I used to direct theater. I left the theater because I got increasingly dissatisfied with its reliance on stories with clear beginnings, middles, and ends. Aristotle’s narrative arc with its rising tension, crisis, and catharsis wasn’t just predictable, but dangerously limiting. Things look bad, but as long as you accept the hero’s solution, everything gets solved and you can go back to sleep. Crisis, climax, and sleep – the much-too-male approach to everything from sex to religion, capitalism to communism.

I left theater for the net, which seemed to offer a more open-ended, connected form of sense-making. So I wrote about that, and the possibilities this opened for everything from economics to society. In my books, I usually tried crashing a set of myths – but then usually offer some alternative at the end. So in my religion book I smashed the myth of apocalypse and salvation, but offered an alternative path toward consensus, progressive collaboration. In another, I exposed the fallacy of hand-me-down truths, but then offered an alternative of collective reality creation. In a graphic novel, I undermined the authority of the storyteller (me) and then have a character hand a pencil to the reader as if through the page. In a book on Judaism, I smashed the idolatry that infected Judaism, but promote a new, provisional mythology of communal sense making. In my books on economics, I crash the cynically devised mythologies of capitalism and corporatism, but offer a new one of circular economics and sharing. In my Team Human podcast, I regularly crash the myth of the survival of the fittest individual, but offer a new evolutionary history of interspecies cooperation.

Better myths, like cultural operating systems, should yield better results. But if they are all myths, are they all ultimately destructive?

Even science falls into the trap. We get an idea – say, that agriculture was a wrong turn – and then “see” evidence that hunter-gatherers worked fewer hours than we did after the invention of agriculture. I have even quoted this ‘fact’ from neuorscientist/sociologist Robert Sapolsky, and others, before realizing it’s based not on science but a story.

People and institutions come to me to help develop a new myth for 21st Century, for digital times. But mythology feels more like the product of a television media environment – imagery and hallucination. The digital media environment is about fact. Memory. It all takes place on memory. That’s why we’re fighting less over who believes what, than what really happened. Where did humans come from? Are things getting better or worse? And the myths are no longer adequate. The stories are not up to the task.

I think Team Human’s job may be to find ways to work together without an overriding mythological construct. We should do something in a new way because it’s just better, on an experiential, practical, or scientific level. Growing food in a certain way – not because it’s connected to Mother Gaia, but because it keeps the soil alive. Not a metaphor. Reality.

If we are destined to think and communicate in myths – if that’s our nature – then we can at least accept that we all use stories to understand the world. Understanding another person means listening to their story – and sharing one’s own – but accepting that both are just stories. Myths are ways of connecting the dots between the moments of human experience. They create a sense of continuity and purpose, even though there may be none. Or myths may help each of us trace a path of cause-and-effect through a maze of reality that is so interconnected it would just overwhelm us to comprehend it in its entirety. We each make our own myth to explain the journey we happened to take. But it’s more of a convenience than a reality. And we can look back on our lives, and come up with a new myth to explain it. The myth is not for someone else, it’s for ourselves.

Of course we can still listen to one another’s perceptions and sense-making – and then gain some empathy for why they’re thinking and acting the way they do – without necessary believing any of it. And, maybe more importantly, without trying to get them to exchange their mythology for ours. Understanding other people’s myths, unconditionally and without being threatened by them, has helped keep me sane during this particularly tumultuous cultural moment.

So what’s Team Human’s job: to come up w a new myth? Or break them all? Whatever we decide, it should be a conscious choice.

This essay started as a monologue on TeamHuman.fm. Please come listen.

Photo by giveawayboy

The post Do we need a new myth, or no myth? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Written by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis:

Two prominent social progressive movements are faced with a few contradictions and a paradox.

On the one side, we observe a re-emergence of the co-operative movement and worker-owned enterprises that, however, suffer from certain structural weaknesses. They have loose connections with each other and thus fail to form a global counter-power capable of confronting transnational capital.

On the other, we have an emergent field of commons-based peer production initiatives, such as the free and open-source software projects, that create digital commons of knowledge, software, culture and design for the whole of humanity. Nevertheless, such initiatives are often dominated by venture-capital-funded start-ups and large multinational enterprises that exploit the same commons.

Thus we have a paradox: the more “communist” the sharing license used in the peer production of digital commons (that is, few or no restrictions on sharing), the more capitalist the practice (that is, multinationals can use it for free). Take for example the GNU/Linux commons that has become a “corporate commons” as well, enriching for-profit corporations such as IBM. It is obvious that this works in a certain way and seems acceptable to many free software developers. But is this the optimal way?

Our argument focuses on the social logic that the licenses used for sharing the digital commons often enable. They allow anybody to contribute, and they allow anybody to use. In fact this relational dynamic is technically a form of “communism”: from each according to his/her abilities, to each according to his/her needs. This paradoxically allows, for example, multinational corporations to use the free software code for profit maximization. At the same time, the majority of the contributors participate on a voluntary basis, and those who have an income, make a living either through wage-labor or alliances with capital-driven entities.

What is to be done?

We suggest a two-step strategy to tackle this “communist” paradox.

First, we argue for commons-based reciprocity licensing, which has been called copyfair as a play on copyright and copyleft. Copyfair allows commons-contributing entities to use the common material for free, but non-contributory capitalist entities have to pay for a license for the right to commercialize that material. In this approach, the free sharing of knowledge is preserved, i.e. the universal availability of digital commons, but commercialization is made conditional on reciprocity. The Peer Production License exemplifies this line of argument.  So, reciprocity is created between the sphere of the capitalist market and the sphere of the commons. This simultaneously allows the entities participating into the ecosystems of commons-oriented entrepreneurial coalitions to pool and mutualize their digital resources and benefit in tandem.

Second, we argue for a synergy between the commons-based peer production movement and elements of the cooperative movements. We propose the model of an “open cooperative”, i.e. an entity that would be legally and statutorily bound to creating commons and shared resources. Open cooperatives would internalize negative externalities; adopt multi-stakeholder governance models; contribute to the creation of digital and material commons; and be socially and politically organized around global concerns, even if they produce locally.

Perhaps a good way to understand this twofold proposal is to look at the functioning of the medieval guild system. Externally they were selling their goods on the marketplace, but internally they were fraternities and solidarity systems. This is a historical analogy to understand the double logic of the new entities connected to the commons. In a commons-centric economy, this could be achieved through open participatory systems that would connect producers and consumer/user communities, through mutual solidarity, as we know for example from the model of consumer-supported agriculture. Open cooperatives would thus intertwine contributors with various roles in a solidarity ecosystem.

Sensorica’s New Economy

Building counter-power

The only way to achieve systemic change at the planetary level is to build counter-power, i.e. alternative global governance. The transnational capitalist class must feel that its power is also curtailed by transnational forces representing the global commoners and their livelihood organizations. We therefore favor commons-oriented entrepreneurial coalitions that strengthen commons and their contributory communities and create an economy for them.

Examples of such translocal and transnationally operating coalitions already exist. Amongst the best known are Enspiral (originally based in New Zealand); Sensorica (originally based in Montreal, Canada); Las Indias (mostly based in Spain but with many hispanic members from Latin America); and Ethos VO(based in the UK). We believe this new type of translocal organization is the seed form of future global coalitions of a commons-oriented cooperative ecosystem.

• This essay was based on Bauwens, M., & Kostakis, V. (2014). From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons: Towards an Open Co-operativism. tripleC, 12(1), 356-361.
• Cross-posted from OpenDemocracy
• Lead image by Usman Malik

The post From the communism of capital to capital for the commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The institution of obștea was not founded at a precise moment or as a contractual organization. Legend tells us that in the sixteenth century Stephen the Great endowed the founders of seven villages for their military merits with communal ownership of the Vrancea Mountains.

Villages of the region jointly possessed the mountains for generations (only interrupted by state ownership during the communist regime), a unique circumstance in Romania and a rarity in Europe. Initially, the whole region owned the entire mountain area (Stahl 1958) in devalmașie. The first division of the land among villages occurred in 1755, followed by another five divisions until the last one in 1840. The divisions were made to meet the pasturing needs of each village and to resolve a political conflict.² By the end of the nineteenth century, villagers’ access to their forests became more and more restricted as exploitation technologies improved and wood became a valuable commodity associated with money, and social status. During this period, several powerful foreign forestry companies, especially from Austria and Italy, struck deals with local elites for leasing and exploiting large areas of forest. In several villages, with the money yield, the old elites worked for the best of the community, building schools, village halls and communal baths. In others, the locals’ collective memory remembers elites who deceived people to sell their use rights, often for a pack of cigarettes. The foreign companies ended their activity in Vrancea by the beginning of the First World War, after committing massive deforestation.

The Romanian state introduced its first forestry statute, The Forestry Code, in 1910, giving obștea formal legal recognition. The law required villagers to obtain vouchers from a local committee (without payment) to harvest lumber, as well as certificates to transport it. These regulations were mostly seen as unnecessary formalities and were not strictly followed at the time. Instead, customary norms continued to serve as effective regulation.

The obștea might have slowly transformed from a socially embedded institution into a modern organizational form except that, in 1948, the Communist Party came to power and the state seized all communal forest property. In the 1950s there were a number of serious fights in Vrancea between villagers belonging to the Anticommunist Resistance Movement, and communist authorities. Several people were killed, and some were imprisoned. These events, along with an outmigration of educated people from rural areas, led to a loss of capable local elites. Many obștea traditions were lost or receded.

Locals’ experiences during the communist period varied a great deal from village to village, and even within the same village. Some people worked as wage earners within state structures. Others stole wood from their former common property with the tacit acceptance of local authorities. A black market for wood arose alongside the legitimate market, facilitated by bribes paid to party officials. I found in my study of forest usage during the communist period that “having” and “owning” were not very important. More important was access and use, which were facilitated in many ways, both legal and illegal, usually involving state officials and corrupt practices.

Immediately after the fall of communism, restitution politics gave way to new property relations (Hann 1998) and regulation and governance entailed a lot of legal fuzziness (Verdery 1999).

Collective property rights were re-established only in 2000. Meanwhile, local businesses involved with timber extraction flourished. These new businesses did not contribute to local economic development; they offered mostly black market, and low-wage jobs, but they played an influential role in the evolution of obștea institutions because many of them, in flagrant conflicts-of-interest, also served as decision makers.

Nowadays, twenty nine obștea institutions continue to function in Vrancea, managing around 65,000 hectares of forest. Each village owns between 1,500 and 14,000 hectares for a population that may range from 800 to 5,000. The restoration process stipulated that the obștea institutions should follow the model of the old organizational structures and that each obștea has the right to modify their statutory norms, according to local situations, with the agreement of the village assembly.

Men and women have equal property rights, although men participate more in assemblies and do more of the forestry work. The guiding principles of managing forestland in the Vrancea Mountains were (and still are) indivisibility, inalienability and equal sharing. A fundamental characteristic is the equal participation of every individual. But the individual does not hold any measurable right or own a precise plot; the only entitlement is the “right to be a member.” Membership includes the right to vote in the village assembly and to receive an annual quota of wood, which changes according to assembly-based decisions about individual shares. An executive committee, ruled by a president, together with the village assembly, manages each common forest. Villagers elect the committee and the president by a secret democratic vote. The committee handles all administrative operations, including organizing the village assemblies, auctions for selling timber, and distributing annual shares of wood to commoners. The participatory framework is excellent in principle, but in practice there are problems with poor attendance at assemblies, fears about the integrity of vote-counting, conflicts of interest, and a limited pool of capable councilors.

Today, an average of 20 percent of obștea-managed wood goes toward household consumption and the rest (usually in the form of monetary profit) towards improvement of local infrastructure. Locals receive as their share a quantity of one to three cubic meters of firewood per year, per family, and the same quantity of timber, with the right to sell it locally, and not beyond the borders of the obștea. The estimated value of the wood in 2006 for a household of two adults was about 80 euros per year, or about 5 percent of the average annual household income of 1,500 euros in the villages studied.

The legend of the commons’ origins stands as a source of legitimacy for present-day property arrangements. This “once upon a time story” is widely remembered and frequently repeated, with the forest perceived as a “legacy from Stephen the Great.” It amounts to a kind of emotional capital that villagers in the Vrancea Mountains draw upon to reassert their collective local identity and history. The symbolic and affective dimension of property, as managed by obștea, is thus reinforced. Most locals cannot conceive the idea of dividing up their forests because it would violate “the old way.” Some people see the rights to use the mountains as a compensation for the vrânceni (as people there are called) for not having access to the prosperous, arable land of the plains. Collective property is seen as a simple historical fact – a given. Even though the quality and quantity of the allotted forest land varies from one village to the next, the initial act appears as indubitable: “This is the way Stephen gave it to us!”

Not surprisingly, feelings, perceptions and meaning matter a great deal in the participation of members and in the management of obștea – and these emotions are dynamic and evolving over time and different circumstances. The relationship between these locals and their forest is more complicated than the familiar “peasant attachment” to the land because what they own essentially involves a diffuse material resource and a shared experience: a use-right in the commons. Yet, from the survey I conducted in 2005-2006,³ 42.2 percent say that feel “a lot” like proprietors of the commons. Another 32.7 percent consider themselves proprietors “to some extent” and 24.1 percent “not at all.” Memories, lived and repeated to others, enhance people’s emotional attachment to the commons. Older locals seem to have a fonder regard for their communal forests than the younger generation, and are more supportive of the current organizational practices.

I found in my extensive fieldwork with ten communities in the region⁴ that people spoke of the forest as property in contradictory terms. The meaning of property is locally expressed in two different registers – property as an affective symbol of inheritance and identity, and property as a material, functional resource for use. They use a rhetoric of community pride in owning and managing historic lands using established practices and traditions, as well as a rhetoric of deprivation, as local or national elites illicitly seize most of the forests’ benefits. Feelings of deprivation and injustice arise when ob?tea is perceived through the lens of its ruling structure, as a group of “corrupt opportunists.” Eighty-nine percent of respondents in my survey perceive that ob?tea, understood as its managing committee, does nothing or too little for the communities.

In the post-communist era, there has been a resurgence of pride and memory of the pre-communist-era ob?tea. Yet, there are also struggles to deal with corrupt practices, conflicts over the fair distribution of wood and profits, and poor local leadership. Part of the problem is that the legal framework of commons is not clear or detailed on many matters. Another problem is that there are no local mechanisms to resolve conflicts in low-cost ways. Both customary and state laws appear to be ineffective when corruption is too pervasive or when conflicts escalate. Ambiguous circumstances can easily result in an “adhocracy” that allows self-interested opportunists to exploit the collective good.

Yet despite these challenges, I have found in my studies of Vrâncean villages that there is a remarkably strong support for ob?tea as an institution of collective identity and purpose. Managing the forest is not all about calculations, performance, material value and revenues. It is also about affective relationships and symbolic meaning as reflected in collective memory, tradition and identity. These affective dimensions keep people interested in and involved in the processes related to their forest property even if the external forces of the state, market and local officials may work in other directions.

References

Hann, Chris. 1998. “Introduction: The Embeddedness of Property.” In C.M. Hann, editor, Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stahl, H. Henri. 1958. Contributii la studiul satelor devalmase romanesti [Contributions in Studying Romanian Joint Property Villages]. Bucuresti. Editura Academiei

———. 1980. Traditional Romanian Village Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Prss.

Vasile, Monica. 2006. “Ob?tea today in the Vrancea Mountains, Romania. Self Governing Institutions of Forest Commons.” Sociologie Romaneasca [Romanian Sociology]. 4(3):111-130.

———. 2007. “Sense of Property, Deprivation and Memory in the Case of Ob?tea Vrânceana.” Sociologie Romaneasca [Romanian Sociology]. 5(2):114-129.

———. 2008. “Nature Conservation, Conflict and Discourses around Forest Management: Communities and Protected Areas from Meridional Carpathians.” Sociologie Romaneasca [Romanian Sociology]. 6(3-4):87-100.

Vasile, Monica and Liviu Mantescu. 2009. “Property reforms in rural Romania and community-based forests.” Sociologie Romaneasca [Romanian Sociology]. 7(2):95-113

Verdery, Katherine. 1999. “Fuzzy property: rights, power, and identity in Transylvania’s decollectivization.” pp. 53-81. In M. Burawoy and K. Verdery, editors. Uncertain Transitions: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Monica Vasile (Romania) is currently visiting fellow at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) at Humboldt University in Berlin, where she researches issues of environmental and economic anthropology. She was previously a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale).

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo by Paul.White

The post Patterns of Commoning: The Role of Memory and Identity in the Forest Commons of Romania appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“There is a tendency in capitalism to automate labor, to turn things previously done by humans into automated functions. In recognition of that, then the only utopian demand can be for the full automation of everything and common ownership of that which is automated.”

This podcast, featuring a conversation between Aaron Bastani and Kirsty Styleslwas forwarded to us by our colleague Federico Guerrieri of the New Economics Foundation.

From the shownotes to the podcast:

Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani discusses his ideas about technology, the future of work and Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

Luxury communism is seen as an opportunity to bring about a post-work society, where machines do the heavy lifting and employment as we know it is a thing of the past

In the podcast Bastani says that “technology has changed everything and politics need to catch up”. “There is a tendency in capitalism to automate labor, to turn things previously done by humans into automated functions. In recognition of that, then the only utopian demand can be for the full automation of everything and common ownership of that which is automated.”

Is fully automated luxury communism the way to go?

Photo by fabola

The post Fully Automated Luxury Communism appeared first on P2P Foundation.