This post is part of our series of articles on the Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 14 “Finding Common Ground”:

In May 2016 the European Parliament voted on an amendment for the “recognition of energy as a common good” as part of a report about decentralised local production, the “New Deal for Energy Consumers”. While the amendment was voted down by 298 votes to 345 votes, this vote reflects the support of almost half of Europe´s democratic representatives for seeing energy as a common good. The amendment was proposed by the “Commons Intergroup” which is part of the European Parliament´s Intergroup on “Common goods and public services” and is made up of Members of the European Parliament from different parliamentary groups, mainly Greens, the United Left (GUE/NGL), and several Socialists & Democrats Group (S&D) members.

In mid-November of this year, the European Commons Assembly was held in cooperation with that same Commons Intergroup in the European Parliament to promote the establishment of creative institutions and political alternatives, from the local to the European level. In the call for the Assembly, ‘commoners’ from around Europe stated: “We call upon governments, local and national, as well as European Union institutions to facilitate the defence and growth of the commons, to eliminate barriers and enclosures, to open up doors for citizen participation, and to prioritise the common good in all policies.”

The dominant European policy priorities are in stark contrast with the commons perspective – an ethical worldview favouring stewardship, peer-to-peer cooperation, and social and ecological sustainability.

Today, however, the predominant discourses that permeate political discussions in the EU and trump all others are economic growth, competitiveness, and efficiency. The majority of EU policy is focused on macro-economic indicators and the promotion of large commercial actors. Citizens are often uni-dimensionally viewed as entrepreneurs or consumers. For many Europeans and for many global citizens the business of the EU is big business and big member states. There is a growing concern among citizens that decisions affecting the well-being of local communities are often driven by distant centralised institutions with other priorities. In fact, the growing feeling of lack of control is eroding confidence in our political institutions on all levels, often sparking xenophobic and nationalistic movements.

The Commons across Europe

The dominant European policy priorities are in stark contrast with the commons perspective – an ethical worldview favouring stewardship, peer-to-peer cooperation, and social and ecological sustainability. The commons discourse considers people as actors deeply embedded in social relationships, communities, and ecosystems. This holistic perspective also tends to overcome dominant subject-object dualisms and to consider human activity as a part of the larger living bio-physical commons.

Across Europe, more and more people are co-governing and co-creating resources. Whether in small local initiatives or in larger networks, new civic and economic structures are moving beyond the rigid dichotomies of producer and consumer, commercial and non-commercial, state and market, public and private, to construct successful new hybrid projects. The commons use voluntary social collaboration in open networks to generate social-environmental value, in ways that large markets and exclusive private property rights do not and cannot. This enormous value, though it may not be monetised, nonetheless constitutes a significant part of societal well-being in academic research, energy production, nature protection, health, creative sectors, drug development, and digital innovation. However it is largely ignored by EU policymakers and institutions, resulting in the atrophy of such social value-creation or, even worse, its appropriation by large investors and corporations.

Notable examples are community renewable energy, Wikipedia, permaculture, the peer-to-peer collaborative economy, distributed solidarity structures, and open source software. Sometimes local commons initiatives are sparked by the scarcity created by economic crisis, or in response to political powerlessness, or just fuelled by the need for social-ecological connectedness.

The European Union is well placed on many terrains to strengthen, promote, and facilitate commoning activities and commons-based production.

Building the commons encourages EU institutions to take a more holistic ecosystemic approach by combining collaborative, participatory, and egalitarian principles with concrete conditionality in favour of social cohesion and environmental objectives. The moral notion of common goods refers to goods that benefit society as a whole, and are fundamental to people’s lives, regardless of how they are governed. Certain matters will need to be claimed as common goods politically in order to manage them as commons, sustainably, and equitably in terms of participation, access, or use. For instance, natural resources, health services, or useful knowledge, or – like the above example in the European Parliament – decentralised renewable energy.

The European Union’s Responsibility

Due to its central role in policy-making for all the Member States, and its significant funding budget, the European Union is well placed on many terrains to strengthen, promote, and facilitate commoning activities and commons-based production. These initiatives and practices demand more flexible institutional and legal frameworks that at once prevent centralisation of market-power and promote dynamic, collaborative, self-governed civic networking. This includes orienting policy to enhance the blossoming of vibrant and caring local communities. To some degree this also implies stimulating new economic identities, where an individual or group orients their economic activity towards caring for the common good of community and their natural, social, and cultural surroundings, instead of solely towards maximising material interests.

According to a 2015 report published by the European Committee of the Regions, a “commons-based approach means that the actors do not just share a resource but are collaborating to create, produce or regenerate a common resource for a wider public, the community. They are cooperating, they are pooling for the commons”. This means helping people and communities to generate and regenerate urban, cultural, and natural commons as active citizens, producers, designers, creators, care-takers, local organic farmers, and renewable energy promotors. It also means embracing an open knowledge economy while promoting the Internet as a digital commons based on open standards, universal access, flexible copyright rules, decentralised internet infrastructures, and democratic governance.

Knowledge Policies

With regards to policies on knowledge management, the EU puts great emphasis on what one could call the ‘enclosure of knowledge’. This enclosure happens through the expansion of intellectual property protection, both within and outside of Europe by means of trade policies. Aside from potentially spurring innovation and helping European industries, this also results in, for instance, long patent monopolies on medicines and long copyright terms.

The copyright reform discussed in 2016 is of crucial importance to the online information commons. It will determine the boundaries of innovative social value-creation through sharing and collaboration online. Sufficient exceptions and limitations to copyright are essential. For example, allowing for text and data mining would support scientific and academic research. Moreover, assuring the right to link information from one web to another is one of the key characteristics of sharing online.

On the global level, through the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Health Organisation (WHO), and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), the EU tends to defend the enclosure of knowledge, promoting further expansion of intellectual property rights of all kinds, from medicines and broadcast signals, to education materials and climate technologies. To allow for a collaborative knowledge sharing economy, the EU will have to be more open to socially inclusive and flexible business models that are more compatible with both the digital era and the urgent needs of people, in both the North and South.

The EU continues to allow the centralised infrastructures of giant telecom operators and monopolistic internet companies to control and commodify people’s online lives.

The European Commission has made some efforts that recognise the need to share knowledge and embrace the possibilities of the digital age. This is for example reflected in commitments on open access publishing mandate in the context of Research and Development funding, open data in some of its policies, and the exploration of open science. Recently, Members States called for a review of monopoly-extending rules on biomedical knowledge in the area of pharmaceuticals due to concerns over increasingly high medicines prices.

However, these moves towards knowledge sharing remain timid and are not at the centre of EU policy strategies as it remains mostly conformist to the interests of the cultural industries, the pharmaceutical industry, or agribusiness.

The Internet and the Collaborative Economy

The recent establishment of net neutrality in the EU, an essential prerequisite for a free and open internet, marks an important victory. Yet truly promoting an “internet commons” would include supporting a universal infrastructure based on public and community-controlled digital infrastructures. It would need to be structurally disengaged from dominant market positions and include broad non-commercial access to bandwidth in spectrum, and open source software.

In its “Digital Single Market” strategy, the EU continues to allow the centralised infrastructures of giant telecom operators and monopolistic internet companies to control and commodify people’s online lives. This is accompanied by the violation of our personal data for indiscriminate political-economic control, and the general extraction of profit from social interactions and peer to peer activity.

As part of the Digital Single Market strategy the European Commission released its “European Agenda for the Collaborative economy” in June 2016. The Agenda deals with issues of taxation, market liability, contractual agreements, and consumer clarity. However it fails to pay attention to democratic structures, social equity, and ecological health – the cornerstones of community-based peer-to-peer collaborative initiatives that regenerate the commons. In contrast, the EU Agenda seems to welcome – with just a few technical caveats – multinational “collaborative” platforms such as Uber and AirBnB despite their extractive, non-embedded nature and their tendency to undermine national laws that ensure fair competition and protect workers. The motor of a commons-based collaborative economy is not just a consumer seeking to possess or purchase a service. Instead the user is often also a producer and/or is involved in the governance of a collaborative platform that is serving social and environmental needs. The promotion of local platform economies requires a different regulatory approach than that currently taken by the European Commission. It requires an approach that understands and acknowledges the value of localised social relations and self-governed technologies, as well as having clear indicators that frame policy within high social equity and environmental sustainability objectives.

Energy

The EU can be an enlightened voice and a leader on global climate and energy commitments. Yet, while large energy companies are starting to invest in renewable sources, they may not be best suited for alleviating our social-ecological dilemma, primarily because they have little incentive to reduce overall energy consumption or to prioritise the social engagement of local communities in their commercial operations. At the same time, some climate technologies that can play an important role in energy transition are often not shared as quickly with developing countries as they could be. This is again partly due to intellectual property protections and a resistance to sharing know-how. In this conflict, the EU fights to enclose climate technology knowledge within UN forums.

In general, the EU’s energy strategy promotes large gas pipelines, giant energy infrastructures, and modest CO2 reductions. Despite more and more Europeans producing their energy locally or at home, most proposed European market regulations do not promote community controlled or self-produced renewable energy, do not offer financial risk facilities for community based energy, nor do they defend the right to sell electricity to the grid. While EU policy proposals are often unsupportive of feed-in tariffs or flexible grid infrastructures to support local renewables, little is being done to eliminate massive direct or indirect subsidies to large gas, coal, and nuclear projects.

A large part of the EU energy budget could be earmarked for community renewable projects and compatible infrastructures, with broad citizen participation. This would help optimise resilient energy supply costs through more efficient, short, and visible distribution loops while promoting flexible local energy autonomy. With this approach the EU could “commonify” energy as opposed to the current principal strategy of “commodifying” it.

Research & Development and Financing

EU research and innovation policy, such as Horizon 2020, the European Research Council, or public-private partnerships such as the Innovative Medicines Initiative, sadly also continue to allow the privatisation of knowledge generated by EU-financed scientific, technological, and academic projects. Instead, they could try to ensure a fair public return on public investments by mandating conditions such as social licensing, open source research, and open data.

To support the commons in the EU’s funding policies would include earmarking significant parts of EU funding programmes with criteria and indicators that give preference to commons-based economic, environmental, cultural, and research activities.

However, through its Horizon 2020 Research & Development programme the EU already funds important projects: Initiatives working on decentralisation of internet infrastructure, such as ‘DCent’ and ‘Netcoms’, as well as networks of renewable community energy cooperatives, such as RESCOOPS, and urban commons projects like Barcelona’s community wifi, guifi.net. This funding is hugely important and the expansion of such programmes could have a structural impact on our societies. The requirements and procedures for EU financing and grants could be especially adapted to commons-based projects to accommodate matching funds for peer to peer crowdfunding, municipal or community-based risk-sharing, small-scale, self-governed projects, and sliding-scale administrative demands.

Democracy for the Commons

The deep crisis of the EU and the lack of confidence of its citizens in the European project is to a large extent due to the lack of democracy in all its different forms, whether the lack of transparency, the power of corporate lobbies, the unaccountable role of national politicians vis-a-vis Brussels, or the lack of public debate on policies. People need to feel much more connected and have opportunities to engage with EU policy making.

The defence and regeneration of the commons depends on meaningful strengthening of EU participative policy processes, greater institutional and legal responsiveness to local civic communities, and concrete advances in creating transnational citizen collaborative instruments to influence EU policy. This means, for instance, wider political support for new digital tools that render visible EU political decisions and empower citizen opinions on concrete legislation, such as a recent Green pilot programme proposal in the European Parliament.

The European Parliament´s Petitions Committee should be a very important channel for citizen power in favour of the application of EU law in defence of environmental or social standards. Unfortunately, it sorely lacks political backing, visibility, and sufficient resources to respond diligently and responsibly to citizen concerns. The European Citizens Initiative petition process, which was instituted as an instrument for grass-roots transnational citizen legislative proposals has been a near total failure due to a series of byzantine processes, and the lack of political will to take it seriously. These institutions need more support, and at the same time the EU has to significantly invest in the creation of additional and innovative tools & institutions for participatory democracy while supporting civic decision-making on local issues.

Allowing the Potential of the Commons to Flourish

Pivotal choices about the commons are also being made today in EU decisions about agriculture, climate, fishing, transport, international trade, and financial markets, amongst other areas.

The crisis of the EU begs for new, unifying, and constructive narratives that will crowd out the xenophobic populist right with its demands for democracy and sovereignty. The commons narrative with its emphasis on participative democracy, community, ecology, and stewardship could reinvigorate progressive politics and contribute to a better, socially and ecologically sustainable Europe. The logic of the commons is able to give clear guidance on policy, and does not sit within one ideological framework of left or right. It does not pretend to be an answer to all our problems. Yet it gives a clear ethical perspective and helps us to understand what happens when people collectively manage and steward resources without the dominant, centralised roles of either the state or the market.

Overall, EU policy objectives and standpoints contrast strongly with the commons approach. The alignment we do see is in some funding programmes and in the knowledge realm where the dynamics of scientific discovery and knowledge creation make this almost unavoidable. What is needed to favour this shift, in addition to strong social pressure from civil society, is a pro-commons shift in the discourses and political proposals of political forces of change such as the greens, and left and social liberal parties.

Due to the general political and economic power relationship within the EU today one cannot expect a major strategic shift toward commons-based EU policies anytime soon. What can be achieved is a significant enlargement of favourable EU policy environments where commoning activities can more easily take root and flourish.

The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 7th article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by Shohei Hanazaki

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The “big problem,” it seems, “isn’t inequality —  it’s poverty.” Freund breaks the global list of billionaires down into two categories: “Those who inherited their wealth, and those who made it themselves.” In the latter category, she argues, company founders and executives like Bill Gates of Microsoft or Jack Ma of Alibaba “have helped create the most jobs and economic growth for those further down the income ladder.” The self-made billionaires who got rich from finance and real estate are more questionable, although some of them are innovators as well. Those in the “made” category who make money off privatization deals and natural resources are the least productive.

Today, Freund says, the majority of developing world billionaires are of the “made” kind, and of them company founders and executives are the single biggest segment.

First, I should give Freund credit for acknowledging the problematic nature of wealth acquired by natural resource extraction and crony capitalist privatization, both of which have close historical associations either with colonial conquest, robbery, enslavement and genocide, or  with neoliberal “Disaster Capitalism.”

So what are the problems? Just off the bat, distinguishing between billionaires located in the global North and South confuses the issue. It’s a global economy, and a major share of the wealth that made U.S., European or Japanese billionaires what they are was extracted by TNCs operating in the Third World.

Beyond that, Freund’s argument (at least as summarized by Swanson) is neither very original nor very significant. First of all, the argument that it’s not inequality that’s the problem, but absolute levels of poverty — and inequality does no harm so long as those at the bottom have a minimum acceptable standard of living and the wealthy didn’t get rich in a zero zum game — has long been  boilerplate at mainstream right-libertarian periodicals and think tanks and conservative institutions like Heritage and AEI. It’s the theme of about three hundred Thomas Sowell columns, for crying out loud.

Second, and more importantly, Freund seems to argue by definition. Made billionaires who are company founders or executives are entrepreneurs, and by definition therefore job and wealth creators.

But founding a company or managing one isn’t inherently productive — the majority of wealth going to company founders and executives arguably comes, not from their productive activity, but from the surrounding structure of privileges, monopolies, artificial property rights and artificial scarcities that enable the company to extract rents on the services they perform.

It’s helpful in this regard to look at what French liberal economist called “the unseen.” We see the companies, we see the services they perform, and we see the number of people they employ. But what’s the proper baseline to compare them to? Even when new companies are doing something useful and productive, that doesn’t tell us whether it’s the most efficient way of arriving at that good. What we don’t see is other, more efficient ways of providing the same good, that may have been crowded out by the companies we do see performing the function.

And in fact actually inventing or producing things is at best the path to small-time wealth. The really big fortunes — the billionaire kind — instead come from controlling the circumstances under which other people are allowed to produce things. Henry George Jr. called it getting rich by “controlling access to natural opportunities.” Thorstein Veblen called it “capitalized disserviceability” —  charging for the “productive service” of not obstructing production by others.

Microsoft is a classic illustration of this. Bill Gates didn’t get to be a billionaire because the Windows operating system has a nice user interface. He’s a billionaire because his copyrights and patents on the software prevent anyone else from copying it and selling it cheaper, or giving it away free. The overwhelming majority of Gates’ fortune comes from a state-enforced monopoly.

And Gates has tended to spend his personal fortune in ways that either directly profit him or promote his vision of the ideal world in which people like him can keep extracting billions. The Gates Foundation’s main “charitable” activities are all things like pushing proprietary GMO seeds and increasing corporate agribusiness’s control of the global food chain, giving away Microsoft software to the public schools (and thereby locking them into a legacy system whose upgrades won’t be free in the future), and lobbying behind closed doors to charterize public schools, insulate them from public control, and incorporate them into the supply chains serving corporate HR departments.

Alibaba isn’t as bad as Microsoft. It isn’t even as bad as Amazon:  rather than charging a commission on transactions made through its marketplace, it makes all its money off advertising. But it is a proprietary platform — something it has in common with all the other “New Economy” ventures like Uber, Lyft and AirBNB that have made people billionaires.

Such platforms basically preempt the venues for a particular type of cooperative behavior, and then rely on a combination of first-mover advantage, path dependency and “intellectual property” to crowd out other — and less socially pathological — ways of doing things.

As for manufacturing in the Third World, much of it is for the supply chains of global corporations like Nike and Apple that use “intellectual property” to retain a monopoly on disposal of the product, so they can simultaneously pay the companies that produce them almost nothing and mark up the sales price thousands of percent in global retail chains.

So here “the unseen” is open-source software, sharing apps that are not only open-source and genuinely peer-to-peer but cooperatively controlled by providers and users rather than a corporation, and open-source garage micromanufacturing cooperatively controlled by its workers and producing affordable goods for the local market.

Finally, “wealth” and “jobs” are by no means self-evident goods. GDP simply measures the sum total of everything that anybody gets paid for. So the more inefficiently stuff is produced, the more it costs in labor and material inputs to produce it, the more quickly it has to be replaced because of planned obsolescence, the more costly it is to repair because of bad design and proprietary parts, and the higher the embedded monopoly rents in the price, the more it adds to GDP. And the more stuff people are forced to do in the cash nexus, that they were previously able to do for themselves through direct production for use or in the social economy without corporate intermediation, the higher GDP.

And if direct production for use or production in the social economy is replaced by working for wages to buy the same goods previously acquired outside the cash nexus — against the will of those subject to the change — then that “job” isn’t a good thing.

In the case of food alone, the mass enclosures of land and evictions of tens of millions of peasants who were previously feeding themselves off their own land, coupled with the influx of evicted peasants into the cities to work in sweatshops to earn the money to buy cash crops produced on the stolen land, has no doubt swelled both the amount of monetized GDP and the number of “jobs.” That’s not a good thing.

So in response to the claim that most billionaires are “made,” all I can say is: So was Don Corleone.

Photo by quinn.anya

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