To do this we must of course define the commons. We generally agree with the definition that was given by David Bollier and others and which derives from the work of Elinor Ostrom and the researchers in this tradition.

What are the Commons and P2P. Click here to enlarge.

In this context, the commons has been defined as a shared resource, which is co-owned and/or co-governed by its users and/or stakeholder communities, according to its rules and norms. It’s a combination of a ‘thing’, an activity, commoning as the maintenance and co-production of that resource, and a mode of governance. It is distinguished from private and public/state forms of managing resources.

But it’s also useful to see commoning as one of four ways of distributing the fruits of a resource, i.e. as a ‘mode of exchange’, which is different from the more obligatory state-based redistribution systems, from markets based on exchange, and from the gift economy with its socially-pressured reciprocity between specific entities. In this context, commoning is pooling/mutualizing a resource, whereby individuals exchange with the totality of an eco-system.

A number of relational grammars, especially that of Alan Page Fiske in Structures of Social Life, are very useful in that regard, as he distinguishes Authority Ranking (distribution according to rank), Equality Matching (the gift economy, as a social obligation to return a gift), Market Pricing and Communal Shareholding.

Kojin Karatani’s book about the Structure of World History is an excellent attempt to place the evolution of these modes of exchange, in a historical context. Pooling is the primary mode for the early tribal and nomadic forms of human organization, as ‘owning’ is counter-productive for nomads; the gift economy starts operating and becomes strongest in more complex tribal arrangements, especially after sedentarisation, since the social obligation of the gift and counter-gift, creates societies and pacifies relations. With the onset of class society, ‘Authority Ranking’ or re-distribution becomes dominant, and finally, the market system becomes dominant under capitalism.

Let’s now reformulate this in a hypothesis for civilisational, i.e. class history.

Class-based societies that emerged before capitalism, have relatively strong commons, and they are essentially the natural resource commons, which are the ones studied by the Ostrom school. They co-exist with the more organic culturally inherited commons (folk knowledge etc..). Though pre-capitalist class societies are very exploitative, they do not systematically separate people from their means of livelihood Thus, under for example European feudalism, peasants had access to common land.

With the emergence and evolution of capitalism and the market system, first as an emergent subsystem in the cities, we see the second form of commons becoming important, i.e. the social commons. In western history we see the emergence of the guild systems in the cities of the Middle Ages, which are solidarity systems for craft workers and merchants, in which ‘welfare’ systems are mutualized, and self governed. When market-based capitalism becomes dominant, the lives of the workers become very precarious, since they are now divorced from the means of livelihood. This creates the necessity for the generalization of this new form of commons,distinct from natural resources. In this context, we can consider worker coops, along with mutuals etc… as a form of commons. Cooperatives can then be considered as a legal form to manage social commons.

With the welfare state, most of these commons were state-ified, i.e. managed by the state, and no longer by the commoners themselves.There is an argument to be made that social security systems are commons that are governed by the state as representing the citizens in a democratic polity. Today, with the crisis of the welfare state, we see the re-development of new grassroots solidarity systems, which we could call ‘commonfare’, and the neoliberalisation and bureaucratisation of the welfare systems may well call for a re-commonification of welfare systems, based on public-commons partnerships.

Since the emergence of the Internet, and especially since the invention of web (the launch of the web browser in October 1993), we see the birth, emergence and very rapid evolution of a third type of commons: the knowledge commons. Distributed computer networks allow for the generalisation of peer to peer dynamics, i.e. open contributory systems where peers are free to join in the common creation of shared knowledge resources, such as open knowledge, free software and shared designs. Knowledge commons are bound to the phase of cognitive capitalism, a phase of capitalism in which knowledge becomes a primary factor of production and competitive advantage, and at the same time represent an alternative to ‘knowledge as private property’, in which knowledge workers and citizens take collective ownership of this factor of production.

To the degree that cognitive or network-based capitalism undermines salary-based work and generalized precarious work, especially for knowledge workers, these knowledge commons and distributed networks become a vital tool for social autonomy and collective organisation. But access to knowledge does not create the possibility for the creation of autonomous and more secure livelihoods, and thus, knowledge commons are generally in a situation of co-dependence with capital, in which a new layer of capital, netarchical capital, directly uses and extracts value from the commons and human cooperation.

But we should not forget that knowledge is a representation of material reality, and thus, the emergence of knowledge commons is bound to have an important effect on the modes of production and distribution.

I would then emit the hypothesis that this is the phase we have reached, i.e. the ‘phygital’ phase in which the we see the increased intertwining of ‘digital’ (i.e. knowledge) and the physical.

The first location of this inter-twining are the urban commons. I have had the opportunity to spend four months in the Belgian city of Ghent, where we identified nearly 500 urban commons in every area of human provisioning (food. Shelter, transportation)^[1].

Our great discovery was that these urban commons function in essentially the same way as the digital commons communities that operate in the context of ‘commons-based peer production’.

This means that they combine the following elements:

1) an open productive community with

2) a for-benefit infrastructure organisation that maintains the infrastructure of the commons and

3) generative (in the best case) livelihood organisations which mediate between the market/state and the commons in order to insure the social reproduction of the commoners (i.e. their livelihoods).

In our vision, these urban commons, which according to at least two studies ^[2] are going through an exponential phase of growth (a ten-fold growth in the last ten years), are the premise for a further deepening of the commons, preparing a new phase of deeper re-materialization.

We can indeed distinguish four types of commons according to two axes: material/immaterial, and co-produced/inherited.

Ostrom commons are mostly inherited material commons (natural resources); inherited immaterial commons, such as culture and language, are usually considered under the angle of the common heritage of humankind; knowledge commons are immaterial commons that are co-produced and finally, there is a largely missing category of material commons that are produced. We are talking here of what is traditionally called ‘capital’, but in the new context of an accumulation of the commons, rather than a accumulation of capital for the sake of capital.

Let’s see the logic of this.

In pre-capitalist class formations, where the land is a primary productive factor, natural resource commons are an essential resource of the livelihood of the commons, and it is entirely natural that the commons take the form of the common governance of natural resources tied to the land.

In capitalist formations, where the workers are divorced from access to land and the means of production, it is natural that the commons become ‘social’; they are the solidarity systems that workers need to survive, and they are the attempts to organize production on a different basis during the rule of capital, i.e. they can also take the form of cooperatives for production and consumption.

In an era of cognitive capitalism, knowledge becomes a primary resource and factor of production and wealth creation, and knowledge commons are a logical outcome. But the precarious workers that are in exodus from the salaried condition, cannot ‘eat’ knowledge. Therefore, the commons also take on the form of urban infrastructure and provisioning systems, but must ultimately also take the form of true physical and material productive commons. The commons are therefore potentially the form of a mode of production and industry appropriate to the current conjuncture. During a time of market and state failure regarding the necessary ecological transition, and heightened social inequality, commoning infrastructure becomes a necessity for guaranteeing access to resources and services, to limit unequal access, but also as a very potent means to lower the material footprint of human production.

Therefore, current urban and productive commons are also the seed forms of the new system which solves the problems of the current system, which combines a pseudo-abundance in material production which endangers the planet, and an artificial scarcity in knowledge exchange, which hinders the spread of solutions.

The knowledge commons of cognitive capitalism are but a transition to the productive commons of the post-capitalist era.

In this new form of material commons, which are heavily informed and molded by digital knowledge commons (hence ‘phygital’), the means of production themselves can become a pooled resource. We foresee a combination of shared global knowledge resources (for example, exemplified by shared designs, and following the rule: all that is light is global and shared), and local cooperatively owned and managed micro-factories (following the rule: all that is heavy is local).

This cosmo-local (DGML: design global, manufacture local) mode of production and distribution, has the following characteristics:

• Protocol cooperativism: the underlying immaterial and algorithmic protocols are shared and open source, using copyfair principles (free sharing of knowledge, but commercialization conditioned by reciprocity)
• Open cooperativism: the commons-based coops are distinguished from ‘collective capitalism’ by their commitment to creating and expanding common goods for the whole of society; in Platform coops it is the platforms themselves that are the commons, needed to enable and manage the exchanges that may be needed, while protecting it from capture by extractive netarchical platfors
• Open and contributive accounting: fair distribution mechanisms that recognize all contributions
• Open and shared supply chains for mutual coordination
• Non-dominium forms of ownership (the means of production are held in common for the benefit of all participants in the eco-system.

In our opinion, the current wave of urban commons, is a prefiguration of the coming wave of scaled up material commons for the production and distribution of value in post-capitalist systems.

All artworks by Mario Klingemann.

^[1] See: http://wiki.commons.gent for a directory of these commons, classified by provisioning system, in Dutch.
^[2] The first study pertains to the Netherlands, and is a booklet with the text of a lecture by Tine De Moor, entitled ‘Homo Cooperans, delivered at her inauguration as Professor of Institutions for Collective Action in Historical Perspective, August 30, 2013:

The second study concerns the Flanders: Burgercollectieven in kaart gebracht. Van Fleur Noy & Dirk Holemans. Oikos,2016: http://www.coopkracht.org/images/phocadownload/burgercollectieven%20in%20kaart%20gebracht%20-%20fleur%20noy%20%20dirk%20holemans.pdf

The post The History and Evolution of the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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.

The post A Synthesis of the Findings of P2P Theory: Ten Years After appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In the preface to his major book, “The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange.”, published by Duke University Press in 2014, he makes the exact same argument I made in P2P and Human Evolution in 2005-6. He similarly distinguishes, using a different terminology, the gift economy reciprocity (called Equality Matching by Alan Page Fiske), characteristic of clan societies, from the pure gift of pooling (called Communal Shareholding by Fiske), which is characteristic of nomadic society. And it is all grounded in a large body of evidence of anthropological research and findings. Karatani similarly hypothizes an emerging “Mode D” of exchange, which is again based on pooling, AND, this is a illumination for me, on renewed nomadism. Think about it, the major and principal effect of internet technology is to massively enable and allow nomadism! In those conditions, the author shows, contributory pooling as an exchange mechanism ‘naturally’ emerges as a necessity.

I am majorly excited to read this important book and if you have any interest in the theoretical and historical grounding of the P2P transition, then it is strongly recommended for you as well!

Karatani Kojin, from the Preface:

“This book is an attempt to rethink the history of social formations from the perspective of modes of exchange. Until now, in Marxism this has been taken up from the perspective of modes of production— from, that is, the perspective of who owns the means of production. Modes of production have been regarded as the “economic base,” while the political, religious, and cultural have been considered the ideological superstructure. In the way it splits the economic from the political, this view is grounded in capitalist society.

Accordingly, the view runs into difficulties in trying to explain pre-capitalist societies: in Asiatic or feudal societies, to say nothing of the clan societies that preceded these, there is no split between political control and economic control. Moreover, even in the case of contemporary capitalist societies, viewing the state and nation as simply ideological superstructures has led to difficulties, because the state and nation function as active agents on their own. Marxists believed that ideological superstructures such as the state or nation would naturally wither away when the capitalist economy was abolished, but reality betrayed their expectation, and they were tripped up in their attempts to deal with the state and nation.

As a result, Marxists began to stress the relative autonomy of the ideological superstructure. In concrete terms, this meant supplementing the theory of economic determinism with knowledge derived from such fields as psychoanalysis, sociology, and political science. This, however, resulted in a tendency to underestimate the importance of the economic base. Many social scientists and historians rejected economic determinism and asserted the autonomy of other dimensions. Even as it led to increased disciplinary specialization, this stance became increasingly widespread and accepted as legitimate. But it resulted in the loss of any totalizing, systematic perspective for comprehending the structures in which politics, religion, philosophy, and other dimensions are interrelated, as well as the abandonment of any attempt to find a way to supersede existing conditions.

In this book, I turn anew to the dimension of the economic. But I define the economic not in terms of modes of production but rather in terms of modes of exchange.

There are four types of mode of exchange:

* mode A, which consists of the reciprocity of the gift ;

* mode B, which consists of ruling and protection;

* mode C, which consists of commodity exchange; and

* mode D, which transcends the other three.

These four types coexist in all social formations. Th ey differ only on which of the modes is dominant. For example, in capitalist society mode of exchange C is dominant. In Capital, Marx considered the capitalist economy not only in terms of modes of production but also in terms of commodity exchange — he theorized how the ideological superstructure could be produced from mode of exchange C. Particularly in volume 3 of Capital, he took on the task of explicating how a capitalist economy is above all a system of credit and therefore always harbors the possibility of crisis.

But Marx paid only scant attention to the problems of precapitalist societies.

It would be foolish to criticize him on this though. Our time and energy would be better spent in explaining how ideological superstructures are produced through modes of exchange A and B, in the same way that Marx did for mode of exchange C. That is what I have attempted in this book. One other question I take up is how a society in which mode of exchange A is dominant emerged in the first place.

Since Marcel Mauss, it has been generally accepted that mode of exchange A (the reciprocity of the gift ) is the dominant principle governing archaic societies. But this principle did not exist in the band societies of nomadic hunter-gatherers that had existed since the earliest times. In these societies, it was not possible to stockpile goods, and so they were pooled, distributed equally. This was a pure gift , one that did not require a reciprocal countergift. In addition, the power of the group to regulate individual members was weak, and marriage ties were not permanent. In sum, it was a society characterized by an equality that derived from the free mobility of its individual members. Clan society, grounded in the principle of reciprocity, arose only after nomadic bands took up fixed settlement. Fixed settlement made possible an increased population; it also gave rise to conflict with outsiders.

Moreover, because it made the accumulation of wealth possible, it inevitably led to disparities in wealth and power. Clan society contained this danger by imposing the obligations of gift – countergift . Of course, this was not something that clan society intentionally planned. Mode of exchange A appeared in the form of a compulsion, as Freud’s “return of the repressed.”

This, however, led to a shortcoming for clan society: its members were equal but they were no longer free (that is, freely mobile). In other words, the constraints binding individuals to the collective were strengthened.

Accordingly, the distinction between the stage of nomadic peoples and that of fixed settlement is crucial. As is well-known, Marx hypothesized a “primitive communism” existing in ancient times and saw the emergence of a future communist society as that primitive communism’s restoration after the advancement of capitalism. Today this stance is widely rejected as a quasi-religious historical viewpoint. Moreover, if we rely on anthropological studies of currently existing primitive societies, we are forced to reject this idea of primitive communism. We cannot, however, dismiss the idea simply because it cannot be found empirically — nor should we. But Marxists have largely ducked this question.

The problem here is, first of all, that Marx and Engels located their model of primitive communism in Lewis H. Morgan’s version of clan society. In my view, they should have looked not to clan society but to the nomadic societies that preceded it. Why did Marx and Engels overlook the difference between nomadic and clan societies? This was closely related to their viewing the history of social formations in terms of mode of production. In other words, when seen from the perspective of their shared ownership of the means of production, there is no difference between nomadic and clan societies.

When we view them in terms of modes of exchange, however, we see a decisive dif erence — the difference, for example, between the pure gift and the gift based on reciprocity.

Second, when seen from the perspective of modes of exchange, we are able to understand why communism is not simply a matter of economic development nor of utopianism, but why it should be considered instead the return of primitive communism. Of course, what returns is not the communism of clan society but that of nomadic society. I call this mode of exchange D. It marks the return of repressed mode of exchange A at the stages where modes of exchange B and C are dominant. It is important to note, though, that clan society and its governing principle mode of exchange A themselves already constitute the return of the repressed: in fixed settlement society, they represented attempts to preserve the equality that existed under nomadism. Naturally, this did not arrive as the result of people’s desire or intention: it came as a compulsory duty that offered no choice.

Mode of exchange D is not simply the restoration of mode A — it is not, that is, the restoration of community. Mode of exchange D, as the restoration of A in a higher dimension, is in fact only possible with the negation of A.

D is, in sum, the restoration of nomadic society. Yet this too does not appear as the result of human desire or intention, but rather emerges as a duty issued by God or heaven or as a regulative idea. In concrete terms, D arrives in the form of universal religion, which negates religions grounded in magic or reciprocity.

But there is no need for mode of exchange D to take religious form. T ere are cases where mode of exchange D appeared without religious trappings — in, for example, Ionia from the seventh to the sixth centuries BCE, or Iceland from the tenth through the twelfth centuries CE, or the eastern part of North America in the eighteenth century. What these share in common is that all were poleis formed by colonialists: covenant communities established by persons who had become independent from their original states or communities. In them, if land became scarce, rather than perform wage labor on another person’s land, people would move to another town. For this reason, disparities in landed property did not arise. Because people were nomadic (free), they were equal. In Ionia, this was called isonomia.

This meant not simply formal political equality but actual economic equality.

Of course, these communities were all short-lived: they ended when they reached the limits of the space available for colonization. These examples show that communism depends less on shared ownership of the means of production than on the return of nomadism.

But in actuality, all around the world socialist movements that aimed to bring about mode of exchange D were generally carried out under the guise of universal religions. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, socialism became “scientific” and lost its religious hue. But the key question here is not whether socialism is religious; it is whether socialism intends mode of exchange D. Socialism in the twentieth century was only able to realize societies dominated by modes of exchange B and C, and as a result it lost its appeal. But so long as modes of exchange B and C remain dominant, the drive to transcend them will never disappear. In some form or another, mode of exchange D will emerge. Whether or not this takes religious form is unimportant. This drive is fundamentally rooted in that which has been repressed from nomadic society. It has persisted throughout world history, and will not disappear in the future— even if we are unable to predict the form in which it will appear.”

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