Commons: Self-organised (re)production as a socio-ecological transformation

About the authors and their positions

We, the authors of this text, Leslie Gauditz and Johannes Euler, are active in the Commons Institute which, among other things, promotes the creation of knowledge and the education on Commons.

We are about 30 years old, with a middle-class background and make our living in academia. We were brought together by the fact that we both practise commoning, and reflect and write about it. In order to give Commoners from our circles the opportunity to collaborate on this text we sent preliminary versions to our mailing lists. Several people have contributed to its development with very helpful comments.

However, this text still reflects our personal view on the Commons movement, and is shaped by our specific position within this movement and the discourses that belong to it.

1. What is the key idea of the Commons?

Commoning: a different way of living and acting together – within capitalism but with a trajectory past it.

Commons are products and resources that are created, cared for and used in a shared way in a great variety of forms. The term has increasingly come into use again over the past decades – “again“ because Commons as concept and praxis are ancient and exist worldwide (see Bollier/ Helfrich 2016). In the German speaking areas the traditional and widely used term “Allmende”, that denotes the shared cultivation of meadows and woods, has been known since the Middle Ages. Today, the research on the shared use of natural resources is mainly connected to the name Elinor Ostrom who received the Nobel Prize for economics for her research in 2009. Ostrom (1990: 58-139) collected best practice examples: self-chosen regulations and locally adapted conflict resolution strategies were some of the design principles of the long-lasting self-governed institutions she described. Differing from Ostrom other authors assume that the main shared features should be looked for in the actual social arrangement, the Commoning, rather than in the institutions and regulations (see Euler 2016; Meretz 2014a).

An ancient irrigation system, cooperatively administrated in Naters, Switzerland. (Image: Johannes Euler)

The spread of knowledge-centred digital Commons (such as Wikipedia) and the development of free software (such as GNU/Linux and LibreOffice) played a decisive part in the rising attention paid to the Commons in the past years.

Currently, Commons can be understood as a concept based on equality and self-governance that is in conflict with the capitalist logic of commodities (see Meretz 2014a). Instead of an exchange of goods it relies on voluntary contributions. In them, there is no equivalent to the division of labour into care activities (that is caring for other people and the environment) and the productive activities as well as the division of production and usage processes which are common in capitalism: for example urban Commons gardens are usually not about producing food for sale but, next to ecological food production, also about cooking, eating and celebrating together. This is not to say that exchange or said division phenomena do not exist in Commons projects. However, Commons mainly work according to a different logic; both aspects are at odds with this logic and are brought in from the capitalist world outside.

We would like to stress that there are no universal blueprints for organising Commons together. We assume that the manners and rules in different times and contexts adapt to the needs of the people involved and thus vary. Nevertheless, we can point out common features. Regarding this it is important to clarify that commoning does not just deal with collective property but rather it breaks with the exclusionary logic of property as such. Instead of excluding others by the means of abstract law (property), Commons concern the actual physical (and potentially inclusive) discretionary options of possession (actual use). Essential to this is a focus on the needs of those affected by the commoning processes, or those taking part in them.¹

The logo of the licence system “Creative Commons”.

The Commons perspective looks specifically at a type of shared living in which people have a great influence on their own living conditions and choose the activities they pursue mainly according to how much pleasure they give, and how crucial they regard them to be.² For example Wikipedia came about because people valued a freely accessible and self-organised form of knowledge and enjoyed writing. Although they may occur, imposed, hierarchical and exclusive organizational structures are quite in contrast to such motivations and are mostly rejected. The aim is to realise rather than valorise one’s own potentials.

For the long-term the self-organising Commons point of view can be the foundation of a society beyond market economy and state. Core principles are: contribution instead of exchange; actual use instead of property; share all that you can (Habermann 2015); use all that you need.
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2. Who is part of the Commons movement, what do they do?

The social movement as part of the Commons world: Who produces what how, why and with which effects, and who uses it (up)?

While there is no Commons umbrella association, there are visible networks such as the Commons Strategies Group and the P2P Foundation, the Commons-Institute in the German speaking countries and the School of Commoning in Barcelona. Which persons actually devote themselves to promoting the Commons world and represent it publicly, who hence makes up the Commons movement, is not easy to determine as there are no systematic studies. Thus this text serves not least a reflection on ourselves as authors: do we even want to speak of a Commons movement? We definitely do not claim to give a comprehensive overview; even less so about what is happening in other parts of the world.

Book-exchange in Büsum in the North of Germany. (Image: Johannes Euler)

Commoning can be found in any imaginable social context and connected to various resources – such as air, seeds and water but also caring for those in need, digital technology, housing, cooking, art and music, modular bicycle construction and means of production. This is due to the fact that it is not inherent to the nature of a resource whether or not it is a Commons. Instead it essentially depends on the way humans deal with them and with each other (see Acksel and others 2015; Helfrich 2012; Euler 2016). If we look at the currently prevailing definitions of social movements (e.g. della Porta/ Diani 1999), they are united by a more or less pointed focus on a connecting self-image (or rather an identity) and the intentional direction of activities towards societal transformation and/ or a political goal. Movements are further identified according to their protest behaviour. Answering the question for the Commons movement thus depends on the political action repertoire and who subjectively sees her/ himself as a Commoner³ – so it depends on who could be considered being a constitutive part of such a movement.

Commoners are people who ”move something”. The only thing we can say for certain about the Commons movement from our point of view is: it is a global movement that is internationally connected as well as locally active. But Commons are more than “just“ a social movement. On the one hand it is possible that Commoners do not explicitly pursue the transformation idea and the critique of capitalism, are not networked accordingly, and neither know nor use the term Commons or claim no Commons identity for themselves. On the other hand there are Commoners who act in a conscious separation from the capitalist commodity and valorisation logic. These we want to call activists and identify them as being the movement. They aspire for a transformation of the world according to Commons principles, organise themselves in respective groups and/ or networks and engage politically.

For many activists it is more important to prefiguratively set an example than to demonstrate on the streets. This means that it is a concern for those who make up the Commons movement to create spaces in which aspects of utopian aims can be lived through their actions in current decision making processes and interpersonal relationships: “In my own life I practise what I want to see in the greater whole.” The important part is that the social practises of commoning, whose rationale undermines the capitalist logic, are in themselves aimed at changing society.

Currently we can make out many movements all over the world for protecting the Commons and resisting enclosures. However, we also need a certain reference to the common features in the struggles for Commons as well as to other alternative economic movements. Even if a lot is moving towards Commons, the bigger picture will hardly change if the similarities between these activities are not recognized.
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3. How do you see the relationship between Commons and degrowth?

The Commons and the Degrowth movement contain each other, and differ in focus and strategy

When we were asked if we wanted to write a text that would put the movement and the concept of Degrowth in relation to Commons, we questioned what its strategic significance might be: this project is called “Degrowth in movement(s)“. Would a Commons contribution not create the impression that Commons are a part of the movements close to Degrowth? Or is it also the other way round: Degrowth is a part of the movements close to Commons? It is a matter of the prerogative of interpretation, a question of the framing, and of the levels: Which theme is overarching and which is a cross-section, and what do we need this interpretation for? We assume that a Commons world is a world beyond growth imperatives – but does the Degrowth movement also automatically include Commons into its considerations in the same way?

In the article “Degrowth: In Movement, Strengthening Alternatives and Overcoming Growth, Competition and Profit“ (Burkhart and others 2016) that is part of this publication, the Degrowth movement is (amongst others) characterized based on the participants of the Degrowth conference in the German city of Leipzig in 2014. At the time many people took part who could rather be placed in the ”Commons“ corner. Hence there were a number of contributions on Commons in the conference program, and Commoners gave several of the plenary talks. The false impression associated with this may well be criticised. However we cannot rule out that the same would happen similarly in the opposite case because in the end, from our point of view, Commons and Degrowth in some way contain each other.

An urban garden in the self administrated “Gängeviertel” in Hamburg. (Image: Leslie Gauditz)

If Degrowth means that we humans have to free ourselves from the bonds of the growth imperative, and if Commons activists advocate more commoning in the world, we have to ask ourselves: which growth do we need to free ourselves from? What do we need more of? How could this come about? Who is promoting it? On the level of the actors there seems to exist a high degree of mutual recognition and sympathy. Especially the critical and progressive part of the Degrowth movement that was strongly represented at the conference appears to harmonize with the part of the Commons movement that is critical of capitalism. Both aim at breaking with old patterns that are founded in the logic of today’s social system and have effect into (and through) the individual foundations of acting and thinking. Degrowth circles denounce growth imperatives. The Commons movement criticises the valorisation pressures in the present society. It is obvious that these are two sides of one and the same coin.

As Degrowth was formed as a counter-movement criticizing the growth model, an idea for an alternative of its own was initially not at the centre of attention. Considering commoning however, one can imagine a world in which our living conditions are (re)produced in a non-capitalist way, beyond the growth imperative. Hence commoning is often seen as an integral part in framing a post-growth society. Especially the considerations on Buen Vivir – living well – that are often drawn upon in the context of Degrowth (see Acosta 2016 ; Muraca 2014) show remarkable similarities with the Commons concepts and principles.

However we can also determine differences. Degrowth circles focus on resilience and sufficiency. In relation to the ecological boundaries of the planet these are rather implicitly included in Commons than vigorously discussed among Commoners. From a Commons perspective one can argue that parts of the Degrowth movement are not critical enough towards the capitalist logics of valorisation, and also depend too much on steering mechanisms of the state. In a way this is a different problem focus (also based in the theory) as well as a different approach in regard to the choice of a strategy for transformation.

Which proposals do they have for each other?

Learning from each other: ecological cycles, critique of state and domination, sustainable technology and self-realisation.

What is missing in the Commons perspective and which impulses can it receive from the Degrowth movement – and vice versa? One field in which the Commons movement can learn from Degrowth is concerned with the ecological cycles in a global context. The description and analysis of local and practical knowledge is strong and deeply founded with Commoners. Yet, the Degrowth academics are relatively stronger in pursuing the research on the planetary boundaries and global ecological cycles. Particularly when looking at the point that activists of the Commons movement consider a Commons world a possible reality, an exchange on this point is fruitful and could prevent inappropriate optimism as well as unrealistic scenarios.

Connected in diversity. How can we draw our common future? (Image: CC – SA, Sarah Klockars-Clauser)

In the other direction the Degrowth movement could let itself be inspired by the Commons perspective. Degrowth is often about abstract indicators on CO2-Emissions, economic growth or resource depletion from which the movement derives its critique of consumerism and demands for the global North to denounce. From a Commons perspective, qualitative differences and structural systemic necessities for change come to the fore. The criticism is voiced towards a consumption that does not seek to fulfil needs, but instead aims for status and / or the production of added value; and there is a general assumption that a full and enjoyable life is achievable for everyone. This means that the primary target is not an individual renunciation but, on the premise of a collective self-development of all, to find an answer to: who produces what how and why, and uses it (up).

Against the backdrop of the principle “contribution instead of exchange“ the Commons discourse fundamentally criticises the logic of money and exchange. There is a discussion on whether a reform of the monetary systems helps to transgress this logic or rather helps to strengthen it. A long-term Commons vision would be a social system that frees itself from exchange as a societal mode of mediation. In addition there is a basic critical attitude towards state institutions – not only because market and state are blamed for playing a substantial role in various enclosures, but also because Commons do not work in a centralized way. This is also a significant delineation of the Commons movement against a Marxist state centred communism. Locating Commons beyond market and state infers that Commons activists want to break with the principles of the market economy as well as the nation state. It can be said that their normative foundation is a fundamental rejection of any form of domination. A greater consideration of such discourses that critically debate state and market as socially determining institutions could enrich the Degrowth movement and contribute to shed light on structural obstacles to a post-growth society.

A fundamental critique of technology, which is present in the Degrowth context and takes its lead from authors like Ivan Illich (1998), is used constructively within contemporary Commons circles by asking: which form of technology corresponds to human needs, and who benefits from technology to what end? Among others, the strong roots in the digital world and a great participation of tech-savvy people from hacker- and maker-spaces as well as the Open Hardware circles form the basis for certain optimism towards technology (see Siefkes 2013). Critique of technology and optimism go hand in hand: while the one deals with criticising current-day technologies that are seen as problematic, others develop new ones that work according to different principles like modularity, repairability or resource conservation – principles that are also compatible with Degrowth demands. For example the project Open Source Ecology has taken it upon itself to develop fifty industrial machines that a small village needs for its inhabitants to lead a sustainable, yet relatively self-sufficient good life.

As mentioned in the beginning, there seems to be a lot of Degrowth in Commons, and a lot of Commons in Degrowth. Similarly, other currents that are united in this project find themselves sharing a lot with the two movements. Many of the inspirations are discussed and put to practise in Commons contexts. Perspectives that aim for equality of humans and nature as they are found in environmentalist and animal-welfare circles as well as various justice discourses play a role; so does the aim of human equality as demanded by No-Border groups who aspire for a world without national borders. Many sovereignty movements in particular (e.g. for food sovereignty) have a lot in common with Commons as their aim is to regain the power to determine one’s own living conditions.⁵ However, sometimes Commons activists relate to other transformation efforts fairly critically; for instance when the means suggested for implementation stand in contrast to the respective aims (e.g. when hierarchically organised political parties promote Commons). Similarly they criticise approaches and ways of handling things that reproduce or manifest without reflection the logic that needs to be transgressed – exchange, valorisation and money – as well as hierarchies and oppressive conditions (e.g. the reform of the money system through an alternative exchange medium such as Bitcoin).
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 6. Outlook: Space for visions, suggestions or wishes

Together on the way to a post-capitalist world: emancipatory, need-oriented, resource-conserving and without growth compulsion

A transformation perspective that anticipates the path to a Commons society is described as a “seed form” approach (see Meretz 2014b). This term offers an important reference point, especially in the German-speaking countries. More simply put: it is the idea that a consistent practise of Commons can spread in the here and now while it could, simply due to the current crisis prone societal system, be able to become the logic that determines society in the future. Hence the potential of a Commons society is already a seed within the current commoning that is not yet fully developed. At the same time, Commons projects are always in danger of being usurped. Fights to defend, re-establish and negotiate commonly managed resources are necessary as long as the hierarchical nation state and the capitalist market with their respective logics are dominant. These struggles will be more successful if they take place in the context of a strong, shared and most of all emancipatory movement.

One viable post-capitalist vision is that of a world that is not hierarchical but self-organised like a network of functionally differentiated connection nodes; a world in which everyone’s needs can be met through Commons. This world would also be marked by autonomous and responsible activities that give joy and meaning without over-using resources or destroying eco-systems. The Commons movement puts its trust in the human potential and translates the concept of sustainability into the language of human needs: there is a need to preserve the planet that can only be met if we organise our individual and collective satisfaction of needs in accordance with the boundaries of the planet. Commoning is a practical way to deal with human and non-human nature that is not built on an abstract growth compulsion but acknowledges that we humans are a (re)productive element of the earth.

An Occupy Wall Street activist. (Image: CC BY 3.0, David Shankbone)

Literature and links

Links

> Weblog keimform
> Weblog CommonsBlog
> What is Open Hardware? – Blogpost about Open Hardware

Applied as well as further literature

Acksel, Britta u. a. 2015. Commoning: Zur Kon-struktion einer konvivialen Gesellschaft. In: Konvivialismus. Eine Debatte. Adloff, Frank; Volker Heins (Hrsg.). Bielefeld: transcript. 133-145.

Acosta, Alberto 2016. Buen Vivir: Die Welt aus der Perspektive des Buen Vivir überdenken. Degrowth in Bewegung(en). Degrowth Webportal. <https://www.degrowth.de/de/dib/degrowth-in-bewegungen/buen-vivir/>

Benkler, Yochai 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Burkhart, Corinna; Eversberg, Dennis; Schmelzer, Matthias; Treu, Nina 2016. Degrowth: In Bewegung, um Alternativen zu stärken und Wachstum, Wettbewerb und Profit zu überwinden. Degrowth in Bewegung(en). Degrowth Webportal. <https://www.degrowth.de/de/dib/degrowth-in-bewegungen/degrowth/>

Della Porta, Donatella; Diani, Mario 1999: Social Movements. An Introduction. Malden/Oxford/Melbourne: Blackwell Publishing.

Euler, Johannes 2016. Commons-Creating Society: On the Radical German Commons Discourse. Review of Radical Political Economics 48(1): 93-110.

Habermann, Friederike 2015. Commonsbasierte Zukunft. Wie ein altes Konzept eine bessere Welt ermöglicht. Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 35-37/2015: 46-52.

Helfrich, Silke 2012. Gemeingüter sind nicht, sie werden gemacht. In: Commons: Für eine Politik jenseits von Markt und Staat. Helfrich, Silke; Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Hrsg.). Bielefeld: transcript. 85-91.

Helfrich, Silke; Bollier, David; Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung 2016: Die Welt der Commons. Muster gemeinsamen Handelns. Bielefeld: transcript.

Illich, Ivan 1998. Selbstbegrenzung: Eine politische Kritik der Technik. München: C.H. Beck.

Ostrom, Elinor 1999. Die Verfassung der Allmende: Jenseits von Staat und Markt. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Meretz, Stefan 2014a. Grundrisse einer freien Gesellschaft. In: Aufbruch ins Ungewisse: Auf der Suche nach Alternativen zur kapitalistischen Dauerkrise. Konicz, Tomasz; Rötzer, Florian (Hrsg.). Hannover: Heise. 152-182.

Meretz, Stefan 2014b. Keimform und gesellschaftliche Transformation. Streifzüge 60: 7-9.

Muraca, Barbara 2014. Gut leben: Eine Gesellschaft jenseits des Wachstums. Berlin: Wagenbach.

Siefkes, Christian 2013. Freie Quellen oder wie die Produktion zur Nebensache wurde. In: „Etwas fehlt“ – Utopie, Kritik und Glücksversprechen. Jour Fixe Initiative Berlin (Hrsg.). Münster: Edition Assemblage. 255-272. Access: 22.06.2016. < http://keimform.de/2013/freie-quellen-1 >

Degrowth is not only a label for an ongoing discussion on alternatives, and not just an academic debate, but also an emerging social movement. Regardless of many similarities, there is quite some lack of knowledge as well as scepticism, prejudice and misunderstanding about the different perspectives, assumptions, traditions, strategies and protagonists both within degrowth circles as well as within other social movements. Here, space for learning emerges – also to avoid the danger of repeating mistakes and pitfalls of other social movements.

At the same time, degrowth is a perspective or a proposal which is or can become an integral part of other perspectives and social movements. The integration of alternatives, which are discussed under the discursive roof of degrowth, into other perspectives often fails because of the above mentioned skepticisms, prejudices and misunderstandings.

The multi-media project “Degrowth in movement(s)” shows which initiatives and movements develop and practice social, ecological and democratic alternatives. Representatives from 32 different fields describe their work and history, their similarities & differences to others and possible alliances. From the Solidarity Economy to the Refugee-Movement, from Unconditional Basic Income to the Anti-Coal-Movement, from Care Revolution to the Trade Unions – they discuss their relationship to degrowth in texts, videos, photos and podcasts.

The project was run by the “Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie” (Laboratory for New Economic Ideas) in Germany, so most of the authors are from there. However, there are a couple of clearly international perspectives and most of the movements work far beyond the national level.

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“In a way we need to stop looking for definitions of the commons as a notion, as a concept. Because in fact it’s not about a thing. It’s not about a concept. It’s not about something separated from us. It’s another way of being in the world. It’s another way of thinking about the world, and thus another way of constantly reshaping and reconstructing the world.”

Silke Helfrich of Commons Institute and the Commons Strategies Group was interviewed by members of Zemos98 during last November’s European Commons Assembly in Brussels.

Video Transcript

My name is Silke Helfrich. I’m from Germany, and I am with the Commons Institute in Germany, which is a network of people who think about the commons, and think about how the idea of the commons transforms our way of being — of living together and working together. And I’m also with the Commons Strategies Group, which is a small group of three independent international activists, scholars and authors on the commons.

In a way we need to stop looking for definitions of the commons as a notion, as a concept. Because in fact it’s not about a thing. It’s not about a concept. It’s not about something separated from us. It’s another way of being in the world. It’s another way of thinking about the world, and thus another way of constantly reshaping and reconstructing the world.

We should better talk about “commoning” instead of commons. And having said this, commoning means being aware that plenty of the resources we need to make a living, don’t belong to individuals, need to be shared with other people. And that need to share resources requires skills: of sharing; of knowing how to do it; of managing shared resources. So commoning is about taking responsibility for common stewardship of resources, processes, spaces and the time we have available together.

It’s a practice: talking about the commons is talking about social practices that enable us to build (I would say) a free, fair and sustainable future. Because if we have one political challenge ahead, it is basically coming up with proposals, and concrete social practices, that help us merging three core ideas of political traditions. Which is: Freedom: the enhancement of ourselves, so to say, but freedom in relatedness to others, because we are not isolated human beings in this world; it is Equity — so we all need fair share in this world which at the same time a fair share is building a safer world; and is the notion of Sustainability, because, as the Greens used to say, we only borrowed this world from our grandchildren, right? So I think that the political project of the commons is to bring these three notions of (usually) different political traditions together: Fairness, which is kind of a very socialist idea; Freedom, which is a very liberal idea; and Sustainability, which is a very green idea.

The thing I enjoyed the most, in this starting process of Commons Assembly in Europe, is that all of us involved in this, got aware of how many we actually are. Because one tends to feel isolated as a commoner, right? Because obviously the way we think, the way we do, the way we work; the proposals we make; are not really on top of the political agenda. And if they are on top of the political agenda then as enclosures of the commons — that it separating people from the resources they need to make a living, or enclosing, privatizing what has been held in common etc. etc. So it has been empowering for us to see so many people all over Europe working, perhaps with different words, and in different realms of action, and certainly in different countries and locations, on a kind of common agenda. So it’s a moment of power, through, simply, coming together and sharing our experiences.

If you really want to challenge the political agenda, which today is an agenda of enclosing the commons, denying access to common resources to people, of market fundamentalism with a consequence of rising nationalism — right wing nationalism — I think that the dimension of the challenge we have had is that we need to flip the whole narrative. So it is not about doing an amendment of concrete laws here and there. It’s not about making another policy proposal which will have tough times to get channelled through the political institutions. It is about commonizing the way we do politics. It is about rethinking politics and rethinking democracy. Because if it is representative democracy, tied to, locked into, extremely structured, and so to say un-free, political processes (as we’ve heard yesterday as well, when we have been introduced to the processes in the European Parliament) then it is pretty clear that what the commons system needs the most which is: conversation; deliberation; time for people, and space for people to figure out how they can resolve their own problems in their very concrete contexts. So perhaps the most important thing decision-makers and policymakers can do for us, is provide support: recognize our right for self-organization; provide support, space, and financing for opening spaces, for a kind of deliberative democracy where people resolve their own problems, because they are the ones who know their situation best; and provide them with the tools to do so, and support them with finding their own solutions. And so it’s flipping the whole narrative, rethinking the very fundaments and the very categories policymaking is based upon today; and rethinking and challenging the dominant notion of democracy — of representative democracy.

I would like to make a call, because I think that in essence the whole idea of the commons is raising awareness that common people usually do uncommon things. And having said that, it’s also pretty clear that a sound message around the commons will be a simple message around the commons, in plain language that really speaks to people’s hearts. And sometimes it seems to me that we, as commoners, who try to theorize, conceptualize and make sense of the complexity out there, are not able to speak that plain and simple language. So I want to make a call to all those creative people out there, who know how to speak to people’s hearts — because it’s about all of us. Each of us out there has a stake in the commons. It’s about raising awareness about what we are already doing, already creating, to create a free, fair and sustainable society. So let’s build a huge coalition between all the commoners in Europe, and communication designers, and people who can help us getting the message across.

Transcript by Simon Grant. Thanks Simon!

The post Silke Helfrich on the Commons as a way of working and living together appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Commons Associations:

[Diesen Artikel gibt es auch auf Deutsch.]

The ideas presented in this document are based on an open space session that took place in April 2016 during the spring meeting of the German Commons Institute. The session was initiated by Gunter; further participants were Britta, Christian, Hannes, Nikolas, Sarah, and Sunna.

This document has been written by Christian, Hannes and Gunter together with Nikolas and Stefan T. It has been translated by Justin and Christian.

Context: Which Problems Are We Trying to Solve?

There are various intentional communities that practice a shared economy (e.g. Twin Oaks in the US or Niederkaufungen in Germany). However, few people are attracted to living in such communities and the barriers to entry are high. Reasons for this include the necessity of sharing so many spheres of life with the same group of people, often causing long and tedious discussions. (A new community member described the experience as “like getting married to 70 people at the same time.”)

There are also numerous commons-based projects focusing on the self-organised production and distribution of goods. Such projects practice a form of solidarity that offers practical alternatives to some parts of the capitalist economy. A widespread example is community-supported agriculture (CSA). Often (at least in German-speaking countries) CSAs practice a model of cost sharing where nobody is forced to pay a fixed price. Instead each member voluntarily decides how much money they can contribute. In the end, such an “offer round” is only completed successfully if the summed contributions cover all costs, but how much everybody contributes is up to them. Hence, there is no buying and selling and no fixed relation between giving and taking. (For a German-language description of the process, cf. SoLaWi-Tagebuch: So funktioniert die solidarische Landwirtschaft.)

So far, however, such commons-based projects are fairly small-scale and cover only a few spheres of life. How can these limitations be overcome?

One thing that’s missing is closer coordination between projects that provide for different needs (“vertical cooperation”). How can I participate in 10 or 20 commons-based projects – how can I get access to the products they offer – without losing “too many evenings” (in the words of Oscar Wilde) by having to participate in separate offer rounds (and possibly other obligations) for every project? It should be possible for projects like these to cover more and more spheres of life without burdening participants too much.

Another aspect that shouldn’t be neglected is the coordination between projects that provide similar goods (“horizontal cooperation”). Otherwise the establishment of (say) more and more CSAs could lead to a situation where they find themselves competing against each other – e.g. for contributing members, for workers with a suitable skillset, or for land and other resources.

How can we ensure that projects will cooperate with and complement each other instead of competing? And how can we facilitate the organisation of joint support projects producing, for example, suitable means of production? In the case of CSAs, such projects could improve and share seeds or they could design and manufacture agricultural machinery.

It’s not quite so easy to get involved in commons-based projects either. You need a certain amount of trust in others and you need to be able to assess your own situation in order to partake in an offer round. How can such hurdles be sensibly reduced to make it easier to get involved?

Based on the above analysis, we have tried to address the following questions:

• How is it possible to create connections between commons-based projects that facilitate horizontal and vertical cooperation between them and that encourage the formation of more and more such projects?
• Which kinds of structures allow people to organise most or all aspects of life according to commons principles, while keeping the barriers to entry low? (Some intentional communities succeed at the first task, but their barriers to entry are high.)
• How can such projects be made attractive enough that more and more people want to get involved and so that more and more of their needs can be satisfied in this way?

The Idea: An Association of Commons-Based Projects

The basic idea of our attempt to answer these questions is: we want regional project associations connecting commons-based, self-organised projects.

We call the envisaged organisation a commons association. The name may still change – other names that came up during brainstorming include commons network, commons coalition, commoning association, commons syndicate, common pool, commoning portal, city of workshops (for urban associations), scalable network community. Any other good ideas?

What’s more important is the concept: an association connects various projects in the same geographical region, which join forces to provide good solutions for (ultimately) all spheres of life. This could include providing members with food (CSAs), electricity (community-supported energy = CSE), living quarters (residential communities or housing co-ops, Mietshäuser Syndikat), childcare, places for experimentation and for the production of means of production and other useful things (open workshops, Fab Labs), software and computer support (hackerspaces), libraries for borrowing tools, household items, and other occasionally required things (in Germany and Austria there are various noncommercial “Leilas”, short for Leihladen or borrowing shop), clothing (clothing distribution centres, sewing workshops), the redistribution of things their former owners no longer need (free shops), and much more.

Additionally cooperation should take place at a superregional level, particularly regarding the production and usage of free knowledge (free and open-source software, open-source hardware, free seeds etc.) But when it comes to the satisfaction of physical/vital needs, regional cooperation should be most important, augmented by superregional cooperation when needed (how to organise such additional superregional cooperation will be discussed below).

Anybody who’s a member of any one of the participating projects becomes a member of the commons association automatically and can benefit from anything it offers. (How this can work in practice is discussed below).

Thus the commons association makes it possible to find suitable solutions for all spheres of life without personally having to get involved in many separate projects. (Having to participate in separate offer rounds and other organisational matters of each distinct project would be impractical and very time-consuming.) It provides access to the benefits offered by various projects and allows contributing in suitable ways. Its ultimate purpose is to mediate the various needs, activities and contributions of all its members.

The commons association is not just a loose network of projects. It organises a collective needs-driven provisioning system, bringing together those who need or want certain benefits and those who can provide them. There is no strict separation between producers and consumers, but rather a smooth transition from one group to the other; all can cooperate on an equal footing.

A Shared Economy as a Flow of Contributions of Different Kinds

Providing the members of the commons association with goods causes expenses of various kinds. There are things that need to be done (tasks or “work”) and in a world that’s otherwise still mostly capitalistic, money is needed in order to buy or rent things that the association doesn’t yet own and cannot yet produce. Alternatively, some such things might be donated by members so that they don’t have to be bought. Still more money is needed if member projects want to pay salaries for performed tasks (see below).

To determine the required contributions, each project keeps a budget of its projected needs. The goal of this budget planning is to answer the questions: “How many and what kinds of goods do we need to produce or provide? What costs will that incur? Which tasks need to be done and where do we need the help of others?”

Based on the financial part of the budget, each project calculates a suggested contribution value (guideline value) for those who want to use the produced goods. Such a guideline value is not obligatory, but only a hint, a suggestion on what amount of payment would be appropriate. Instead of being absolute, it may be calculated relative to a person’s income. This means that somebody who earns three times as much as another person will get a guideline value that’s three times as high. This notion of relative guideline values is similar to the system used by the German public health insurance companies whose membership fees are calculated relative to a person’s income. (See below for further discussion of relative guideline values.) But ultimately every person decides for themselves how much they are able and willing to contribute. The important thing is that the total is sufficient to cover the expected expenses of the project.

Most participants will want to use many different kinds of goods and services (perhaps only vegetarian food? Perhaps also meat? Perhaps also electricity? Or perhaps everything the pool has to offer?). Their total guideline value is calculated by adding up the respective guideline values for all the kinds of goods they want to consume.

The collected financial contributions only serve to cover the expenses of projects; they can’t make anybody rich. And they shouldn’t exclude anyone from participating in the association, which is why they are relative to people’s income and are only suggestions rather than being mandatory.

In the long run, a commons association aims to provide more and more of the goods and services needed by its members. The goal is to have member projects produce all these goods as well as the required means of production and other upstream products and resources. Where this is infeasible because an association is too small, cooperative projects jointly organised by several commons associations may be able to close the gap. If this strategy works, fewer and fewer goods will have to be purchased from the capitalist outer world. This should cause the financial budget to shrink over time – not in absolute numbers, but relative to the number of people that belong to the association and the variety of goods offered to them. Cooperation between commons associations is likely to be essential for this, as a single association will be too small to efficiently produce some of the goods required (see below).

Monetary calculations are therefore merely a temporary solution during a transitional period; they are not supposed to be needed forever.

Volunteering for tasks required by one of the member projects (or for managing the association) will, however, be permanently possible. This kind of unpaid engagement is welcome (and, all in all, needed to keep the association running), but it’s entirely voluntary rather than mandatory – whether to get active is up to you. (It’s possible that this principle will have to be modified in some cases because there are CSAs that require work assignments. See below for a discussion on how to handle this.)

Whether a person volunteers for tasks has no influence on the size of the guideline value suggested to them as a financial contribution. (Since these values are mere suggestions, you can obviously decide to reduce your actual financial contribution or even to forgo it altogether if you feel that your active engagement is sufficient to make up for that. But that’s a personal decision.)

What Is Pooled

A commons association therefore constitutes a pool, which everyone can take from according to the agreed rules and which everyone can and should contribute to. The pool encompasses three fundamental aspects:

• Provided goods and activities (“services”): available under the terms agreed (e.g. according to need, or x per person)
• Budgets (costs for purchases, rent, taxes, paid work): divided up via offer rounds
• Tasks: can be completed by volunteers or as paid work where agreed (see the next section)

Another thing that is pooled is the risk: by participating in the association the individual projects can protect themselves against uncertainties. When a project is in trouble or needs special short-term support, others can come to its aid. But pooling risks should not be unconditional: as with all solidarity, the autonomy of projects must be accompanied by self-responsibility.

Projects have to be able to fail (including economically in the form of an insolvency) without endangering the entire association. Otherwise, justifiable concerns could soon spell the end of autonomy altogether: for its own security the association would have to start “checking up” on each individual project, which could easily lead to a top-heavy bureaucracy, and that is hardly desirable.

The way to avoid this is demonstrated by the Mietshäuser Syndikat, where theoretically every project could go bankrupt without the syndicate losing any more than the €12,400 that they paid to the project as their share of the start-up capital. On the other hand, the association shouldn’t give up a project unless absolutely necessary. (In the Mietshäuser Syndikat, out of more than a hundred successful housing co-ops there has so far only been one that failed, and in that case they managed to repay the direct creditors at least partially, by having a solidarity committee organise collections.)

While not absolutely necessary, it may also be helpful to have a “capital pool” where the association connects willing creditors with projects that need to make investments. But, for the reasons mentioned above, the association should probably only be the mediator, instead of taking up the credit itself and passing it on, and hence being ultimately liable for paying it back.

One of the advantages for members to give interest-free or low-interest credit to association projects is that they know that something sensible is being done with their money and that they can build up a basis of personal trust with the borrowers. It should not be too difficult to take up loans from more well-off members and their circle of acquaintances, since people find it easier to lend money than to just give it away, and because there isn’t much “competition” in times of generally low interest rates.

If necessary, projects can also make interest-free or low-interest credit available to each other (that is also something practised in the Mietshäuser Syndikat). However that is more likely to be just a short-term solution, because after all, projects are only taking money to cover their foreseeable expenses and aren’t going to have particularly big financial “reserves” at their disposal.

Additionally, projects gain more political weight thanks to the association – who would make trouble with a project that belongs to an association with 500 or even 50,000 members, without having second thoughts?

Paid Jobs within Projects

All the necessary tasks that nobody undertakes voluntarily must be paid (so long as they really are necessary!), and therefore there will also be paid roles in many of the participating projects. This also corresponds to current practice in CSAs and similar projects. Creating jobs is not the association’s goal. But perhaps it can still be a positive side-effect, because the people taking these jobs will be able to make ends meet – so long as they are still living in a capitalist context where it is scarcely possible to do so without gainful employment.

Questions like which roles are needed, who takes them on, and probably also how they are paid, are decided by the participating projects themselves, under their requirements planning. It is possible that co-operating projects will agree on certain general guidelines which will then apply to everyone. Most probably it’s people who are already involved in the project or the association who will be preferred for jobs; people from outside will likely only be considered when they can identify with the association’s self-conception and its cooperative model.

If there are more suitable candidates applying for a job than needed, the participants (applicants as well as the people already involved in the project) will try to find a solution that everyone can live with. In some cases it may be preferable to create several part-time positions instead of fewer full-time ones, though the jobs shouldn’t be divided up to such an extreme that it no longer makes sense for the participants.

There could be a fixed wage, corresponding to the average hourly wage in the corresponding country (or region or city) for example, with surpluses for particular needs (such as single parents / multiple children / living in an expensive area). Alternatively the individual participants could set their own wage based on their individual needs, as practised by some CSA projects (compare Was ist eigentlich „solidarisch“ an der „Solidarischen Landwirtschaft“? [DE]). Of course this model requires the participants to have some skill in self-reflection and the ability to estimate their needs, so it is not entirely unproblematic. Hybrid forms between these two models are also conceivable, for example defined hourly rates as guidelines that the participants can use for orientation (but don’t have to).

In any case, the payment should be high enough for the participants to have proper health insurance (as long as they don’t have another job that gives them access to health insurance). In Germany the monthly salary must currently amount to at least €451 for that to be true. The monetary payment can be accompanied by free access to goods and services from the commons association.

Formation of Prices

As we’ve already discussed, the guideline contributions that are calculated for members are based, amongst other things, on what they would like to consume or use – if they are interested in additional product categories, then there will be higher manufacturing costs, which will be incorporated into their guideline. Within particular product categories however, the flat-rate principle will often apply: you can help yourself to the produced goods according to need, without having to pay for the consumed quantity directly or having it incorporated into your guideline contribution. In this case a share should typically correspond to the consumption demand of a person – a family, shared flat or housing co-op will generally consume more than an individual person and therefore get a higher guideline. On the other hand, provision for children could be included for free, based on considerations of the Berlin SolE project (Solidarische Energieversorgung [DE]) – a contribution is only expected of every adult person living in a household. The actual personal consumption is not billed in this approach.

Alternatively a share could allow the long-term usage of a particular good. A share in a bicycle project might entitle you to obtain a bicycle or pedelec which would also be maintained and repaired when necessary and then replaced at the end of its life with a new model. Some extras such as the occasional use of a bicycle trailer may be included; these are again calculated as a flat rate, i.e. not separately billed. It could be similar in technology projects, which could for example provide their members with a smartphone or a laptop along with the appropriate accessories.

In other cases it might make more sense to calculate the guideline contributions based on the actual individual level of consumption. So your personal guideline in a housing co-op could depend not just on your income, but also on the living space that you’re using – if you have a bigger room or a bigger flat, then in general you’ll pay more. (But it is still based on guidelines here, which aren’t compulsory.)

Guideline prices are in principle also conceivable for non-members. The left-wing café collective Morgenrot in Berlin doesn’t charge a fixed price for a breakfast buffet for example – instead, it has a price range, within which you can make your own assessment of how much to pay. If there is an association housing co-op that has its own bar, it could do a similar thing.

In any event, whether the prices are for members or outsiders, they only serve to cover costs, not for making profit. And prices do not arise from market competition (as a participant in the market I have to try charging the highest price I can, but then lower it to stop customers from switching to a competing product). Instead they are collectively agreed in a transparent process between the members of the association (both “consumers” and “producers” ). And their purpose is not to maximise profit, they are only used to cover the costs that are incurred.

The principle underlying the formation of prices can be summed up in this formula: Sharing the expense by agreement, instead of competition.

Decision-Making and Organisational Structures

Free agreements underlie the relationships between participating people and projects – not formal “democratic” elections and votes, in which a majority could push through their own agenda at the cost of minorities.

The approach of Sociocracy 3.0 may be helpful here: see Sociocracy 3.0 in Details (and in particular the section on Circles and Decision Marking as well as Organizational Structure).

In this approach, “circles” allow individual projects to coordinate with one another (they could be called “coordination circles”). The circles are staffed according to the four-eyes principle: two delegates from every involved project are sent into a circle – for example, the maintainer and someone chosen by the project team.

Decisions within a circle are made by consent. Consent doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is happy with the decision, but that everyone can live with it. Anyone with strong objections can block a decision by stating and explaining their objection. The circle cannot ignore objections for which a reason has been given; in this way, a decision is only possible if the circle can allay the concerns so that the objection is withdrawn.

All of the coordination tasks relevant to the commons association, such as drawing up the overall budget and guideline values as well as taking on new projects, are carried out by corresponding circles.

Coordination circles also serve as mediators for related projects within a commons association, those handling a particular type of provision. For instance, within a bigger commons association, you could have several CSA projects reaching mutual agreements with each other in a coordination circle.

Another responsibility of the circles is to create transparency towards the individual projects and the members. They are in charge of publishing the decisions that are made within the projects and in the association, as well as the costs incurred, planning processes etc.

The internal structure of an individual project can also be organised in the form of circles.

Safeguarding Resources against Privatisation

Resource management is guided by the principle: commons and possession instead of property. The things that aren’t commons – i.e. not collectively used and cared for – can become the possessions of individuals, meaning that they can use and, where applicable, consume them. But alienable property (that which can be sold or rented out) plays no role.

Consumer goods (such as food, electricity) are distributed among and consumed by the members, according to their needs and the agreements that have been made.

Goods that are used on a long-term basis (such as houses/living space) can be used by members as long as they need them (unless something else has been arranged), after which they return to the association. As a general rule the users are expected to contribute to the necessary expenses for the duration of use. Just as with housing co-ops of the Mietshäuser Syndikat, the contributions (“rent”) must be sufficient in total in order to produce the good in question (or to acquire it) and to maintain it in the long term, but they don’t have to be equal for all users. Instead, they are shared out by agreement, such as in the offer rounds.

Such long-lasting goods as well as means of production should be protected for the long term as commons. In order to prevent them from being privatised later on (for example, if the project leaves the association), a security measure is available that is modelled on the practice of the Mietshäuser Syndikat. Specifically, the commons resources are formally co-owned by the individual project that produces or uses it, and by the association. They can only be sold with the agreement of both owners, and the association makes it clear in its statutes that it will only give this consent if all of its individual members agree to it. That should make the threat of privatisation de facto impossible, since every person belonging to the association has an inviolable right of veto.

In this way, formal property is “neutralised”. The respective projects have full usage rights, but don’t have the right to bypass the association and sell the goods they use, or to exclude others from using goods that they personally don’t need (anymore).

Any knowledge and information produced (software, building plans etc.) are released as Free Software/Free Knowledge. If in doubt, licences that have a copyleft clause (GPL, AGPL or CC-BY-SA) are preferred, in order to make sure that any derivatives also remain free.

Regionalism and Super-Regional Cooperation

A commons association covers a particular region, typically a city (and its surrounding areas perhaps), a group of neighbouring towns or cities, or a rural region. For example, there could be an association for Berlin-Potsdam, for the Ruhr area, for Wendland, for Vienna etc.

Different commons associations can coordinate with each other, and there can be coordination circles for this purpose as well. This coordination should take place not just at the level of entire associations, but also on the level of each individual industry. For example, the CSAs could coordinate with each other super-regionally and organise common supply chains, such as the production of tools.

So that they don’t eventually become too big and unwieldy, commons associations can each set a maximum size that they don’t wish to exceed – for example, 300,000 people. If the membership figures exceed this limit, then the association breaks up into two or three smaller associations by mutual agreement, with each one of them taking on a particular part of the region formerly covered by the old association. The newly created associations are formally independent of each other, but can nevertheless still work together in some ways, just as there is super-regional cooperation between different associations anyway.

Where the Low Threshold Comes From

The stated aim of our approach is to keep the barriers to entry small, to make everything as attractive as possible, including for people who aren’t enthusiastic about current approaches like communes and CSAs. There are several factors that contribute to this low barrier to entry that we’ve been striving for:

• People decide for themselves how much or how little they want to participate in the collective economy – everything is possible, from only using one particular offering (such as CSA food) through to living in a housing co-operative and being provided for almost entirely by association projects.
• Similarly you decide for yourself how intensively and in what way you get involved – whether you just make a financial contribution (and how much you want to give), whether you do some work in the projects as an occasional volunteer, or whether you want to take on an intensive role in one of the projects (which at least in the initial stages will often be a paid role).
• You can choose for yourself the areas that you want to engage in, depending on your own interests and abilities and what there is available to do. Those areas don’t have to have anything to do with your own consumption – I can for example consume CSA food and take care of children (without necessarily having children myself).
• You can get involved at any time and then leave again with no disadvantage. (Whereas in some communes you have to put in your entire wealth – and if you leave, then you’ve lost it.)

This last point doesn’t stop individual members from being able to make low-interest or interest-free credit available to projects or to the association, which can enable longer-term planning security. In this case a fixed term can be arranged (meaning you won’t get your credit back earlier) or alternatively the notice periods can be set in such a way that individuals or small numbers of people dropping out can’t put the project in danger, in order to counteract the potential for blackmail in decision-making. (Otherwise lenders could make a threat: “If you don’t do what I want, then I’ll leave and take my money out.”)

Short Summary of the Concept’s Essential Features

The aim is a commons association with a collective economy that is based on needs and contributions. The participants receive primarily non-monetary benefits: goods of all kinds that they need or want.

Money circulates to the extent necessary, but nobody should be excluded for lack of sufficient financial resources. There can also be fairly paid jobs, but only as long as they are necessary for carrying out the tasks required. The goal is to phase them out completely over time.

There is no exchange – instead, people contribute to the common pool and costs as well as benefits are shared according to collective agreements (“From exchange to contributions”). To this end, the participating projects draw up their own budgets, which are then combined together in an association-wide budget (including both the monetary and labour needs).

Who contributes what, and how much, are decided in offer rounds that extend across projects. The goal is a needs-based economy in the old Greek sense of “oikonomia”: the provision of necessary and useful goods (cf. Aristoteles macht aus der Ökonomie eine Wissenschaft [DE]).

Another goal is to organise a kind of reciprocal trust that enables individuals to participate in collective provision, without compulsion or competition and without the worry of being excluded.

Points to Discuss Further

This proposal cannot – and does not intend to – “prescribe” all of the details of how a commons association should be organised: a lot of things will only become clear in practice, when such associations start to spread. The following are some points that still require some discussion or which could perhaps be solved differently to the solutions suggested here.

One point which is still not completely clarified is how the offer rounds are carried out within an association, which after all could potentially involve thousands or even hundreds of thousands of members. Obviously, getting everyone together in one room will quickly prove impossible. One idea for a solution developed by the SolE project is to use nested offer rounds: for example, an association with 10,000 members could have 100 separate offer groups (“small groups”), each with 100 members. Each small group is expected to raise the sum of the guideline contributions for its members as a whole, but exactly how those contributions are distributed among the individual people is arranged at a face-to-face meeting of the small group’s membership. The contribution expected from each small group would, however, be fixed and non-negotiable.

A variant of this concept is to understand the contribution required of the small groups as a guideline as well, and to allow each small group to deviate from it upwards or downwards. As per the Sociocracy principle, each small group then sends two representatives into a circle to establish whether the small groups’ contributions are sufficient in total, and to renegotiate them where necessary. Here the concept of self-organised solidarity is used more consistently, albeit with the disadvantage that small groups might have to be called back several times if their contributions have turned out to be too low in total.

An alternative may be to carry out the offer round for the entire association over the Internet instead of in personal meetings. The individual members would then make an “offer” via the software. As soon as everyone has made an offer, they learn whether the total amount is too little, enough, or too much, and can then modify their offer upwards or downwards – and this continues until there is enough. Just as with the other processes, the individual contributions (offers) can remain confidential. People only need to know that the overall total is enough, but not how much other people are contributing.

A relatively innovative element in our concept is the idea of income-dependent guideline values. It is still an open question as to whether this idea conflicts with the low barrier to entry that we are striving for, since everyone would need to disclose their income. It doesn’t necessarily have to be public, but it would have to be disclosed to a trustworthy group of people in the association who calculate the individual guidelines from this data and then delete it. It remains to be seen whether this would still deter people. It’s conceivable that the income won’t be asked for exactly but rather in five or ten tiers.

Or the association could dispense entirely with asking people their income and use income-independent guidelines instead. The contributors could then adapt the suggestion at their own discretion: people who have more, give more; people who have less, give less. Admittedly the differences between individual contributions emerging from this method would probably be much smaller than if the real income differences were used as the basis of the guidelines.

In order to achieve a fairer approximation of the paid contributions to the real income differences, the association could, while still not asking people for their income levels directly, supply some advice for estimating their contribution: “The average income in our region is XY. If your income is double/half of this, could you perhaps contribute double/half as much?”

A further open point is whether other duties can be expected of people alongside participation in the offer rounds. Above this was rejected: “unpaid engagement is welcome …, but it’s entirely voluntary rather than mandatory ”. There are, however, CSAs that oblige their members to make a certain amount of labour contributions. How does that fit in – do such projects absolutely need to change their practice in order to become part of an association?

The idea of labour assignments in individual projects is problematic because it doesn’t “scale” very well (amongst other reasons). If I benefit from the products of a dozen projects, I cannot make separate labour contributions to every one of these projects without hopelessly overburdening myself and probably losing interest in the whole thing. Clearly such compulsory assignments have to remain the exception and not the rule. In principle it would nevertheless be possible for the association to agree that its members have to actively participate in one or two of the member projects instead of just contributing financially. But it would still be up to individuals to decide exactly which projects and activities they would engage in.

Such rules are conceivable, but ultimately we have to wonder whether an encouragement to participate (“we would be pleased if…”) wouldn’t actually be more pleasant and perhaps also more motivating than a mandatory regulation (“as members you must…”). It’s also possible that any necessary tasks that aren’t undertaken by paid workers could also be divided up via offer rounds: nobody is personally obliged to take on particular tasks, but collectively all of the tasks have to have somebody who will carry them out.

With some communes, the whole wealth of the participants is collectivised (that is, transferred to the commune), at least gradually. With some recent communes the rule is that ten percent of your personal assets has to be collectivised/redistributed each year. Whoever has been there for more than ten years and then leaves the commune, takes away only the average of all the wealth that was paid in (in the simplest case). Alternatively there can be fairer solutions based more on need (exit contracts), but this takes a lot more discussion to organise.

For a commons association, this kind of collectivisation would probably not be practical. This is because most participants in the initial stages are using the association as just one source of support – they get some of their goods from the pool, and they continue to buy the rest of them from the market. It is conceivable, however, that some housing co-ops that belong to the association could carry out this sort of wealth collectivisation, and then also organise a communal fund for anything that doesn’t come from the association.

We have set up a mailing list for the discussion of commons associations and for coordination of steps towards their practical realisation.

Related Concepts

• The Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) is a Catalan cooperative that aims for a comprehensive provision of services for its members.
• Time banks and LETS schemes are a simple approach to the organisation of a communal solidarity-based economy; however, they are based more on individual calculations than on collective cooperation and solidarity. We do not advocate their practice of individual “billing” (where the contributions I make are balanced against what I consume: without sufficient contributions of my own, I can’t consume/use anything). Still, the similarities and differences should be borne in mind.
• In the Keimform blog last year, Martin Siefkes suggested the concept of “Peer Networks” (see Eine Idee für den Übergang and 10 Prinzipien des Übergangs [DE]), which anticipate some of the core ideas of the commons association idea presented here, though there are many differences in the details.

Photo by Wendy Longo photography

The post Unifying commons-based projects in a self-organised solidarity 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.

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“The purpose of the association is to promote science and research, the arts and culture, and adult and vocational education in relation to Commons.

Commons are institutions in which people in a self-determined way organize reproduction and / or production based on common resources, jointly meeting their needs while also re-/producing the shared resources.

The commons and research on the commons have been widely recognized by the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to the commons researcher Elinor Ostrom on 10 December 2009.

The purpose of the institute is realized by:

• Scientific work and research: theoretical, but also grounded in practice (e.g. in cooperation with concrete commons projects)
• Education: empowerment and encouragement of people to create and participate in commons projects, creation or provision of materials, organization of workshops, lectures, conferences, seminars, summer schools, etc.
• Publications: research results, press releases, educational materials, etc.
• Cooperation: national and international, with interested people, social movements, research institutions, universities, non-governmental organizations
• Creation of a knowledge archive: sharing “project knowledge” and project ideas, archives of commons literature
• Consulting and promotion: supporting the creation and implementation of commons projects

There is an open, international, English-language listserv for information and discussion about the Commons.”

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