamics (i.e. Communal Shareholding), but also that it ‘transcends and include’ the older forms in a new configuration. Just as capitalism consists of Capital-Nation-State under the domination of the capitalist market logic as the main mode of exchange, so we posit the Productive Commons Community, the generative Entrepreneurial Coalition, and the For-Benefit Association as the seed form for a society that consists of a Productive Commons-Centric Civil Society, a Ethical Economy, and a Partner State, but under the dominant exchange form of the Commons.

Yochai Benkler has described the emergence of commons-based peer production as a subset of today’s capitalist society, but lately, authors like Jeremy Rifkin in the Zero Marginal Cost Society, and Paul Mason in PostCapitalism have started joining our hypothesis that the new modalities are not just subforms of capitalism, but have the capacity to subsume capitalism. None of these authors however, has collated the amount of data on the actual occurence of the shift, and while Karatani brings a wealth of historical and anthropological findings to bear on the previous shift, the documentation on the emergence of an actual Mode D remains scarce.

Based on ten years of observation and analysis, allowing a much more ‘thick’ description of the already occurring phase shift, we believe the broad outlines of such a new social form have become visible:

1) the key network institution is the Commons, i.e. shared resources, their productive communities of contributors, and their shared norms and regulations. The key social form is the networked productive community practising Communal Shareholding, through which all citizens can produce shared value, through open contributory system, that create shared commons, and using ‘mutual coordination’ (stigmergy) as their main modality of cooperation and coordination.

2) the key market institution in a society dominated by the network form, i.e. based on networked commons as explained above, is the ‘ethical market entity’ or generative entrepreneurial coalition, which creates value and livelihoods around these commons; these market entities in other words, are not the dominant form, but serve the commons and their communities through generative practices (in contrast with traditional capitalist firms which ignore negative externalities, or netarchical capitalist forms which directly extract value from the commons without adequate return) that are beneficial for both the human and nature. P2P market entities infuse the market form with reciprocity based requirements at least within the coalitions itself, and are reciprocial towards the commons and nature. The ethical market institutions are not-for-profit (not for private profit, but also not necessarily non-profit).

3) the key governance institution (I+) form in this era of N+, is the for-benefit association, which exists alongside nearly all p2p productive communities and commons-centric entrepreneurial coalitions, i.e. these institutions, usually non-profit, create and maintain the infrastructures of cooperation needed by the commons and its actors (think of the role of the Wikimedia Foundation, which does not direct the work on the Wikipedia, but makes it possible)

So, in the emergent form, in N+, the M+ and I+ are subsumed under the logic of the accumulation of the commons ; my hypothesis is that this emerging micro-logic of peer production, is prefigurative of the new social form that is emerging for the N+ era, to use the language and TIMN theory. Thus our thesis that the new commons-centric society or post-civilization, will consists of 1) productive civil society, consisting of citizens contributing to the commons of their choice 2) ethical entrepreneurial associations, which respond to social need and create livelihoods for the commoners 3) a partner state form, which creates the meta-conditions for personal and social autonomy and the capacity building that citizens need to have equipotential rights of participation in the new society.

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