A national conversation has begun which is alarming, yet also familiar. It talks about costs and trade-offs, losses and accounts. It is a conversation about human lives framed in the language of economics.

A recent study by Philip Thomas, professor of risk management at Bristol University, suggests that ‘If the coronavirus lockdown leads to a fall in GDP of more than 6.4 per cent more years of life will be lost due to recession than will be gained through beating the virus’.

Research like this presents us with a terrible dilemma, even leading some people to wonder whether the trade-off for trying to save elderly and vulnerable lives is really worth it, when it would cripple the economy for decades.

In times like these it helps to remember that we are presented with this misleading narrative every time we decide to act on our conscience. We are told we cannot halt the arms trade, because we will lose jobs. We are told we cannot reduce carbon emissions, because we will lose jobs. Now we are told we cannot save people’s lives, because we will lose jobs. For decades governments have used the threat of recession to badger us into maintaining an economic system that has made the poor poorer and the rich richer at the expense of the Earth’s support system. We are told this makes economic sense, but does it? 

Economics vs Chrematistics

In their book ‘For the Common Good’ economist Herman Daly and theologian John Cobb, Jr explain the difference between the practice of economics (from the Greek word oikonomia ‘the management of the household so as to increase its use value to all members over the long term’) and chrematistics (from khrema, meaning money and referring to ‘the branch of political economy relating to the manipulation of property and wealth so as to maximize short-term monetary exchange value to the owner’):

“Oikonomia differs from chrematistics in three ways. First, it takes the long-run rather than the short-run view. Second, it considers costs and benefits to the whole community, not just to the parties to the transaction. Third, it focuses on concrete use value and the limited accumulation thereof, rather than on an abstract exchange value and its impetus towards unlimited accumulation…. For oikonomia, there is such a thing as enough. For chrematistics, more is always better… “

In this definition of economics financial wealth does not trump the wellbeing of the community, as it is distinct from the actions a society must undertake to look after its members. The threat to our livelihoods that a fall in GDP represents is due to a conflation of economics with chrematistics.  

If for a moment we were to prise them apart we would see a different picture.

Whereas the lockdown has caused a drop in GDP growth (chrematistics) with the threat of recession and likely hardship for many people, apart from restricting our movements, it generally does not make us less able. It will mean many of us will not have access to society’s current means of exchange (money), but it does not represent a loss of ability, talent and willingness to contribute in the population at large. 

In fact, despite the fear and anxiety generated by the crisis, what we are witnessing is a phenomenal upsurge in generosity and creativity as people pull together to support each other with whatever they have. We are collectively defying the popular economic notion of humans as selfish utility maximising individuals and mostly showing solidarity and kindness. In the process we are realising who the real wealth creators are. They are the frontline workers in the caring economy: the nurses and doctors, the shop assistants and delivery drivers, the shelf stackers, the cleaners, the 750.000 (and counting) volunteers that have come forward to help the NHS. Online, they are the people offering free education, performances, exercise classes, financial advice, museum tours, mental health support, the list just goes on.  Behind closed doors it is those managing the domestic life: the family members doing their best to keep their children and themselves healthy and happy and sane, the friends joining together at a distance via a multitude of platforms. 

In this moment of crisis the fragilities of a globalised system have been exposed and it is ‘ordinary people’ and communities working together that are heading off socio-economic breakdown. They are demonstrating in the words of Naomi Klein in her book No is Not Enough, that ‘If the goal is to move from a society based on endless taking and depletion to one based on caretaking and renewal, then all of our relationships have to be grounded in those same principles of reciprocity and care —because our relationships with one another are our most valuable resource of all.’

The effects of Covid 19 will continue to place an unprecedented strain on societies that will require international cooperation, imagination and courage to overcome, but these efforts must not be geared towards returning to business as usual. Instead, we need to foreground the countless social and economic practices that have been developed over the last four decades by academics and practitioners dedicated to creating economic systems that serve all life on earth, and put in place mechanisms that reward people for generating real wealth and value. 

Time for bold solutions

After years of waiting in the wings Universal Basic Income (UBI) has now entered public discourse. Many pilots are underway, but the oldest ongoing experiment, The Alaska Dividend Fund, has shown no decrease in labour market participation and has ‘significantly mitigated poverty, especially among Alaska’s vulnerable rural Indigenous population.’ 

Currency experts such as Bernard Lietaer have shown that diversifying our exchange systems will make them more resilient to shocks in the global market and enable us to support social and ecological regeneration. The Human Scale Development framework developed in Latin America in the 1980s can help us evaluate whether what we are currently producing is actually meeting our real needs or pseudo satisfying manufactured wants. Together with Doughnut Economics and Steady State Economics such frameworks can help us steer a course that keeps our economic activity within the Earth’s limits. 

Vulnerable international food chains must now be replaced by regenerative local food systems. Building a vibrant food culture could simultaneously tackle obesity and youth unemployment, while ensuring future food security and restoring our soils. Land and property ownership must come under scrutiny and re-imagined to ensure food sovereignty, the regeneration of natural habitats and truly affordable and secure housing for all. The creation of worker cooperatives and support for local businesses have been shown to multiply local wealth and wellbeing, and will be needed to create more cohesive living and working communities.

In order to give people a say in shaping their lives and their communities, local authorities could introduce participatory budgeting, citizens’ assemblies and community charters.  Both nationally and internationally we must look at ways to abolish the crippling debt that is forcing people into unsafe work or destitution. We must also urgently start a discussion about the internet as a public utility. Work done by the P2P Foundation and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance can provide a guiding framework for sharing the wealth created by our communal efforts and make sure we all have access to its vital services.

The unintended social experiment precipitated by the virus presents a once-only window of opportunity to re-think our economic and social organisation in ways that can help us survive both the Corona epidemic and the greater threat of climate change that is now playing out. Instead of making people and planet fit around the numbers, it is time for numbers (financial mechanisms, exchange systems) to start fitting around people and planet. 

GDP does not measure what we value most. This crisis must be an opportunity to challenge what we have allowed corporations around the world to do with the natural environment (conveniently referred to as resources) and people (labour) in the name of economic growth. Thatcher was wrong: there are alternatives. Many of us have been working on them for decades. We are ready to take our rightful place at the table to help us turn the corner into a possible and hopeful future.  

Lead image by Tim Mossholder

The post No more business as usual – Rethinking economic value for a post-Covid world appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Jonny Gordon-Farleigh: Your new book, How to Thrive in the Next Economy, explores practical innovations in sustainability across the world. What stories would you pick out as the most instructive for the scale of change we need to see?

John Thackara: The sheer variety of projects and initiatives out there is, for me, the main story. No single project is the magic acorn that will grow into a mighty oak tree. We need to think more like a forest than a single tree! If you look at healthy forests, they are extremely diverse—and we’re seeing a healthy level of diversity in social innovation all over the world. Many people say we need to focus on solutions that scale, but to me that’s globalisation-thinking wearing a green coat. Every social and ecological context is unique, and the answers we seek will be based on an infinity of local needs.

JGF: What examples of inspiring stories can you give?

JT: The story of soil has been an epiphany for me. Soil is the largest living system on the planet; without it, we wouldn’t exist. But I only learned this a few years ago. At first I read a whole pile of articles and books, but it all came to life when I then went on a soil creation course in the Cevennes, the mountainous area in France where I live. Our teacher was a French agro-ecologist Robert Morez who has worked as an agricultural advisor in Africa for forty years. He showed us how to make a growing mound with a bunch of ingredients: bone meal, dried blood, crushed oyster shells, wood fire ash, onto a growing mound of wood, twigs, leaves, straw. Each layer is seasoned, as if with salt and pepper, by this powdery mix of minerals and biological activators. Robert told us we were learning “how to construct a bio-intensive planting mound”—but in my mind, I was making soil, rather than depleting it, for first time in my life.

JGF: There was a figure recently stating that we have around 100 harvests left.

JT: Yes, that figure was for British soil at the current rate of soil depletion. Other reports suggest that we are losing 3.5 tonnes of soil for every person on the planet every year. The numbers are either hard to grasp or just dispiriting, but either way, it’s enormous. But what I learned up the mountain is that we can restore soil because people in different regions of the world have been doing precisely that for a long time. On its own, soil formation is an extremely slow process— sometimes taking thousands of years—but a growing band of visionaries have discovered that the process can be speeded up dramatically if the right approach is followed.

JGF: Farming organisations, such as La Via Campesina, describe this approach as agroecology.

JT: Yes, they do. It’s an ugly word, I know, but it describes the practical wisdom of people who’ve been stewarding the land for generations. It’s not my job to tell La Via Campesina what language to use—the word make sense to their 300,000 members—but I think one of the things that we writers can do is come up with better words!

JGF: This leads into my next question: Early on in the book you remind readers to be careful of the words we choose to make sense of these new times. Noting, “one man’s energy descent, is another woman’s energy transition.” Words that I find unhelpful, and come to mind, are phrases such as ‘degrowth’. What language do you find alienating in the language around the new economy?

JT: I’m totally not a fan of ‘degrowth’. I’ve learned through experience that calling for people to give things up, voluntarily or otherwise, doesn’t work. Most people simply turn off when confronted by lists of prohibitions. I try, instead, to talk about kinds of growth we do need: land getting healthier, water getting fresher, air cleaner to breathe, communities more resilient. These kinds of growth add up to new kind of value.

JGF: You also write about healing the metabolic rift, a term that Karl Marx used to describe the loss of interdependency between social and ecological systems and the reason for recurring crises.

JT: The metabolic rift is another of the ugly green buzzwords that seem to plague us—but learning about the concept was another lightbulb-going-off-in-my-head moment. I’d spent half my life trying to figure out why even decent people who love animals and children persist in organising the world in such an obviously damaging way. An answer that makes sense is that we don’t experience the result of the damage that we do as visceral, embodied feedback. We don’t feel the pain felt by the earth because it happens somewhere else—out of sight and therefore out of mind.

JGF: Could you explain more about what the metabolic rift is?

JT: It’s not that our brains lack processing capacity—more, that they’re preoccupied by the wrong inputs. A combination of paved surfaces and pervasive media has shielded us from direct experience. Material progress itself has distracted us from the health of the natural living systems upon which we still depend—and, indeed, are a part. If you put it to someone—as I have done—that, without soil, humanity will quickly starve, they usually agree, nod sagely—and wait for me to change the subject. Few of the city-dwelling people I know ever touch, feel, taste or smell the stuff—healthy or otherwise. Our children are not taught about it at school. It’s the same with climate change, the loss of biodiversity, deforestation; or dying seas: Out of sight, out of mind. Why would we care?

The ways we understand the world are shaped by the political and economic system. As Jason Moore explains in his book Capitalism in the Web Of Life, the metabolic rift is not a regrettable side-effect of the modern economy; it’s written into its DNA. Our present economy has to grow in order to survive, and ceaseless growth entails ever-larger inputs of external resources and energy. Our problems started when we first travelled across the world to take other people’s minerals and resources—and that was 500 years ago. This is where the richness of the so called developed nations originates. The Spanish plundered wood from the Baltic region to build the ships in which they sailed off to the West Indies to bring back spices, and so on. A hundred million kilos of silver from Latin America provided much of the capital for Europe’s industrial revolution. Our bad behaviour dates back a long way!

JGF: Your book suggests that organising the world around bioregions is one way to close the metabolic rift?

JT: The notion of a bioregion appeals to me for a specific reason: Telling city people to take better care of nature has been one of my many failures as a writer. Intellectually, city folk buy the argument that growth should mean soils, biodiversity and watersheds getting healthier, and communities more resilient. But in the absence of positive feedback from some distant place called Nature, people just don’t connect with my exhortations. I realised that a more compelling story, and a shared purpose, were needed. So I started asking people two questions: “Does your city know where its lunch is coming from? And is that place healthy—or not?”

With the prospect of missing lunch as motivation, I’m finding that the idea of a bioregion is an appealing way for city people to reconnect with living systems, and each other, through the unique places where we live. It acknowledges that we live among watersheds, foodsheds, fibresheds, and food systems—not just in cities, towns, or ‘the countryside’. The idea is culturally dynamic, too—far more than abstract words like sustainability, or resilience, or transition. A bioregion is about unique geographic, climatic, hydrological and ecological qualities. These can be the basis for meaning and identity, and people get that.

But beyond the idea in general, what most turns people on—especially designers and artists—is the sheer variety of work to be done in bringing a bioregion to life. Maps of a bioregion’s ecological assets are needed: its geology and topography; its soils and watersheds; its agriculture and biodiversity. The collaborative monitoring of living systems, the interactions among them, and the carrying capacity of the land, needs to be designed—together with feedback channels. Spaces and places that support collaboration need to be identified and, where needed, adapted—from maker spaces to churches, from town halls, to libraries. New collaboration and peer-to-peer platforms are needed to help people to share resources of all kinds—from land, to time and knowledge. New economic and business models need to be adapted and deployed, such as peer production, commons economics, and open value accounting. Novel forms of governance and discussion must also be designed that enable collaboration among diverse groups of people and enterprises. Every bioregion will need its own identity, too—what the bioregion looks like, and feels like, to its citizens and visitors.

JGF: Those subjects are pretty broad-ranging. Are you suggesting that designers and artists are best-placed to take care of them all?

JT: None of these actions mean designers or artists are acting alone. Developing the agenda for a bioregion involves a wide range of skills and capabilities: The geographer’s knowledge of mapping; the conservation biologist’s expertise in biodiversity and habitats; the ecologist’s literacy in ecosystems; the economist’s ability to measure flows and leakage of money and resources. But in creating objects of shared value—such as an atlas, a website, a plan, a building, a landscape, or a meeting—I do think the design process can be a powerful way to foster collaboration among diverse disciplines and constituencies, yes. I’d also say that the service designer can bring something special to the creation of platforms that enables actors to share and collaborate. And—as you’ve shown so wonderfully in STIR magazine already—artists have a unique capacity to represent real-world phenomena in ways that change our perceptions.

GF: At the recent new economy summit we both attended in Bristol, I mentioned Charles Eisenstein’s claim that, “the city of New York, with over one million people, met all its food needs from within seven miles prior to 1850.” If you look at the scale of most UK cities, such as Bristol or Manchester, it’s a very possible project.

JT: It is very doable. Urban farming started off as a minority fad, but it’s quickly going mainstream in many northern cities. A lot of smart innovation to support urban farming is happening—but it’s not much about high-tech control systems. It’s more about new ways to share resources, and collaborate to get the work done. New kinds of enterprise are emerging: food co-ops, collective kitchens, community dining, edible gardens, new distribution platforms. The big change is an understanding that urban farming can encompass an archipelago of growing spaces within a 50-mile radius—a mosaic of growing situations that we can think about as a whole.

JGF: What examples could you give of urban projects that you experienced while writing the book?

JT: I’m very excited by a project called The Food Commons in the USA. This project marks a radical shift from a narrow focus on the production of food, towards a whole systems approach in which the interests of farm communities, the land, watersheds, and biodiversity, are all considered together as inter-dependent parts. The Food Commons is conceived as a kind of connective tissue that weaves connections between grassroots projects, on the one hand, and vital support services, on the other: legal, financial, communications and organisational.

Another great example is the city of Cleveland, also in America. It’s a classic rustbelt city that has lost large chunks of traditional industries. They have a particularly down-to-earth mayor who, when badgered by activists for the need for more urban farms, commissioned a three-year a peer-reviewed assessment of what could be grown on different patches around the city repurposed for growing food, such as abandoned lots, vacant buildings. The results surprised everyone. Something like 70% of all fruit and vegetables, and quite a big chunk of the dairy products, could be grown within Cleveland’s city limits. And that is without even venturing 20 miles outside the city. So now the Cleveland model, as it’s called, is almost a reincarnation of the new city model from the 1920s.

JGF: One of the big shifts you advocate in the book is to move beyond the language of ‘do less harm’ to the idea of ‘leaving things better.’ What inspired this change of approach in both thought and action?

JT: I had another transformational experience at a meeting of 200 sustainability managers at a famous home furnishings giant in Sweden. During 20 years of uninterrupted work on sustainability, they told me, this famous company has made thousands of rigorously-tested improvements that are recorded on what they call a “list without end.” The range of improvements I heard about was startling—even admirable—except for one fact: The one thing this huge company has not done is question whether it should grow. On the contrary: It is committed to double in size by 2020. By that date, the number of customers visiting their giant sheds will increase from 650 million a year at the time of writing to 1.5 billion a year. Sitting there, it hit me that there’s a problem with this narrative that concerns wood. The company, as the third largest user of wood in the world, has promised that by 2017 half of all the wood it uses—up from 17% now—will either be recycled, or come from forests that are responsibly managed. Now 50% is a vast improvement, but it also begs the question: What about the second half of all that wood? As the company doubles in size, that second pile of wood—the un-certified half, the unreliably-sourced-at-best half—will soon be twice as big as all the wood it uses today. The impact on the world’s forests, of one company’s ravenous hunger for resources, will be catastrophic. The committed and gifted people I met in Sweden—along with sustainability teams in hundreds of the world’s major companies—are confronted by an awful dilemma: however hard they work, however many innovations they come up with, the net negative impact of their firm’s activities on the world’s living systems will be greater in the years ahead than it is today. And all because of compound growth. This was the moment when I realised that it doesn’t matter how committed you are to doing less harm. If it is simultaneously committed to grow then they will inevitably leave things worse.

JGF: Throughout the book you look at ‘nonmarket work,’ life ‘without money,’ and the ‘commons of care,’ or what is sometimes known as the shadow economy. Commons advocate David Bollier claims “an estimated two billion people depend on various natural resource commons for their everyday survival—farmland, fisheries, forests, irrigation water, wild game.” And this figure dramatically increases when you add care and other forms of noneconomic activity. How much of a role can commons play in western economies, alongside co-operatives, social enterprises and other social business models?

JT: A gigantic amount. The commons is an idea, and a practice, that generates meaning and hope. I’m nervous of definitions—they cause endless disputes and also tend to freeze an idea in time —but I like the way Silke Helfrich talks about the commons as “all the things that we inherit from past generations that enable our livelihoods.” Seen through that lens, the commons can include land, watersheds, biodiversity, common knowledge, software, skills, or public buildings and spaces. The important thing is that the commons are a form of wealth that a community looks after, through the generations. The idea embodies a commitment to ‘leave things better’ rather than extract value from them as quickly as possible. They are the opposite of the impulse to monetise everything. And because the commons, as an idea, affirms our codependency with living systems and the biosphere, it also represents the new politics we’ve all been looking for to replace the industrial growth economy we have now.

None of this is new, by the way. The commons goes back an awfully long way. It describes the way communities managed shared land in Medieval Europe. Even earlier history, too, is filled with examples of communities managing common resources sustainably. Examples of water being shared as a commons date back 8,000 years. One of the things I’ve learned from the so-called undeveloped world is that the care-based economy has existed throughout human history—looking after each other, and the land, in a multitude of ways, many of which don’t involve paid-for work.

Writers like Hazel Henderson have been trying to refocus our attention on the care economy, writing 30 to 40 years ago. More recently, an important German writer called Ina Pratetorius has argued for a care-centered economy. In German the word care encompasses being mindful, looking after, attending to needs, and being considerate—caring for the world, in other words, and not only nursing and social-work activities or housework in the narrow sense. In a care-centered economy, the commonly held resources that enable us to look after each other, and nature, are part of the same story. Theodore Shanin, who has been called the peasant’s philosopher, makes a similar point: in terms of the land, the water and the air, so called peasants, farmers and poor people have been stewards of their commons for generations; modern, industrialised mass-production farming made it harder and harder to do their job. The care economy has always existed, and we now have the pleasant task to reinvent it for these new times.

JGF: The word ‘connection’ crops up a lot in the book. Is that a core theme?

JT: Too true, it is. I’m like an amateur EM Forster: Howard’s End opens with the words, “Only connect.” The word unlocks so many blockages. I’ve learned that too many of our most celebrated inventions have been the result of a design approach that strives for perfect, static, utopian solutions. These are different, in kind, from real-world ecologies that are dynamic and constantly changing. This habit of mind of ours is not limited to the engineering of hard systems; some visions of nature itself have been utopian in this sense.

Until recently, conservation research tended to focus on the individual species as the unit of study—for example, by looking at the impact of habitat destruction on an individual’s situation. I’m especially inspired by the work of the ecologist Jane Memmott. She has explained that species interactions may be much more important. All organisms are linked to at least one other species in a variety of critical ways—for example, as predators or prey, or as pollinators or seed dispersers—with the result that each species is embedded in a complex network of interactions. The extinction of one species can lead to a cascade of secondary extinctions in ecological networks in ways that we are only just beginning to understand.

The eco-philosopher Joanna Macy is another inspiration. She describes the appearance of this new story as the ‘Great Turning’, a profound shift in our perception, a reawakening to the fact that we are not separate or apart from plants, animals, air, water, and the soils. There is a spiritual dimension to her story—Macy is a Buddhist scholar—but her Great Turning is consistent with recent scientific discoveries, too—the idea, as articulated by Stephan Harding, that the world is “far more animate than we ever dared suppose.” No organism is truly autonomous. In Gaia theory, systems thinking, and resilience science, researchers have shown that our planet is a web of interdependent ecosystems. From the study everything from sub-microscopic viruses, yeasts, ants, mosses, lichen, slime moulds and mycorrhizae, to trees, rivers and climate systems, this new story has emerged. All natural phenomena are connected. Their very essence is to be in relationship with other things—including us.

For thirty years John Thackara has traveled the world in his search of stories about the practical steps taken by communities to realise a sustainable future. He writes about these stories online, and in books; he uses them in talks for cities, and business; he also organises Doors of Perception xskool workshops that bring the subjects of these stories together.

Interview by Jonny Gordon-Farleigh, originally published in STIR magazine no.12 Winter 2016 and reposted from STIR’s website.

The post Healing the metabolic rift: an interview with John Thackara appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Here is a draft of a text we wrote for another study commissioned by the Boll Foundation, that will serve for a ‘deep dive’ discussion on the value shift, organized by the Commons Strategies Group in Berlin later this month. This analysis is preliminary, the main study will be finished in November this year. We hope to integrate the empirical findings of the P2P Value scientific community in there as well.

The text, co-written and with the assistance of Vasilis Niaros of the P2P Lab, starts here below,

Michel Bauwens, Amsterdam , September 2, 2016

**

Our common world is faced with huge questions regarding the evolution of value. Amongst the important questions we can think of are the following:

• What is value, specifically in the context of the allocation of resources in human societies, and perhaps even more specifically, in more ‘digitalized’, ‘networked’ societies where emerging knowledge commons are playing an ever more important role?

• What ‘should’ be value, in a world marked by ecological and resource constraints that are now operating at a global scale ? Can we imagine a value system that rewards generative instead of extractive activities and exchanges ?

• In a world of social, cultural and institutional diversity, can a new ‘value system’ ever incorporate the multiple values that are not recognized by capitalism, such as the care economy and domestic work ?

David Graeber’s book, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value, is a deep historical and anthropological survey of ways of dealing with value reviewing anthropological research and approaches, and is itself a testament to the wide variety of value practices and explanations. It’s main underlying thesis, if I understood it correctly, is that value is related to ‘making society’ and that we need value regimes that allow us to direct attention and energy to what we commonly value. Value comes into being through social practices. This stands in paradoxical contrast with the capitalist value regime, which seems to lead to avenues that no one in society, or perhaps only the very few, really want.

There is of course no consensus about what value is, and what economic value is derived from, neither cross-historically, nor amongst analysts and commentators of contemporary capitalism. What human individuals and societies are willing to put their attention and energy to, and the ‘rules of the game’, through which resources are allocated, varies amongst cultures, amongst various regions, amongst ideological groups within a society, and amongst various historical times.

The debate therefore rages on whether what determines value is located in the objective sphere (reflecting an amount of labor, energy, capital, resources …), such as is claimed by the labor value theory (LVT), or those arguing that value (and money) should now be tied to biomass or energy expenditure; or is it located in the subjective sphere (the marginalist school, austrian economics and its influence on mainstream neoclassical economics), whether as a simple correlation of individual desires, or as a conscious collective decision and social contract (many monetary reformers and for example Modern Monetary Theory would adhere to that view).

There is certainly a revival of interest in Marx, and in the labor value theory, though the general literature of current Marxism is still very poor in looking at how ICT and digitization would affect its understandings.

A recent exception is the work of Christian Fuchs. A common characteristic of these approaches is the claim that despite technological changes, capitalism itself is intact, and therefore, the analytical tools of Marx and the LVT are still essential. Fuchs also published a number of books looking at how digitalisation, the emergence of social media and of peer production and its derivatives, are changing capitalism. Within that tradition, Fuchs stresses that the ‘audience labour’ of social media users is ‘productive labour’, and that Facebook and other platforms are capitalist platforms are extracting surplus value from the labour. This also means that social media users are considered as part of the class struggle within capitalism.

There is a second stream, located with the labour theory of value, represented by authors like Jakob Rigi or Olivier Fraysse, who stress that the production of use value does not directly create surplus value, and that the platforms are extracting rent. Facebook is not selling what we produce on social media, which is about sharing ‘use value’ to peers, what they are selling are derivatives from our sharing, i.e. data about our likes and interests, essentially to advertisers. They are operating not in the production of value, but in the sphere of realization or circulation of value, i.e. helping sell what capitalism produces, and operating like media did before the internet, through audience work that insures the presence of attention.

The third stream, though linked to Marxism, is the post-autonomist tradition, derived from the autonomist social movements of Italy in the seventies, with authors like Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, and the analysts of the French-Italian school of cognitive capitalism,Yann-Moulier Boutang, Andrea Fumagalli, Christian Marazzo. Adam Arvidsson is broadly making the same argument.

These analysts argue that the labour theory of value is no longer the primary driver of cognitive capitalism, and that the productivity of cognitive labour cannot be compared in socially necessary labour time. Creating symbolic, creative, esthetic, cognitive value is highly contextualized and independent of the expenditure of time. They also argue that the production of value has spread to the whole of society, to what they call the ‘social factory’. Labour has become “biopolitical” because work and life have fused and become indistinguishable. Now that the production of value occurs in the ‘social factory’, value is extracted from the totality of life, in a kind of bio-cognitive capitalism. The value produced by society as a whole is what Hardt and Negri call the common, and the value of that common is extracted and ‘translated’ from ‘outside’ of the conventional production process–essentially through the financial sector, in ways that create and reinforce the inequity of our economic system.

There are of course major differences between the fundamental approach of these authors as well. The Negrian school is clearly an anti-capitalist school, and believes local and global rebellions and revolutions of the ‘multitude’ are needed to break the stranglehold of finance over the common. Adam Arvidsson’s concern in The Ethical Economy is to make the new types of value (which are independent of labour time) measurable and recognizable in the current economy, so that this new value can have its legitimate piece of the distributional pie.

What all these authors agree on however, is that there is a ‘crisis of value’, i.e. that the old value regime does not adequately recognize and reward the new value that is created.

The diagnosis is that we are transitioning to an economy with an evern increasing number of collaborative eco-systems, where the common value is produced through numerous contributions, which are most often not measured or recorded, but that value is then realized or captured through our financial systems. Value is increasingly created through the contributions of the many, but realized for the benefit of the few. However, the concern for this imbalance may entirely stay within the sphere of commodification. In this case, we would simply replace commodified labor with commodified contributions.

The authors of this report however, take a different position. Rather than discussing what the new value means for capitalism, we ask instead: What does that new value represent for a shift towards post-capitalist practices? What if the common, or the commons more precisely, actually represents a new economy that is being born within the old? This changes the perspective because it reorients discussion around commons-producing ‘peer producers’. If one adopts this perspective(we are anticipating later parts of this report), two main avenues would be open to us.

The first avenue would be to think about ‘reverse co-optation’ of value, from the ‘old’ system to the new. Can the emerging commons-centric economy, which creates value in and through the commons, use capital from the capitalist or state system, and subsume capital to the new logic? This premise proceeds from the realistic position that the new system does not have the power (yet?) to change the overall logic of the present system, but it can carve out relatively protected niches within it.

The second avenue goes one step further, within the confines of the already existing commons economy: Can broader streams of value be recognized, and become the basis of a new distribution of value that recognizes the commons and its distinct species of value-creation?

The third step will be the most difficult, if commons communities succeed in both reverse cooptation and new value distribution strategies within the confines of their communities, how does it become the basis of a wider system change, that would affect the very domination of the capitalist market and its value regime ?

The first option is represented by the ‘transvestment’ strategy of the Enspiral open cooperative, using external investments with capped returns, and also insulating their purpose-driven activities from capitalist extraction. The second option is represented by Sensorica, which internally creates a value-sovereign distribution through its open value accounting system. The key to more fundamental change however, will be the capacity to have this newly recognized value, be recognized by the system as a whole.

Before we proceed in documenting precisely such practices, we need to deepen our understanding of the value crisis.

Analysing the Value Crisis

A spate of recent books has used derivations of the labour theory of value to highlight a ‘value crisis’:

Adam Arvidsson’s book The Ethical Economy, in a thesis earlier outlined in a joint essay by Michel Bauwens, is one of many treatises stressing that contemporary capitalist value-practices are no longer able to determine what value is. Value is now more than ever essentially co-created in the civic and social sphere, and it cannot be restricted to economic value as recognized by the system of capital. The material value of products and services, and the corporations that sell them, represent only a fraction of the total value that is somehow generated by economic forces, as evidenced by the ‘goodwill’ value of stocks, which vastly exceeds the value of the material resources. The stock market is no longer an adequate way to recognize and gauge that social value; new value-measures may need to be developed, but also a recognition that many human activities are beyond ‘value’ and cannot, or should not, be measured. Many of the new value-measures that are presently being developed and experimented with, will be post-monetary ‘current-sies’, as Arthur Brock of the MetaCurrency Project calls it — systems that enable communities to see flow, and react to it.

Michel Bauwens’ commons-centric interpretation is that human societies, through commons-based peer production and related modalities of creating value, are now able to exponentially increase use-value production outside of corporations and markets. However, because abundant, digitally reproduced immaterial use-value is generated outside of the commodity form, it moves to the periphery of market production, and therefore ever greater amounts of use-value production are no longer recognized through monetization. This is creating a crisis of capital accumulation (as it becomes harder for capital to discover reliable sources of return), but also of precarious livelihoods.

It is not difficult to see that answers to this conundrum could tilt towards either more intensive capitalist responses, or to the commons. One of the solutions, as advocated by Jaron Lanier, is to monetize and commodify the digital economy through micro-payments. This is similar to the familiar efforts to value “nature’s services” through contrived markets, such as for pollution rights, and we can see similar efforts advocated in the care economy. In these visions, markets and capitalism are seen as the inescapable horizon of societies and their economies for which greater commodification is the natural, inescapable answer. Capitalist players assimilate the new value streams on the old, familiar terms. Of course, there are many other valuation proposals that do not proceed from a desire for marketization, but for the justified desire to create a flow of resources and income to the digital commons, the care economy, and people involved in managing and protecting natural resources. A key question here is, can efforts to valuation lead to any other reality than commodification ?

Jeremy Rifkin, in his book The Zero-Marginal Cost Society, argues that the trend of de-commodification seen in intangible realms (software, social networking) now extends to ‘material’ production. Distributed renewable energy creates, once the initial investment is made, an abundant flow of energy which destroys its monetary value. New manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing, create a similar effect for many material goods. Hence Rifkin predicts a future economy where demonetized collaborative commons are at the core of production, and market functions operate at the periphery.

Paul Mason, in his book Post-Capitalism, uses the labor theory of value to make a similar argument. Software and design, he argues, once they become produced through open and collaborative commons that can be abundantly reproduced, should be considered as ‘virtual machines’. This means that once labor is used to produce new software, very little new labor is needed to reproduce it, and therefore, the input of labor is minimized. This makes software companies that operate under the average socially necessary labor hyper-competitive vis a vis their competitors, but, because they are able to eliminate labor cost in production. They are also reducing the overall pool of profit for entire sectors of the economy, creating a crisis of capital accumulation through falling rates of profit.

Perhaps the most influential book of the last decade has been Race Against The Machine, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew MacAfee, which points to the danger of increased automation. Automation has now moved to knowledge work, and threatens to destroy millions of jobs. As products become ever more abundant and cheaper, they argue, with less and less human labor needed to produce them, there will be fewer and fewer humans as consumers, and capitalism as we know it will cease to operate. The book has led to a broad re-assessment of value practices, and to calls for initiating a basic income, including from leaders of Silicon Valley, who are more keenly aware than others of the potential for this wave of automation to disrupt the stability of the capitalist economy.

So, at least amongst the authors reviewed here, there seems to exist an increasing consensus that we are going through a ‘value crisis’, and that a new value regime has to be invented.

Feminist authors have been stressing the other side of this value crisis, which has been a constant characteristic of capitalism and even one of the conditions of its existence, as Slivia Federici argues in her magisterial The Caliban and the Witch. That argument is of course that capitalism cannot exist without externalizing costs and appropriating “free” resources (such as the social reproduction that occurs through families and care work). Not recognizing and not valuing domestic care work, the labour of love that is so crucial to human survival. is one of the key processes that maintain this unjust system. The broader forms of care that capitalism’s value system does recognize, and commodifies as labor for hire, are at the very bottom in terms of value recognition, most often considered to be the simplest form of exchangeable labor.

There is a parallel here with work for the commons, or commoning.

It should be noted that the capitalism renders the commons economy invisible in much the same way that it ignores the value of domestic work. The digital value crisis has similar roots: the increase in free labour goes unrecognized. Capitalism doesn’t here just ignore negative environmental and social externalities, it profits from positive social externalities generated by care work, the commons and digital communities. This is the core achievement of the new netarchical capitalism: it has learned to profit directly from the positive social externalities of commons-based peer production, just as it has always profited from unrecognized domestic work. An interesting idea here is that some of the solutions invented by peer production communities could be of interest in the care economy as well, and perhaps, vice versa.

I would propose that the concepts of the care economy and that of a commons(-centric) economy are converging in the same general direction. As Peter LInebaugh has noted, the commons requires the activity of commoning, which is nothing other than caring for a joint resource or common social object. Care-givers are often giving energy and attention to unrecognized commons, such as the family commons. Authors from the care economy, such as Ina Praetorius call for a return of ‘economics’ to its original function of providing for human needs and for recognizing all those who contribute to the general welfare. Moving towards a commons economy moving to a economy centered around commoning, i.e. caring, where people can freely choose their object of care, be recognized for it, and be rewarded for it so that they can maintain fulfilling lives. Especially in the light of the re-emergence of digital knowledge commons, as being increasingly central to the organisation of our social lives, it would seem that where the new commons are essentially about our social and ‘psychological’ reproduction, the care economy rightly focuses on its conditio sine qua non, our even more basic need for physical and affective reproduction. Both need to go hand in hand, and a dialogue between the commons ‘economists’ and the care ‘economists’ seems long overdue. Both ‘movements’ may have a lot to learn from each other. For example, both are facing the fact that most resources are controlled by the state and market, and the transvestment strategies of commoners (see below), have also been invented by reproductive care workers. Both movements are interested in re-creating meaningful autonomous work, something that both child-care collectives and digital commoners, have been successful at creating. And as Massimo de Angelis and Silvia Federici (et al.) write in the preface and introduction to a special issue of the Commoner on ‘Care Work and the Commons’, many new social movements and initiatives with the sphere of reproductive care work, are actively creating new social commons. The solutions that are found and developed within commons-creating peer to peer communities are therefore of the greatest possible interest in terms of how to support the care economy as well. Caring and commoning bring affectivity at the core of production.Perhaps as importantly, the capacity for the ‘global scaling of small group dynamics’, one of the key characteristics of commons-based peer production (CBPP) brings back the community dynamics of our original hunter-gathering anthropological condition, but adds the logic of affinity to the original logic of kinship. Bringing the commons back to the core of value creation and distribution, in the context of small group dynamics, brings care back at the center of production.

But let’s now move to a perhaps even more important central issue of the current value crisis, since it involves our very ‘survivability’, i.e. our connection to the natural world, in which we are embedded, and of which we are a substantial, not separate, part.

It seems clear that the current value regime rewards ‘extractive’ production and consumption activities. This increasingly endangers the ‘sustainability’ of the planet, or rather the capacity of the planet to sustain the current level of human activities. This points to the necessity of a shift in value regime, from ‘extraction’ to ‘generation’ (and regeneration).

Linking value to its expression in our monetary systems, ecologist John D. Liu suggests that:

“If we say that money comes from ecological function instead from extraction, manufacturing buying and selling, then we have a system in which all human efforts go toward restoring, protecting and preserving ecological function. That is what we need to mitigate and adapt to climate change, to ensure food security, to ensure that human civilizations survive. Our monetary system must reflect reality. We could have growth, not from stuff, but growth from more functionality. If we do that and we value that higher than things, we will survive.”
(http://regenerationinternational.org/2016/03/07/meet-john-d-liu-the-indiana-jones-of-landscape-restoration/ )

We can apply this principle to ‘social extraction’ as well, and relate it to the potential shift towards a commons and care economy. How do we move from a extractive to a generative economy as it relates to human communities and their commons? Indeed, the ‘value crisis’ as we described above, means that more value is extracted from generic productive activities, and less value is flowing back. The current format of ‘netarchical capital’ — in which capital no longer produces commodities for sale through commodified labor, but ‘enables’ peer to peer commons production and peer to peer ‘exchanges’ in order to extract rent from it — is similarly ‘socially’ unsustainable.

So in conclusion, it would seem that the three issues we have discussed — i.e. the free labour of digital workers and social media users, the non-recognition of care work, and the ongoing ecological degradation of our planet and its resources — are all interlinked to the dominance of a system based on extractivism.

Therefore, the key underlying shift needed is one from extractive models, practices that enrich some at the expense of the others (communities, resources, nature) to generative value models, practices that enrich the communities, resources etc.. to which they are applied. This is what we could call the Value Shift.

A historical approach to shifts in modes of exchange

According to Kojin Karatani in, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, there are four fundamental modes of exchange. The first is Mode A, which is based on the reciprocity of the gift and on the “community”. The second is Mode B, which is related to ruling and protection, and based on the “state”. The third is Mode C, which involves commodity exchange mediated by the “market”. Capitalism only emerges when the market becomes dominant and subordinates Mode A and B to its own needs.

The fourth is the hypothetical Mode D, which transcends all the other three. Each modality changes as it constrained by the domination of other modalities. For example, the form of community is first the band (under nomadism), then the tribe, then the agricultural or territorial community under imperial systems, which eventually becomes the nation under the domination of capitalist systems.

The following table summarizes Karatani’s modes of exchange:

Concerning mode A, Karatani stresses that Marx did not distinguish between the pooling of resources in nomadic bands, and the reciprocity of the gift in tribal systems. He makes that distinction very clear, though he still uses the overall name and concept of mode A (the reciprocity of the gift) to refer to this joint period, which can sometimes cause confusion. But it becomes obvious that his description of mode D (the transcendental one) is very congruent with the thesis that we may currently be at the threshold of a new type of civilization and economy based on a new mode of exchange. Very specific about the argument of Karatani is that mode D is not just a return to the reciprocity of Mode A, nor a pure nomadic band structure, but a new structure which transcends all three preceding structures. Mode A is dominated by a new form of gift exchange based mainly on the pooling of resources, i.e. the digitized commons which enable all kinds of pooling of physical and infrastructural resources. In other words, mode D is an attempt to recreate a society based on mode A, but at a higher level of complexity and integration.

What this means in our context is that Karatani marshals considerable evidence for the existence of each modality, sourced in both anthropological and historical literature. He thus recognizes different major transitions:

• A first transition occurs when the pooling of resources in nomadic bands is replaced as a dominant modality of exchange by the reciprocity-based gift economies of tribal systems. This allows a scaling from bands to clans, tribes and inter-tribal systems and, therefore, creates a world that consists of a collection of tribal mini-systems.

• A second transition occurs when the reciprocity-based systems of tribes are replaced by state systems, based on the logic of “plunder and redistribute” or “rule and protect”. This allows scaling to inter-tribal and inter-community levels and, thus, creates a world of world-empires that compete with each other.

• A third transition occurs when these systems are replaced by the market form as the dominant form of exchange. This creates a global world-market system in which nation-states compete with each other, which Karatani characterizes as a world-economy.

• Finally, he posits, and we agree with him, a new transition towards mode D, a mode of exchange that integrates the preceding ones but is dominated by the pooling that was originally dominant in the early nomadic groups. Karatani calls this modality “associationism”.

It is important to stress the following point made by Karatani. To begin with, all systems are multimodal.The four modalities (or five according to our adaptation of Karatani’s scheme) exist in some form in all systems and it is only their mutual configuration which changes. This means that transitions depend on struggles for dominance among these modalities.
This opens up thinking about the value shift or value transition, not just as the replacement of one system by another, but as an ongoing inter-modal struggle. The question then becomes, How can we think about a commons transition as a way for the commons to engage the other modalities? Just as the logic of capitalist markets attempts to commodify, the logic of the commons is an effort to commonify. There is evidence of this type of value shift in the current practices of peer to peer based, commons-producing communities.

The Current Value Shift

The first underlying operating concept here is a quest for ‘value sovereignty’. Just as there is no consensus on what constitutes good food, so communities must decide for themselves how to regulate food provisioning, through ‘food sovereignty’. Similarly, communities that are already engaged in the value transition are opting for practices that advance their ‘value sovereignty’.

An example of this is the open and contributory value accounting approach of Sensorica, an open scientific hardware community in Montreal, Canada. Its main aim is to create a wall between the various forms of income generated through the market or grants, and the actual distribution of it, i.e. a de-coupling of internal and external value. The aim is also to avoid rent extraction, not just by external forces, but by privileged internal forces, since the commons also have internal power dynamics. Thus, the system allows the identification of all types of contributions, in time, effort, but also for those contributing ‘space’ , or time on their instruments, etc. All contributions, all ‘capital’ is recognized, and through a combination of self-logging and peer review, contributors are given “karma points” to document their contributions. The social contract is that all external revenue shall flow back to all contributors, not just those directly connected to the market or government partners. It should be noted however, that the linking of contributions to income is controversial. Other approaches would de-link entirely the contributory sphere, and link income streams exclusively to the ‘added value’ services performed around the commons, in the cooperative sphere.

A slightly different approach is used by Ethos in the UK. Ethos recognizes two types of shares. Regular shares are given to those that directly create recognized market value, but virtual shares are granted to those who contribute in a generic way to the common resources that are used in specific projects. The social contract here is that these virtual shares will be recognized as legal shares in five years time, sold to the market, and therefore also realize (monetary) value. Thus the value is here eventually shared with all contributors. None of these solutions is of course perfect, but they attempt to create a form of value sovereignty, even as their members are obliged to engage with the market in order to create livelihoods.

Note here, though, an important shift — from the use of commodified labor to produce commodities sold on the market, to contributions that create common, shared value.

A second approach has been theorized by the Telekommunisten group in Berlin and by their main authors Dmytri Kleiner and Baruch Gottlieb. They propose an inter-modal approach of ‘reverse cooptation’ of value streams, called ‘transvestment’, i.e. the transfer of value from one modality of value creation to another. An example of this is the ‘capped returns’ model of the ethical entrepreneurial coalition Enspiral in New Zealand. In this model, a wall is created between the investors, whose returns are capped, and the autonomy of the purpose-driven social entrepreneurial ventures. Through this mechanism, external and potentially extractive capital is ‘subsumed’ and disciplined to become “cooperative capital.” Significantly, once the capped return contract has been fulfilled, the resources are then ceremoniously given to the commons.. We believe that the Rooted Internet model with Pedro Jardim, is linked to this practice as well. Investors in Rooted Internet ventures also are confined to capped returns, and cannot influence the management of the participating purpose-driven entities. It should be noted that in the introduction to the special issue of The Commoner on Care Work, Silivia Federici et al. mention very similar practices in the sphere of the social commons.

Silke Helfrich, in her keynote at the Urban Commons conference in Bologna last year, described the emergence of pooling strategies for material provisioning, called Pool&Share, which combine user communities with specific types of payment for goods and services. The goal is to prevent the creation of a producer-consumer divide. A well-known example of this are the Community-Supported Agriculture models, which create a solidarity between producers and consumers engaged in one joint network.

It should be stressed that these examples are not just marginal, but part of a broad gamut of self-organized civil initiatives. This has been shown by recent surveys by Tine de Moor, for the Netherlands (in the booklet ‘Homo Cooperans’), and confirmed by Oikos, a Belgian think tank, for the Flanders, which have seen an explosion of new provisioning systems and value practices.

However, it is clear that the individual initiatives we have described in this emerging sphere of a ‘commonified’ economy, and its value regimes, have as yet to reach a working rapprochement with the dominant extractive regime. And also, while it can recognize a much wider variety of contributions, it cannot as yet recognize the general conditions in which it has to operate, and that includes the unrecognized care work that commoners themselves benefit from. While grassroots experimentations can be imagined, this it seems to us, remains a job for the wider polity.

So we conclude with one of the leading questions: Can we imagine a value regime that seamlessly recognizes all contributions, direct and indirect, which create and maintain the wellbeing of all human subjects, and the wider natural environment that is the condition for human life?

The post The Contemporary Value Crisis and the Search for ‘Value Sovereignty’ appeared first on P2P Foundation.

David Bollier is very enthused about this essay:

“I recently encountered a brilliant new essay by German writer Ina Praetorius that revisits the feminist theme of “care work,” re-casting it onto a much larger philosophical canvas. “The Care-Centered Economy: Rediscovering what has been taken for granted” suggests how the idea of “care” could be used to imagine new structural terms for the entire economy.

By identifying “care” as an essential category of value-creation, Praetorius opens up a fresh, wider frame for how we should talk about a new economic order. We can begin to see how care work is linked to other non-market realms that create value — such as commons, gifts of nature and colonized peoples –all of which are vulnerable to market enclosure.

https://www.boell.de/en/2015/04/07/care-centered-economy

The basic problem today is that capitalist markets and economics routinely ignore the “care economy” — the world of household life and social conviviality may be essential for a stable, sane, rewarding life. Economics regards these things as essentially free, self-replenishing resources that exist outside of the market realm. It sees them as “pre-economic” or “non-economic” resources, which therefore don’t have any standing at all. They can be ignored or exploited at will.

In this sense, the victimization of women in doing care work is remarkably akin to the victimization suffered by commoners, colonized persons and nature. They all generate important non-market value that capitalists depend on – yet market economics refuses to recognize this value. It is no surprise that market enclosures of care work and commons proliferate.

A 1980 report by the UN stated the situation with savage clarity: “Women represent 50 percent of the world adult population and one third of the official labor force, they perform nearly two thirds of all working hours, receive only one tenth of the world income and own less than 1 percent of world property.”

But here’s the odd thing: The stated purpose of economics is the satisfaction of human needs. And yet standard economics don’t have the honesty to acknowledge that it doesn’t really care about the satisfaction of human needs; it’s focused on consumer demand and the “higher” sphere of monetized transactions and capital accumulation. No wonder gender inequalities remain intractable, and proposals for serious change go nowhere.

“The Care-Centered Economy” asks us to re-imagine “the economy” as an enterprise focused on care. While Praetorius’ primary focus is on the “care work” that women so often do – raising children, managing households, taking care of the elderly – she is clearly inviting us to consider “care” in its broadest, most generic sense. The implications for the commons and systemic change are exciting to consider.

I think immediately of the Indian geographer Neera Singh, who has written about the importance of “affective labor” in managing forest commons. Singh notes that people’s sense of self and subjectivity are intertwined with their biophysical environment, such that they take pride and pleasure in becoming stewards of resources that matter to them and their community.

Such affective labor – care – that occurs within a commons becomes a force in developing new types of subjective identities. It changes how we perceive ourselves, our relationships to others, and our connection to the environment. In Singh’s words: “Affective labor transforms local subjectivities.” In this sense, commoning is an important form of care work.

By setting forth an expansive philosophical framework, Praetorius’ essay provokes many transdisciplinary, open-ended questions about how we might reframe our thinking about “the economy.” The 77-page essay, downloadable here, was recently published by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin as part of its “Economy + Social Issues” series of monographs.

Praetorius begins by situating the origins of “women’s work – children, cooking and church – in the original “dichotomization of humanity” into “man” and “nature.” This artificial division of the world into realms of man and nature lies at the heart of the problem. Once this “dichotmomous order” is established, the public realm of monetized market transactions is elevated as the “real economy” and given gendered meaning. Men acquire the moral justification to subordinate and exploit all those resources of the pre-economic world – nature, care work, commons, colonized people. Their intrinsic needs and dignity can be denied.

What’s fascinating in today’s world is how the many elements of the “pre-economic lifeworld” are now starting to assert their undeniable importance. As Praetorius puts it, “Without fertile soil, breathable air, food and potable water, human beings cannot survive; without active care, humanity does not reproduce itself; and without meaning, people descend into depression, aggression and suicide.”

As the pre-economic lifeworld becomes more visible, it is exposing the dichotomous order as unsustainable or absurd. Climate change is insisting upon limits to economic growth. Modern work life is becoming ridiculously frenetic. Questions of meaning arise that “free markets” are unequipped to address. “Why work at all if working amounts to nothing more than functioning for absurd, other-directed purposes?” writes Praetorius. “Why keep living or even conceiving and bearing children if there is no future in sight worth living?”

As the private search for meaning intensifies, the formal political system has little to say. It is too indentured to amoral markets to speak credibly to real human needs; it is ultimately answerable to the highest bidders. This also helps explain why politics, as the helpmate of the market order, also has so little to say about people’s yearnings for meaning.

But new meaning are nonetheless arising as the credibility and efficacy of the old order begin to fall apart. Praetorius argues that the anomaly of a black man as US President and a woman as Germany’s chancellor makes it increasingly possible for people to entertain ideas of subversive new types of order. “The supposedly natural order of the hierarchical, complementary binary conception of gender is inexorably disintegrating,” writes Praetorius. Other dualisms are blurring or becoming problematic as well: “belief and knowledge, subject and object, res cogitans and res extensa, colonizer and colony, center and periphery, God and the world, culture and nature, public and private spheres.”

What’s exciting about this time, she suggests, is that the “dichotomous order” is opening up new spaces for new narratives that re-integrate the world. People can begin to “collectively dis-identify” with and deconstruct the prevailing order, and launch new stories that speak to elemental human and ecosystem needs. If there is confusion and disorientation in going through this transition, well, that’s what a paradigm shift is all about. In any case, people are beginning to recognize the distinct limits of working within archaic political frameworks – and the great potential of a “care-centered economy.”

What exactly does “care” mean? It means the capacity for human agency, individual initiative yoked to collective practice, shared identity and meaning-making. It means “being mindful, looking after, attending to needs, and being considerate.” It refers to “awareness of dependency, possession of needs, and relatedness as basic elements of human constitution.”

While some might regard the elevation as “care” as vague, I agree with Praetorius: “Care” helps break down the dichotomous order and emphasize the “pre-economic” order of human need. “The illusion of an independent human existence becomes obsolete,” she writes. Relationships outside of markets become more important.

Introducing “care” into discussions about “the economy” can also have the effect of transforming ourselves. We can begin to name the pre- and non-economic activities — care, commoning, eco-stewardship – that create value. We can develop a vocabulary to identify those things that mainstream economics deliberately does not name. In this sense, talking in a new way becomes a political act. It begins to change the cultural reality, one conversation at a time.
Praetorius’ essay is a fairly long read, but a rewarding one. I came away from it with a fresh, more hopeful perspective. I also realized how care work and commoning are part of a larger enterprise of honoring, and creating, new types of value.”

The post Essay of the Day: The Care-Centered Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Farm hack – global online platform full of blueprints to be adapted to others’ needs. Screen shot.

Our text is the first product of our effort to think and write as a group. For us, this means that we bring to some analytical aspects of the Manifesto our commoning perspective. It is inherent in such a process that our writing is “not-thought-through”. We see this as an invitation to reflect on the ideas we lay out in this text and on the issues left open or controversial.

Con-vivere

The term “con-vivere” (Les Convivialistes 2014 [henceforth abbreviated as LC]: 24) serves as an anchor for deepening the Manifesto from the commons perspective. The connection between con-vivere and com-mons is visible in the first syllable. Marianne Gronemeyer states that “our habits of hearing and speaking have turned us completely deaf […] to the good sound of the […] ‘cum’, which appears as the preposition ‘kon’ or ‘kom’ in the German language.”  She regrets that:

“ […] most of the composite words we form with these syllables have completely reversed their original meaning. The Latin preposition ‘cum’, which once meant being together as equals in a shared activity, now increasingly serves to describe a harsh and unforgiving ‘against each other’ in the struggle for advantage, power and influence. Kon-kurrenten2 (competitors) no longer run together, but are at war with each other over scarce resources; the English com-petition no longer stands for a common quest, but rather for the effort to strike each other down. Con-sensus is no longer a sense that we create together but rather an imposed equality. Con-sume no longer means that we use something thoroughly in sharing and consideration, but that we use it to raise envy in others by means of the things we consume.”

And con-struction no longer means to layer words and their meanings on and next to each other, to distance oneself from the layers and reconnect them in new ways – as happens in writing processes as well as commoning. Instead, since the sixteenth century, this term has shifted from the realm of grammar to the technical realm of building.

“Being together as equals in shared activity“ – it appears as if this preposition was intended to sum up in three letters the essence of commoning and commons. In fact both terms point us to our always present option to shape our living together in the spirit of the cum/con, which is as commonplace as it is repressed.

These terms express what the prologue of the Manifesto declares to be the core of the conviviality debate: “the associative, civil-society-based self-organization of people is a crucial element in the theory and practice of conviviality. Free and gratuitous exchange between people can serve as the basis for a convivial social order that distances itself from a version of prosperity and the good life defined in purely material and quantitative-cum-monetary terms” (LC: 13).

We want to use our contribution to bring into the debate on conviviality our thoughts on and experiences with commoning as a life practice and the commons as a structural precondition to enable such practice.

At the same time we want to clearly point out that an argument which is mainly based on moral imperatives falls short. From our point of view it seems necessary to change the perspective: peaceful community and free self-actualization of individuals need not contradict each other. We can begin here and now to create the conditions that allow both to go hand in hand.

On commoning and the commons

Commoning is a social practice within a framework set by the commons as a structure and common arrangement. The commons can be seen as the foundation of a convivialist society, commoning as its living expression. Hence commons are not goods even though they are often described as such. And goods are not commons because of their “natural” properties but because we treat them as such. Therefore we can essentially describe the commons as an institutionalised, legal, and infrastructural arrangement for a practice – commoning – in which we collaboratively organise and take responsibility for the use, maintenance and production of diverse resources.  The rules of commoning are (ideally) set by equal peers whose needs are at the focus of a shared process. Opportunities for individual growth and self-development are combined with the search for shared solutions, meaningful activities with extended and deepened relationships, and the creation of material abundance with the care for others and for nature. Living together like this was and still is practised to various degrees all over the world. In the process, commoning has to be repeatedly scrutinised, updated and rehearsed in order to remain embedded in every day life. This can never be taken for granted, and needs a suitable framework which currently we can rarely find.

Common wealth

The results of commoning traditionally consist of the sustainable use of natural resources such as forests, water or soil. For example this is the case with irrigation systems for which the people affected (commoners) give themselves rules for the shared use that enable a long-term fulfilment of needs (irrigation of fields, protection of water quality etc.). At the same time commoning can serve as the basis for the creation of something new: knowledge, hardware, software, food or a roof over the head. Basically there is nothing that cannot be thought of and designed as a commons. In the end our perspective may be to even view human society itself as the shared good – as our Common Wealth – which we have to make our own in practise and shape together according to our needs.

Human hubris or structural opposition?

Under the title “The mother of all threats“ (LC: 23)3 – the Manifesto identifies its central question, “how to manage rivalry and violence between human beings” in the context of the great problems of humankind. This question seems well justified as rivalry and violence are obvious features of our living together. They can neither be ignored nor explained away. However, if we do not delve down to their structural roots, we may get the impression that we should look for the causes solely in human nature. e.g. in the fact that “every human being aspires to have their uniqueness recognized“, while a “healthy society” knows how “to prevent that desire from degenerating into excess and hubris”  (LC: 25). Consequently the Manifesto poses the “moral question […] what may individuals legitimately aspire to and where must they draw the line?” (LC: 26). The authors point out that “we have to make conflict a force for life rather than a force for death. And we have to turn rivalry into a means of cooperation, a weapon [sic!] with which to ward off violence and the destruction it entrains“ (LC: 25). However, they do not address satisfactorily how such a transformation could be reached by means of moral imperatives or political measures.

Living-in-community

Looking through the lens of the commons opens new perspectives because it poses the question how we create our material and social living conditions. This points to fundamental structures and logics for action – and thus sheds light on the question why our living in community so often appears in the form of opposition.

To prevent us from remaining on the level of appearance, we take the daily creation of the basic conditions for our living-in-community as the starting point of our analysis. These basic conditions include everything that constitutes our society: household items, technologies, institutions, languages, ways of thought, world views, and forms of interaction with each other and with nature. On the one hand, these social structures are the result of past human activity while, on the other, they are also the foundation of our current and future actions. The relationship between structures and action is therefore a reflective one. The one feeds into the other again and again. This explains why historical processes can bring about a self-reinforcing dynamic which causes structures to fossilize and become independent of the many intentions to act.

When social structures governing our living-in-community define the opportunities and limits of their own change, people may perceive them as external and unchangeable although in fact they are human constructs and hence changeable. This occurs, for example, if we interpret structural constraints on human action that exist in our current social conditions as an expression of a transhistorical “human nature.” In fact, along with capitalism a vision of human nature has become dominant that makes agents appear “as if they were separate individuals, indifferent to one another and concerned solely to maximize their individual advantage“ (LC: 28).

Modern society is shaped by a self-reinforcing dynamic that leads to money becoming the pivotal point for our living together. Turning more and more areas of life into commodities creates an ever-increasing stream of goods which are predominantly meant for sale in markets. For the producers neither their activities nor the goods they produce serve to fulfil any actual need – they are mainly a means to earn money. At the same time the producers need the money to buy goods and services in their role as consumers. As the goods are produced by companies and self-employed people who compete with each other for a share of the sales, they have to constantly re-invest their gains in order to remain competitive. Money thus becomes an end in itself: it is invested to make more money which then needs to be re-invested so more money can be made in the future. In this function money becomes capital – so it’s not without reason that societies that are based on this logic are called capitalist.

In the exchange of equivalents the market participants (to which the people are at times reduced) are indifferent to each other – just as money is indifferent towards them. Bread costs the same to the poor as it does to the rich. The loss of one is the gain of another. As competitors (in the non-convivialist meaning of the word) people are even potentially an existential threat to each other. Cooperation and partial alliances are not rendered impossible, but these often serve the purpose of enabling survival of the competition more successfully than others. This competition takes places on several levels at the same time: companies compete for customers on the market,4 consumers compete for the best deal, applicants compete for jobs, colleagues compete for promotion prospects etc.

In such roles people have to aim to get the most out of every exchange (such as a material or immaterial good, or human labour) at the expense of others. Personal relationships are preformed by this predicament. “Every area of life, down to emotions, friendships, and loves, found itself subject to the logic of accountancy and management” (LC: 28). In this system one progresses by pushing the other down. Being “greedy”, “corrupt”, “excessive” and “unscrupulous ” is a functional behaviour which is often promoted by society.

This logic of indifference, of structural opposition and atomization is based on the severed way we produce the conditions of our lives: before you can sell something as a good it first has to have been withdrawn from those who have a tangible need.This exclusion usually works legally based on the concept ofproperty, which is essentially a right to exclude. By means of this principle the freedom of the one becomes the limit for the other, and the participation of the one becomes the exclusion of the other. This is why we call this mechanism of asserting-yourself-at-the-expense-of-the-other as a logic of exclusion.5

Solidarity

Relationships of solidarity require explicit struggle against the logic of producing goods for the market, and are therefore always precarious – they only survive as long as they are an insignificant hindrance to survival on the market.

The coercion to act which stems from this logic of exclusion – and which can eliminate any good intention in an instant – can hardly be counteracted by demands for more ethical and moral values. The fear of being outsmarted and exploited can lead to well-founded mistrust, related security-oriented strategies and various forms of exclusion that maintain divisions according to social markers such as class, gender, sexual preference, skin colour, age, education, and language. Because the logic of exclusion rewards exclusionary behaviour, even legal equality cannot truly overcome these divisions. If claims that there is equality of opportunity are used to justify privileges in the name of a so called meritocracy, and to attribute the responsibility for failures individually to the losers, then formal equality can even consolidate actual inequality.

The tragedy of the markets

The exchange and money system we describe contributes to the necessity for growth as lamented by the Manifesto, which is at its core a coercion to extract monetary value in a competitive environment. Capital has to “pay off”, meaning that it has to grow. This can only succeed if one’s own market share is secured or expanded – at a cost to others – by managing to equal or undercut the market price by lowering production costs.

This in turn is often achieved by raising productivity by means of technical innovation and – which is often the reverse side of the coin – lower work input. The increased productivity produces more goods which have to be sold in order to maintain or increase the return on investment. In this way more and more things are produced with less and less effort, using increasing amounts of resources and energy – despite or even because of the increase in energy efficiency. Because every competitor on the market does this, is indeed forced to do this in order to secure his existence, this process results in a coercion for growth which the individual actors within these structures cannot evade. Hence we can speak of the “tragedy of the market”.

Trapped in the capitalist model, humanity has entered a phase of structural debilitation – of resources, of nature and of people and their communities. Therefore we should not criticise the excessiveness but rather the model of only following one standard: the structurally imposed, one-dimensional standard of monetary valuation and the prerequisite that goes with it to reduce everything into countable and measurable units. How many pupils can a teacher manage? How much time can be allowed for combing the hair of a woman with dementia? What is the value of a lost butterfly species? Living together under such conditions is not living in community, nor is it con-vivere, but a collective life in opposition to each other and against nature. It is not sustainable and poses an immediate threat to our very existence in the twenty-first century.

Reproduction

Opposed to this ‘productive’ system of exclusion, accounting, monetisation and exploitation stands the ‘reproductive’ inclusiveness of helping and caring relationships. As a matter of fact so-called ‘reproduction’, the production and maintenance of the basis of our existence, is the basis of every society without which even capitalist structures could not persist. As it is incompatible with the market system of competition and exclusion, this type of work is delegated to the – mostly female – private domain (household).

A convivial society which promotes living-in-community would have to place the foundations of life into the centre of its activities. This includes the natural foundations of our existence which in capitalist contexts are resources that primarily exist to be exploited and commodified.

Humans are part of nature however and cannot live in opposition to it without harming themselves. Therefore, human reproduction in the broader sense can only work if it respects the ecological logic of natural material cycles as a precondition and inherent part of the fulfilment of human needs.

Questions for a change of perspective

Searching for fundamental alternatives and sharpening our senses for a new “art of living together” we have to look for new categories and terms which depart from the basic assumptions and terms we have just criticised in order to approach a society based on positive-reciprocal structural logics.

In doing so we have to address fundamental questions: How do we create our living conditions in a way that leaves no-one behind – including people of future generations? And how can all those affected participate in this process? The “big questions” (LC: 26) which the Manifesto divides into moral, political, ecological and economic categories, are united by this approach because it does not consider them as independent but rather as interlinked with each other, just as we encounter them in the real world.

The Manifesto formulates four principles of the “only legitimate kind of politics”: “common humanity, common sociality, individuation and managed conflict” (LC: 30). Even though it is debatable whether the “social nature of humanity” encompassed by the first two principles is truly a definition of the human condition or a political principle, it certainly makes sense to us to bear in mind that we are one humanity and that people are social beings. Likewise we support the aim connected with “individuation” to allow “each of us to assert our distinctive evolving individuality as fully as possible by developing our capabilities, our potential to be and to act without harming others’ potentials to do the same, with a view to achieving equal freedom for all”  (LC: 31). And last but not least the term “managed conflict” means to “be individual while accepting and managing conflict” (LC: 31).

It is critically important that these four principles are not mistaken forprerequisites to action in the sense of moral imperatives. Given favourable structural preconditions, actions tend to bring about these principles. Experience in many projects shows that commons work best when they not only allow inclusive action which cares for others and their concerns, but actually facilitate such action and make it difficult to act otherwise.

In this way, commons gain a meaning that goes beyond their specific concerns. In the following section we want to illustrate that in successful commons-practice, positive-reciprocal relationships emerge which make it necessary to resolve conflicts peacefully and constructively. Such a culture of relationships enhances individual freedom because the process of commoning foregrounds the unique characteristics of the people involved and the deeply felt fairness in cooperation. People are simply different from each other, they are special individuals, each and every one of them. Hence it does not help to assume abstract or formal equality.

Neoliberal discourse, too, draws on this thought, but it mistakes individual particularity by reducing it to being a mere factor in the fight of all against all. The alternative to a competitive development of individual potentials is not found in equalizing the unequal, but in the development of everyone in all their particularity in a way that does not leave anyone behind. In a practice based on a logic of exclusion, this appears neither thinkable nor achievable. In this logic, the freedom of the other is the limit of one’s own freedom and the transgression of these boundaries lets rivalries escalate on a regular basis in the violent expression the Manifesto rightfully laments.

Taking responsibility and being in relation

As outlined above, the main feature of the logic of exclusion inherent in the production of commodities is the fact that only those advance who push ahead at the expense of others and establish partial alliances along the way.

In contrast to this, the logic of inclusion 6 is the determining feature of the commons. Within this logic, the condition for growth is to find sufficient and suitable co-operators. Its fundamentally voluntary character  – totally contrary to the necessity to market oneself in the logic of commodities – requires structures to be inviting and motivating. Commons projects can only sustain themselves if people feel good in them and can contribute in a way that they subjectively find fulfilling and meaningful. This generally means that it is in the commoners’ interest to consider the concerns of others because this is the only way they can reach their shared goal.

The logic of inclusion of the commons is geared towards the development of the unique qualities of the individual person as a prerequisite for the flourishing of all people. If this succeeds in the context of the commons it could look like this: a person learns a new skill which he or she can then contribute. This will help everyone because tasks at hand can be done better, more easily or by more people. The larger the pool of skills which can be used collectively, the better. This type of relationship of positive reciprocity, of potential promoting reciprocal referentiality, differs fundamentally from that of negative reciprocity in the structurally exclusive logic of commodities.Rather than creating isolation it creates a structural communality(Meretz 2014).

Another essential difference consists in the fact that the production of commodities is essentially determined by external purposes. Commodities have to be designed to be sellable. Commons serve own purposes. The fulfilment of needs can thus also succeed when market or state fail or are blind to particular areas of life. For “the market” the fulfilment of needs is a mere side effect and only relevant when it is “marketable” or can be made so. Needs which do not contribute to sales are left unfulfilled. They are externalized. In capitalist structures the transmission of needs on a societal level takes place via the market or the state ex post, that is after goods and the attributed benefits and damages have been produced and brought to market. Such conflicts of needs cannot be resolved in hindsight. This isolation of the various needs from their fulfilment (and of each satisfaction of needs from the others) brings each and every one of us into a situation of a structural absence of responsibility.

Structural self-hostility

We cannot compensate for these structural deficits individually. No-one can know all the externalities which are promoted by one’s shopping, never mind avoiding or eliminating them. If even the “ecological” detergent contains palm fat from monocultures, the limits of ethical consumption become evident.

Hence the efforts to “shop correctly” fail to bring about the intended effect. Subjectively there may be a “better than” feeling, but that does not make the action emancipatory and self-determined. One might also put it this way: the factual impossibility of acting responsibly results in structural self-hostility. In fulfilling one need I harm another – of my own or of someone else. And vice versa, others unintentionally harm me. Automotive mobility stands against the local residents’ need for quiet, employment against a clean environment, CO2-reduction “here” against rain forest preservation “there” etc. In the end our actions turn against ourselves because they are subject to conditions in which needs are not brought into mutual reference. Structural self-hostility manifests itself in the opposition of differing partial interests which cut through and divide the person.

The problem becomes even clearer when we take another look at the logic of the commons. In this logic people have the opportunity to internalize their various needs and communicate them ex ante. Internalising means to integrate all needs and to look for a way to fulfil them comprehensively. If this happensbefore or in the course of production, of a project or process, it becomes possible to co-ordinate the different ideas and wishes, and to negotiate conflicts in a way that ensures that no-one asserts himself at the expense of others – e.g. due to power imbalances.

This is not easy and the prevailing restrictive conditions mostly put spanners in the wheels of people who are involved in such projects. Fundamentally though, the logic of inclusion in the commons provides a framework for the structural ability to be responsible. This is no guarantee for good solutions. Nevertheless, only those who have at their disposal the productive means and resources forself-determined production of living conditions, even have the option to act responsibly with regard to the whole.  

Designed social relations to nature

On the one hand, externalisation combined with the necessity to continuously expand the return on capital investment leads to a systematic exploitation of natural resources as if they were infinite. The recognition of their limitation merely leads to continuously increased sophistication of exploitation methods. In the market system, solutions to ecological problems are sought in various ways; market instruments such as emissions trading are currently in favour. The protection of nature is supposed to be achieved by turning it into yet another tradeable commodity. However, in this process nature is subjected to the same commodification mechanisms from which the social sphere already suffers.

On the other hand, an approach which focuses exclusively on “nature protection” is often accompanied by the displacement of people who have lived for centuries in territories which are now declared as nature reserves. Their presence is seen as harmful to nature. It is absurd, however, to protect natureagainst or from people. If humans and nature are understood as belonging together, nature can only be protected along with the people. Ever since people have existed, many communities have lived with their non-human environment under diverse conditions. They were not intruders but part of this natural environment and did not only take from nature but also gave back to it and shaped it. Such a relationship between humans and the non-human environment which does not endanger the latter, and therefore humans, is indispensable. But under the current structural conditions it is hardly achievable.

The capitalist economy in its commodification and growth compulsion has taken on a life of its own in opposition to ecology. However, in its original Greek meaning of prudently managing a household, the term economy refers to striving to fulfil everybody’s needs using available resources.

If such an economy is not to destroy its own foundations, consideration for the interactions between human needs and the non-human ecology that satisfies them has to become the basis for all actions. Permaculture, which aims to embed food production in self-maintaining natural cycles, follows this idea. Self-regulatory processes in ecosystems are actively strengthened and used in order to achieve and improve the basis for a sustainable fulfilment of human needs instead of maximising nature’s exploitation in the short term. The prerequisite for this is to consider all ecological and social aspects which are necessary for this kind of relationship to nature. The commons offer a suitable structural framework, because the inclusive and future-oriented mode of action of commoning is all about securing the fulfilment of needs not only in the moment but also in the long-term.

Commons on all levels

As the examples we presented may suggest, commons are mainly associated with local action in specific projects in which people know each other and can interact with each other directly.

An extension of such action frameworks to regional and supra-regional levels hardly seems imaginable due to the necessary (communicative and other) efforts. However, in our view, the time required for the direct – and often redundant – communicative effort to negotiate different needs is regarded as “inefficient” primarily in the context of enforced time saving due to the permanent price pressure in partitioned private production.

Instead, a mode of production of living conditions founded on the commons is likely to be more efficient when we look at it from the point of view of society as a whole. It is efficient in the sense that it aims towards prevention, maintenance and avoiding damage rather than towards follow-up repair, deterioration and coping with damage.

People also experience commoning to be more individually rewarding because quality of life emerges from the actual time spent in productive activities because they are voluntary, rather than being outsourced into the split-off realm of family, marriage, leisure time, vacation etc.

From a commons perspective the path to a future-oriented social system is not built on renunciation; on the contrary it is paved by a permanently good and fulfilled life for all which, due to the comprehensive inclusion of all needs in life, also includes respecting planetary limits.

Some examples

Let’s give some examples to illustrate the great variety of commons projects and their potential to create global networks of cooperation. Wikipedia(wikipedia.org) is an online platform which allows us to create and use encyclopedic articles and thus out-cooperated the proprietary, exclusive counterparts such as the Encyclopedia Britannica or its German equivalent, theBrockhaus.7

Wikispeed (wikispeed.com) is an open project for the production of cars which are designed modularly, need few resources and hand back the power over the goods produced into the hands of the users.

Farm Hack (farmhack.net), Wikihouse (wikihouse.org) and Opendesk (opendesk.cc) are global online platforms to which people all over the world can upload blueprints for machines, houses and furniture that others can then adapt according to their needs and re-create using available locally resources.

This exemplary choice of projects could be expanded ad infinitum. There are exciting developments in all fields of production: electronics, pharmaceuticals, bio-tech, robotics, medicine, clothing, etc. All these projects make their blueprints freely available. Open Source and open cooperation are the design principles which result from this practice and without which such collective activity would be impossible.

The differences in the physical qualities of the resulting products compared to their commercial counterparts are remarkable. The products not only look different, but they are normally designed to be modular, accessible, documented, repairable, durable and produced with efficient use of resources. Criteria that are usually ignored under marketing principles became the guiding design principles from the early stages of development.

Nevertheless we do not want to idealise such projects. All currently existing commons projects have to address problems and sometimes do so in contradictory ways. It has become evident that all these beginnings have to survive in the structurally hostile environment of the capitalist market economy. Therefore financing the projects is an issue time and again. Therefore financing the projects is an issue time and again.Within the real world settings, they keep having to ask themselves the difficult question, to what degree they will engage with the market logic or manage to resist exchange logics even in their financing (e.g. by crowd-funding, foundation financing or donations).

Polycentric self-organisation

Clearly, we consider reforms to alleviate specific excesses of capitalist structures to be insufficient, regardless of whether they are based on the market or on moral appeals. Instead we consider it necessary to think differently and change the structure of our mode of production and of the creation of our living conditions. Commons open up possibilities for such changes, theoretically as well as practically. But can they be generalised? Is it possible to develop a perspective for society as a whole on such a basis? Can we produce the necessary goods, services and social structures as commons and not as commodities? There are a range of indicators that suggest that this questions can be answered with a “yes”.

We can think of a society based on commons as a social macro-net in which the decentralised commons-units represent nodes distributed throughout the net. In the process of internal differentiation, large social networks divide into functional clusters and hubs that are highly connected. This allows them to be flexibly restructured and to tolerate mistakes, so that partial nets that get cut off can maintain their function when important hubs fail (e.g. in disasters).

These properties have already been observed in big commons structures like irrigation systems and have been described as polycentric self-organisation. In contrast to hierarchical systems with a single decision-making centre at the apex, commons structures create many centres which take on the differentiated functions that a society with an advanced division of labour needs (re-/production, infrastructures, co-ordination, planning, information etc.).

The decisive factor is that these specialised functions remain embedded in the negotiating network of society as a whole, as well as being organised as a commons. Social negotiation therefore would work according to a different logic and would no longer be disconnected from re-/production: society is neither governed by the “invisible hand” of the market nor by a state-run planning administration; instead it plans and organises itself guided by its real needs.

A change of perspective is necessary: instead of alienated planning and organisation of the production processes, our aim is self-planning and self-organisation by the people – producers and users alike. Instead of planning and organising these processes for others, the affected people need to create the conditions and infrastructures themselves.

The question is therefore not whether there is planning, but for and by whom, how, where and guided by which criteria. In this sense every society is a “planned society.” Hence market systems activate and demand self-planning, but they do so under the conditions and the logic of exclusion, at full own risk and not based on voluntary engagement and security.

In contrast to market systems, central planning systems have society as a whole in mind, but due to their inflexible hierarchical structure they can only react slowly to changes. People are basically secure but their creative capability to act is restricted by planning specifications. Control by others and threats to existence suppress creativity and motivation.

The change in perspective consists in realising that people can take up their own affairs successfully if they enjoy the appropriate conditions for development, which rarely exist under the conditions of a commodity society – whether market, centrally planned or mixed forms. Replacing the commodity form of goods by the commons can create the preconditions for a societal negotiation based on polycentric self-organisation which in turn can create the precondition for general human self-determination and flourishing.

Conclusion

We are confident that commons can embody the “mode of living together […] that values human relationships and cooperation and enables us to challenge one another without resorting to mutual slaughter and in a way that ensures consideration for others and for nature” (LC: 25). However this is not because commoners are better people or follow ethics that others have not yet understood, but because commons are a qualitatively different way of creating living conditions – a way in which it is functional to be inclusive instead of exclusive, resource efficient instead of wasteful, guided by needs and not by return on investment.

Such living conditions are neither the Land of Cockaigne nor free of conflict, but they provide the prerequisites to live our differences and negotiate our conflicts in a way that does not push anyone down.

COMMONS INSTITUT (GERMANY), BRITTA ACKSEL, JOHANNES EULER,LESLIE GAUDITZ, SILKE HELFRICH, BIRGITTE KRATZWALD, STEFAN MERETZ, FLAVIO STEIN, and STEFAN TUSCHEN 6 March 2016

Translation: Maike Majewski and Wolfgang Höschele

Originally published in OpenDemocracy.net

Literature

Gronemeyer, Marianne (nd.): Convivial. Der Name ist Programm, www.convivial.de/about5.html (Accessed 30.01.2015)

Holmgren, David (2014): Permakultur. Gestaltungsprinzipien für zukunftsfähige Lebensweisen. Klein Jasedow: Drachenverlag

Les Convivialistes (2014): The Convivialist Manifesto: A declaration of interdependence. With an introduction by Frank Adloff. English translation by Margaret Clarke. Global Dialogues 3. Duisburg 2014. Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research. Available online:

Meretz, Stefan (2014), Grundrisse einer freien Gesellschaft, in: Konicz, Tomasz & Rötzer, Florian (Hrsg.), Aufbruch ins Ungewisse. Auf der Suche nach Alternativen zur kapitalistischen Dauerkrise, Hannover: Heise.

The post More Commoning – perspectives on conviviality appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The ontology of Copylove. Map collectively produced after the first Copylove Residencies. Translated by Rubén Díaz.

The story-behind: Commons, Love and Remix

About four years ago, Copylove put into orbit the ZEMOS98 festival, bringing an apparently simple premise: investigating how affection and care can cultivate relationships within a community of agents who are trying to generate common goods. Taking this hypothesis as a starting point, the coordination group called some residencies in February, March and April 2012; and there, people belonging to several groups with previous community experience could have a brainstormed ways of thinking related to the management of affections, commons and communities.

We believe in commons. Commons, as Elionor Ostrom said, are sometimes apart from the market or the government. Commons are about the contents we are sharing all the time in our digital networks. But commons are not new. When we talk about commons, we are talking about really old questions. For example, the recipe of our typical andalusian tomato soup is a common recipe. It is not private. It is not exactly public (in the sense of “institutional or governed by official rules). It constructs a common code. A common language. You can choose one single recipe and create your own version. But, if you share your own version, anyone could do it the same, remixing your version. Because, culture is an infinite palimpsest. So, of course, we have to expand the utility of the commons. We have to spread how the commons could help us to build our communities.

On other hand, when we talk about the market and the government, we talk about words like “inside” or “outside” the communities, and about our official economic system. And we divide it in two levels: the productive level and the reproductive. Some feminist studies consider that we are just talking about the official and productive level. When you ask someone, “What do you do?”, people answer with the professional profile. They don’t say: “I’m a mother” or “I usually cook rice with vegetables”. But, how important are these kind of tasks in our communities? Why can’t we talk about it? We consider this a reproductive sphere. And you can imagine how important it is for our culture.

“Our mothers taught us that life is a battlefield. The battlefield of making possible what we consider life”. Poster of the 14 ZEMOS98 Festival, dedicated to our mothers.

Commons, love and remix were the three initial concepts, they related to each other, they opened the field of play to start building collectively the meaning of “copylove”. We saw soon that they were three interwoven fields nourishing each other: Affections nourish commons and vice versa. We must place affection in the spotlight, understand commons as already a part of a community, see that communities have constituent links and values; but also, in order for them to be sustainable, require a caring component, a subjective built by affections.

The Invisible Commons

No doubt that the objective of the first edition of Copylove was to make all those ways of doing things visible, and create a community where citizens are the core of it. Trying to become more specific about it, we wanted to recall those everyday practices so tightly attached to our everyday life that go unnoticed, because they are essential to hold our lives together. We defined the invisible commons, as non-monetary resources, ways of doing things to which we have become assimilated (for good or for bad), and processes we have been taught or acquired in our community life and that make community sustainable. These commons are occasionally invisible because we have assumed they are something “natural” in our practice, but other times (most of the times and especially those related to women’s labour work) they become invisible by the developmentalist regime we are living in, specialized in ignoring that what makes life livable.

“Citizens-Godzilla”, poster of the 15 ZEMOS98 Festival.

Based on this legacy, we reached a new turning point in the investigation. We had to organise what we had learned and pose new questions. Following this track, we thought that “invisible commons” was a good label for the things we had learned up to that moment, and gave us the opportunity to keep uncovering those practices exceeding what is considered productive. In order to have a better understanding of all the resources and community processes we had to value and activate simultaneously, we started interviewing groups and associations from Bilbao and Barcelona, so we could obtain new questions for our Copylove residency.

We were searching for a better understanding of these invisible commons, starting from three topics that were present in the early stages of the investigation, they would help us to go deeper towards the following stage. Three major concepts would be helpful and would make new questions about “copylove” arise: Community, Memory and Life explained by the participants in this video (english subtitles):

After that, we did another Festival dedicated to Copylove in April 2013 and a crowdfunding campaign (gathering 7.865€, at the end of that year añlso) to try to gather all the essential lessons-learned in the process and of course, we had internalized most of them also in our daily practices and as part of our way of living and working.

In summary: without care, life is impossible. Life cannot be “productive” without a care centered economy. If we have been “productive” in the fiction called capitalism, it is thanks to the fact that we care for others, what some have labelled as an “unproductive” action: domestic work, the reproduction of labor. Without care, working life could not exist in a market economy, although these practices are not visible. This invisible work has been done by women (and here «women» can be also understood as minorities). Neither state nor market have managed to cover a fundamental need: the right to be cared for/of.

The post The Importance of Care and Affections in our Communities: Copylove and the Invisible Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Copylove started in 2011 as a local informal network for investigations into commons and feminist practices. Later, it turned into a public and open investigation via www.copylove.cc (only in Spanish) led by Sofía Coca (ZEMOS98, Sevilla), Txelu Balboa (COLABORABORA, Euskadi) and Rubén Martínez (Fundación de los Comunes, Barcelona) in which we tried to extract, from the experiences we had, what kind of ties and relations are established within a community of agents, whose practices and ways of doing generate commons for the whole community. Copylove was a way of getting deeper into all that we consider that reproduces desirable conditions of existence: affection, processes of interdependence, mutual aid, community love, care, etc. When we say Copylove, we mean everything we produce and reproduce that can take us closer to “good living”, to a sustainable living, and not simply in monetary terms.

The ontology of Copylove. Map collectively produced after the first Copylove Residencies. Translated by Rubén Díaz.

The story-behind: Commons, Love and Remix

About four years ago, Copylove put into orbit the ZEMOS98 festival, bringing an apparently simple premise: investigating how affection and care can cultivate relationships within a community of agents who are trying to generate common goods. Taking this hypothesis as a starting point, the coordination group called some residencies in February, March and April 2012; and there, people belonging to several groups with previous community experience could have a brainstormed ways of thinking related to the management of affections, commons and communities.

We believe in commons. Commons, as Elionor Ostrom said, are sometimes apart from the market or the government. Commons are about the contents we are sharing all the time in our digital networks. But commons are not new. When we talk about commons, we are talking about really old questions. For example, the recipe of our typical andalusian tomato soup is a common recipe. It is not private. It is not exactly public (in the sense of “institutional or governed by official rules). It constructs a common code. A common language. You can choose one single recipe and create your own version. But, if you share your own version, anyone could do it the same, remixing your version. Because, culture is an infinite palimpsest. So, of course, we have to expand the utility of the commons. We have to spread how the commons could help us to build our communities.

On other hand, when we talk about the market and the government, we talk about words like “inside” or “outside” the communities, and about our official economic system. And we divide it in two levels: the productive level and the reproductive. Some feminist studies consider that we are just talking about the official and productive level. When you ask someone, “What do you do?”, people answer with the professional profile. They don’t say: “I’m a mother” or “I usually cook rice with vegetables”. But, how important are these kind of tasks in our communities? Why can’t we talk about it? We consider this a reproductive sphere. And you can imagine how important it is for our culture.

“Our mothers taught us that life is a battlefield. The battlefield of making possible what we consider life”. Poster of the 14 ZEMOS98 Festival, dedicated to our mothers.

Commons, love and remix were the three initial concepts, they related to each other, they opened the field of play to start building collectively the meaning of “copylove”. We saw soon that they were three interwoven fields nourishing each other: Affections nourish commons and vice versa. We must place affection in the spotlight, understand commons as already a part of a community, see that communities have constituent links and values; but also, in order for them to be sustainable, require a caring component, a subjective built by affections.

The Invisible Commons

No doubt that the objective of the first edition of Copylove was to make all those ways of doing things visible, and create a community where citizens are the core of it. Trying to become more specific about it, we wanted to recall those everyday practices so tightly attached to our everyday life that go unnoticed, because they are essential to hold our lives together. We defined the invisible commons, as non-monetary resources, ways of doing things to which we have become assimilated (for good or for bad), and processes we have been taught or acquired in our community life and that make community sustainable. These commons are occasionally invisible because we have assumed they are something “natural” in our practice, but other times (most of the times and especially those related to women’s labour work) they become invisible by the developmentalist regime we are living in, specialized in ignoring that what makes life livable.

“Citizens-Godzilla”, poster of the 15 ZEMOS98 Festival.

Based on this legacy, we reached a new turning point in the investigation. We had to organise what we had learned and pose new questions. Following this track, we thought that “invisible commons” was a good label for the things we had learned up to that moment, and gave us the opportunity to keep uncovering those practices exceeding what is considered productive. In order to have a better understanding of all the resources and community processes we had to value and activate simultaneously, we started interviewing groups and associations from Bilbao and Barcelona, so we could obtain new questions for our Copylove residency.

We were searching for a better understanding of these invisible commons, starting from three topics that were present in the early stages of the investigation, they would help us to go deeper towards the following stage. Three major concepts would be helpful and would make new questions about “copylove” arise: Community, Memory and Life explained by the participants in this video (english subtitles):

After that, we did another Festival dedicated to Copylove in April 2013 and a crowdfunding campaign (gathering 7.865€, at the end of that year añlso) to try to gather all the essential lessons-learned in the process and of course, we had internalized most of them also in our daily practices and as part of our way of living and working.

In summary: without care, life is impossible. Life cannot be “productive” without a care centered economy. If we have been “productive” in the fiction called capitalism, it is thanks to the fact that we care for others, what some have labelled as an “unproductive” action: domestic work, the reproduction of labor. Without care, working life could not exist in a market economy, although these practices are not visible. This invisible work has been done by women (and here «women» can be also understood as minorities). Neither state nor market have managed to cover a fundamental need: the right to be cared for/of.

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