Eleni Katrini: Analysis: Imagine living in a neighborhood where you can learn from your neighbors, grow your own food, participate in your child’s education, and invest back to your community’s well-being through your daily transactions. If you’re reading this article, you’re probably interested in or already involved in a community garden, daycare cooperative, trade school, tool library, or other hyperlocal initiative. These projects, which can be found all around the world, allow communities to build their collective agency in solving everyday needs and create a local sharing culture, thus providing an alternative for more sustainable and socially just communities.

While the field of “urban commons” has been around for a while, there’s limited research that investigates the relationship between initiatives like those listed above and physical space. My doctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Architecture in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, takes upon this exciting challenge of identifying spatial patterns of sharing practices. In my research, I’m drawing from the fields of the commons, social practices, human behavior, architecture, and urban design, while investigating four contemporary case studies of sharing culture in London, U.K., and Athens, Greece. I’m interested in learning what a daycare cooperative, an alternative currency, a cultural center, and self-governed refugee shelter have in common with regards to their spatial attributes. Some of my early findings might be useful to others researching sharing and the commons, but more importantly, I think they can be insightful to those who are on the ground, working on amazing sharing and collaborative initiatives.

So, what have I learned so far?

Space acquisition and appropriation: In their early stages, sharing programs tend to run into the challenge of acquiring a space. Many cities often limit themselves to residential and commercial uses, with very little opportunities for communal, nonprofit uses. Even after a group has found a space, it is usually a space not designed for sharing. Given the inherent dynamism of sharing initiatives’ activities, they tend to be creative in appropriating their spaces to accommodate emerging needs. Towards that end, a large open floor-plan space is usually preferred as it allows for flexibility and can afford a wide range of activities.  

Identity and interactions: Sharing initiatives aspire to engage with the wider public by being open and accessible to all. To this end, it’s important to consider the spatial attributes of a place — large, open doors, for instance, serve as porous spaces, inviting people outside of the group inside. However, beyond the physical “openness” of the space, there are non-spatial conditions such as territoriality and the projected identity of the group that can create barriers between the initiatives and the adjacent community. In those cases, the group needs to make an effort to engage with the neighborhood by extending its activities to adjacent public spaces. Nearby parks, sidewalks, or squares could be instrumental in providing a fertile ground for facilitating interactions between the initiative and those who may not have made it to the group’s physical location.

Local ecosystem: Finally, for an initiative to be fully supported, it needs to be embedded in the daily routine of the people involved. The proximity of people’s homes to the space is critical. That does not necessarily mean that sharing initiatives should be located in purely residential areas. Finding a place that has a good mix of residential area and local commerce is important for the initiatives to place themselves within a supportive ecosystem of people, organizations, and businesses.

This piece is based on the paper “Creating the Everyday Commons; Towards Spatial Patterns of Sharing Culture,” published by Bracket Magazine.

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Saturday 13 October: 11.00-18.00

Register Here.

What to expect

In his book ‘Tools for Conviviality’ (1973), the late Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich argued that the nature of modern ‘tools’, from machines to schools, had the effect of making people dependent and undermined their own natural abilities. What he called “convivial tools” were those that encouraged people to think for themselves and be more socially engaged.

Convivial Tools is a programme of talks, debates and workshops exploring new strategies for a more cooperative society. Using Ivan Illich’s concept of “conviviality”, it will bring together designers, artists, media theorists, curators, and social thinkers from diverse fields to examine current tools and technologies that encourage alternative modes of production and social relations.

Working together with those in the cooperatives movement – which includes economists, technologists, philosophers, sociologists and proactive citizens – the programme will explore whether they can help to create what Illich would call a convivial society.

Speakers include; John Thackara, Eleanor Saitta, Joseph Rykwert, Ben Vickers, Torange Khonsari, Adam Greenfield, Ben Terrett, Sarah T Gold, Dougald Hine, and many more…

Photo by P. Marioné

The post Event: Design Museum, Convivial Tools appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The TepozHub is an office jointly used by several people and initiatives, where the infrastructure is available to all who contribute. There is also the secondhand and barter online initiative and the community radio station Tepoztlán. Our family decided that all this offered a unique potential to create a special learning context for our children as well as for neighborhood youths and adults…and so we decided to contribute to the transformation from the bottom up and to focus on building an alternative to education with many others who shared our views.

It all began when we as a family had to choose a school for our children to attend. Making a wise choice became more and more intense as we realized that other parents were grappling with the same question. But to us, it became a decision of life beyond the school and even education. We felt it was more important to ask how we wanted our children grow up and learn. We thought about how we would spend the time that we devote to our children, and how we would have to change ourselves so that they could grow up free, being exactly who they are, and make decisions about their own lives.

All these questions made us want to reinvent learning as something deeply connected with the joy of life and something that requires care. They strengthened our desire to ensure that we could connect life and learning in our children’s lives, and also in other people’s lives, and especially in our own. We wanted to open up a path that everyone could take, a path through which we would reinvent ourselves and define what to do, a path on which we would expand our means, opportunities, and skills to learn and take action, and together with other people experience and bring about the vitality that lies in learning itself.

That is how we came to establish Camino Abierto, the Open Road, a space for pursuing alternative forms of learning and living on this planet. The name refers to the poem “Song of the Open Road,” written by Walt Whitman in 1856. Camino Abierto sees itself as a community for self-directed learning. This is where we try to integrate learning and living, and in the process, build community ties. Our group includes families whose children go to schools and others whose children do not. We meet on a regular basis to exchange views, and we organize common activities, tours and outings as well as workshops that everyone can participate in.

Our starting point is our own interests, creativity and skills. Every month we compile a calendar with all activities that we want to do. For example, we learn about the balance of life in the orchard and in the biology of the region, about the natural world with expert talks and hiking. We are developing a new global consciousness through our film club. We get to know ourselves through contact with nature, exploring our comfort zones and our boundaries. We learn to reinvent ourselves in the meeting with others, and we learn about the power of the word in reading groups where we grapple our feelings towards others. We work on social integration, occupying the public space where we use bicycles, tricycles and roller skates² – which requires redesigning the public space – and we create communal spaces, designing projects for community parks and orchards. In short: We shape and live learning as commons!

Building and revitalizing our community are the most meaningful, essential and useful learning of our time. It takes place from a local initiative in a small and human scale. People assume that learning happens naturally; they integrate it into their family lives and in a natural way, and it leads to actions. Thus the very process of creating networks for mutual support results in more resources and relationships becoming available – and over time, this brings about a learning-friendly context and spaces of communality.

People in many parts of the world are starting to recover and claim learning as a commons, and are creating new structures to make it real. The initiatives vary widely, but they all share the feature that the people are directing their learning themselves. Learning as a commons is embedded in meaningful contexts. It is founded on people developing their own interests and addressing problems and questions in their lives. Doing all this in a self-directed and free way – “unschooling” themselves³ – lets people find their own ways of learning that exist beyond the logic of the state and the market, both of which are increasingly shaping school curricula and undermining academic freedom.

“Learning as a commons” is a challenge because it always has to be rethought and re-enacted with others. Also, in contrast to homeschooling, it must take place within the community itself. The challenge lies in developing unique living environments in which children and youth can take courses, work on projects, solve problems, or simply play. Learning as commoning must create an ambiance that is embedded in active life, and in which there is no room for coercion, pressure, manipulation, threats and anxiety. Such “learning communities” do not seek to imitate school, but rather to create environments in which the people involved do things, and in which they do better and better at what they are doing, not least because they themselves benefit from it. Learning in this way is encouraged. Girls, boys, youths, men and women all have the capacity to learn for themselves, provided they are interested, are offered a suitable context, and have the resources and the liberty to do so.

Real learning empowers us to decide how we spend our time and how we give the world meaning – from our identities and relationships with others. That is how learning sticks; people understand and remember it, and it is useful for taking care of ourselves, others and nature. Curiosity and creativity are at the center of attention – and they can unfold in horizontal networks among similarly minded people, supporting solidarity and exchange. At the same time, such a process opens up substantial individual potential for development. All this creates the conditions for people to shape their lives themselves and to live life to the fullest. In other words: learning is living. Learning as commoning has an impact beyond the learning itself. It affects family life in different convivial forms, gender relations, and the organization of work, time and good living. It is a process for building another basis of understanding.

Instead of education what we really need, in the words of Gustavo Esteva, the founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca, is “to find ways to regenerate community in the city, to create a social fabric in which we all, at any age, would be able to learn and in which every kind of apprenticeship might flourish.…When we all request education and institutions where our children and young people can stay and learn, we close our eyes to the tragic social desert in which we live.”⁴

It is hard for us at Camino Abierto to imagine approaching learning from a culture of individualism, yet at the same time, most of us are not deeply embedded in communities. The reality of our lives does not correspond to the commons. That is why this way of shaping life is also an opportunity for us to establish and enliven our own experience of community in everyday life. Ivan Illich described the magnitude of this task like this: “We have almost lost the ability to dream of a world in which the word is embraced and shared, in which nobody limits the creativity of anybody else, in which every person can change life.”⁵

Yet it is not all that difficult to create alternatives, and the implications are considerable. There are many opportunities for developing a real intercultural dialogue that comes from learning by doing. Autonomous learning communities can connect as equals with other worlds beyond “education,” and with other learning communities, especially with those that rely on “new commons” created by information and communication technologies. Learning as commoning brings the possibility of building relationships and networks in a horizontal exchange, between those who were born into a culture of individualism and those who were born into a rich community. Together, they can develop the knowledge and wisdom to build their autonomy: the beginnings of a rich interculturality. All new structures of learning could be conceived of as commons – popular education, community-based and supported schools, educational institutions, vocational training centers, learning communities, even universities.

The Zapatista communities in Mexico are an impressive example of taking demands for educational autonomy seriously. As J.I. Zaldívar writes, Zapatista education offers an incredibly strong anchor for “establishing learning from the bottom up and seeking those elements within the communities themselves that combine the local reality with the universal; developing them beginning with their local foundation, and relying on the knowledge present in the indigenous farming communities in the process….” He continues:

It has succeeded in developing an educational system with various levels that were developed by the Zapatista communities themselves, referring to their history and their geographical surroundings; […] it sets its gaze on the Zapatista communities, even when seeking to better organize what these communities have been doing for centuries, namely training those people who will attend to life in the communities, in the final analysis so that they will not die, but will on the contrary be reborn time and again”⁶.

In the Mexican state of Oaxaca, the Universidad de la Tierra (in English, the University of the Earth, or “Unitierra” for short) takes a similar approach. It was established in 2001⁷ to provide free learning opportunities, especially for youths who have not completed school or vocational training. It employs learning methods that people have always used in their own ways. Unitierra is an example of creating places of conviviality⁸ where everyone plays a part, where people learn communally, and every individual can still do what he or she is interested in.

The founder of Uniterra, Gustavo Esteva, puts it like this: “Knowledge is a relationship with others and with the world; it does not mean consuming a good that is packaged in bite-sized insights. In the best case, consuming such a tidbit means receiving information about the world. Yet knowledge means learning from the world, by entering into relationships with it, with others, and with nature, and by experiencing them. […] At the university, the youths learn things they are interested in from people who do or produce something in particular; in this way, they not only acquire specific skills and capabilities, but also observe the lives of people who pursue certain activities and can figure out whether that is what they really want to do in life. What they learn is useful for the communities they come from, and the young people derive dignity, esteem, and income from it.”⁹

Unitierra is also a place where people think about the economization of learning, in other words, the fact that “education is learning under conditions of scarcity and is therefore, seen from a historical perspective, a relatively young practice that [emerged with] the economic society. Everywhere, people and entire peoples are taking up initiatives that are no longer limited to reforming the educational system or making it their own. Instead, they are leaving it behind.” Here, Esteva agrees with Holt¹⁰ when he adds, “our competence in life emerges from our learning by doing, […] to be precise, being alive and living means nothing other than learning.”¹¹

Learning as a commons is in fact functioning in a number of countries. In Udaipur, Rajasthan, a de-educational movement called Shikshantar is focused on regenerating diverse informal knowledge systems and nurturing radical learning communities within the larger spirit of gift culture. Inspired by commons freedom-fighters such as Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, Shikshantar has created an intergenerational community “unlearning” center with a library, Slow Food café, urban organic farm, upcycling maker space and community media studio. At an annual Learning Societies Unconference, learners can enter into deeper dialogue, friendship and collaboration among learning communities across India that are seeking a radical, systemic rethinking of monoculture education and development.

Another project in India, Swaraj University, hosts a two-year self-designed learning program for people between sixteen and thirty years old. The learners, called khojis (seekers), are encouraged to reconnect with the wild and explore their deeper passion, purposes, needs and gifts within a larger context of community living. Their co-learners (“faculty”) in reclaiming the abundance of the commons include other khojis, artisans, healers, tribal fishermen, small farmers, street children, grandmothers and activists, among others. There are no “degrees” required to join and no degrees issued because certification is regarded as another tool of enclosure. To support the program,khojis are invited to contribute whatever they can to operating costs and to pay it forward to help others participate in the future. A notable part of Swaraj University is the cycle yatra, in which a group of young people travel in rural areas on bicycles for one week, without any money, digital technologies, medicines or planning.

In Ciudad Bolivar, a neighborhood in the southwest of Colombia’s capital Bogotá, Libertatia is a social center for children and youths of the most disadvantaged social classes of the city’s population. Libertatia is designed as a space for learning and dialogue, for exchanging knowledge, and is managed by the young people themselves. There are neither teachers nor students, but workshops where the people involved learn critical thinking in order to change their living conditions.

The Purple Thistle Centre of Vancouver, Canada, was established in 2001 as an alternative to schools that is managed by youths themselves. The focus is on art and activism that help young people gain experience the challenges of community needs and self-organization.

The Otherwise Club in London has been a place of self-determined learning for more than twenty years. It was established by mothers for children and youths. The Otherwise Club has been cooperating with the London Community Neighbourhood Co-operative (LCNC), an ambitious project supporting environmentally sensitive practices in housing, working life, and in the communities and neighborhoods themselves, since 2011.

The Learning Exchange started in Evanston, Illinois, in the US in 1971 and rapidly spread to more than forty communities. It is closely tied to the ideas that social critic Ivan Illich set forth in his book Deschooling Society.¹² People documented on file cards what they wanted to learn as well as what they could teach and what they wanted to share. After just two and a half years, 15,000 people had registered to teach or learn 2,000 topics. Today, there are similar “Learning Exchanges” in many states of the US.

The Synergia Project at Athabasca University in British Columbia, Canada, uses online tools to share extensive research about cooperation – whether through formal knowledge or tacit knowledge – to teach how to build new types of institutions for a sustainable and socially just future.

Since 2013, the Cusanus University in Gründung, Germany, has been an ambitious educational institution that offers a critical, transdisciplinary masters degree program in economics, with a special emphasis on the formation and creation of society and the economy. The state-accredited university is committed to the notion of community. One example of how this is expressed is the campaign Denken Schenken (“Thinking Giving”) in which the community of students itself raises support for its members and also decides how to distribute funds, including scholarship grants. In their vision statement, the founders of Cusanus speak of “empowering people to educate themselves.” By this, they mean that “within the social community, every person should be permitted to educate himself or herself in moral and intellectual freedom.” That includes learning how to “creatively develop and reflect on [one’s own subject area] beyond pure imparting of knowledge.” The school also encourages students to take part in “interdisciplinary dialogue as well as to participate creatively in society rather than focus on narrow specialization.” “In the process, we explicitly include the level of values and meaning,” the website reads.

That is surely what unites the experience of those who participate at Camino Abierto and so many other commons: learning must have meaning for our lives and for the lives of the people with whom we are in relationships.

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.

Claudia Gómez-Portugal M. (Mexico) is a Mexican activist promoter of the transition agenda and founder of the organization SAKBE Commons for Change (Spanish: Comunicación para el Cambio Social) and the Free Learning Communities for Life initiative. She is a strategist in communication for social change, effective participation, knowledge sharing and community revitalization.

Image by TepozHub.

The post Patterns of Commoning: Learning as an Open Road, Learning as a Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Platforms enabled by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), like Uber and Airbnb, are increasingly being seen as looters by cities. They are like Death Stars, extracting great swaths of value from local communities only to transfer that wealth elsewhere. Indeed, it would seem that the original ideas of sharing and peer-to-peer collaboration have been co-opted through an almost feudal structure of wealth extraction. Technology as such is not the culprit here. But it certainly enables the creation of new products and markets that, in practice, can perpetuate or even deepen existing socio-economic inequities.

In contrast to the usual examples of on-demand “sharing” platforms, the initiatives below demonstrate technology’s capacity to enable real sharing within cities. These examples offer crucial alternatives to extractive platforms that are currently dominant. They are also solutions that are intentionally designed to address urban challenges, instead of exacerbating them. There are solutions based on an understanding of digital technology as what philosopher Ivan Illich defined as tools for conviviality: tools that empower people to realize their freedom through interpersonal dependence and reciprocity. — Adrien Labaeye and Ryan Conway 

These three short case studies are adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.”

1. Human Ecosystem Project: Social Media Data Used to Analyze City Infrastructure and Citizen Well-being 

Social media networks and state intelligence agencies harvest massive amounts of data on their users. Private services primarily use the data to show targeted advertisements to their users, while government surveillance programs allegedly use the information for national security purposes. In both cases, the use of the data is neither transparent nor is it used to directly help the people whose information is being collected.

Human Ecosystem Relazioni is a project funded by the city of Bologna to harness public information available from social media to understand what their citizens care about and how they are feeling at a given time and place in the city. The Human Ecosystems platform, on which this project relies, turns data from privately-owned social media platforms into open data that can be used by city officials, researchers, and the community at large. It is a way to identify trends and patterns that can lead to observations about the functioning of city infrastructure, and which can in turn lead to possible paths toward their improvement. The data can also be analyzed to produce interactive exhibits featuring a series of visualizations that demonstrate certain types of behavior and opinions among the citizens of Bologna. The Human Ecosystems platform has also been adopted in São Paulo, Brazil, and New Haven, U.S. — Adrien Labaeye 

2. Smart Citizen Toolkit: Monitoring City Air Quality with Crowdsourced Data 

Air pollution is a critical public health issue that many cities are struggling to address. Aside from political disputes that can hinder regulatory solutions, there is also a broader obstacle to solving this challenge: the lack of accurate, publicly-accessible data that reflects the extent of the pollution on a real-time basis. This is why FabLab Barcelona, through a collaboration between technologists and citizen scientists, created the Smart Citizen Toolkit. It is a compact device that contains a data processor and a series of sensors that people use to monitor environmental conditions where they live.

Using the kit and the accompanying online platform, users can monitor such things as temperature, humidity, and carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide levels. The information is automatically uploaded to an independent platform that gathers the data from hundreds of distributed sensors. Since the published data can easily be made publicly accessible, universities, city governments, and anyone with the know-how can use the data for research on the local environment. The software and hardware for the toolkit is also all open-source. In addition to Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Manchester have used it to measure air quality in their region. — Adrien Labaeye 

3. PetaJakarta: Disaster Response Management Through Crowdsourced Civic Data

Jakarta has long faced a host of challenges. It is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and every year the area is battered by a monsoon. Since 40 percent of the city is at or below sea level, it regularly floods — a problem that will be exacerbated by the global sea-level rise induced by climate change. Jakarta also has one of the highest concentrations of active Twitter users in the world and a high proportion of cellphone use overall. That’s why a public-private partnership between Twitter, Jakarta Emergency Management Agency, the University of Wollongong in Australia, and others developed CogniCity, an open-source intelligence framework that manages spatial data received from mobile messaging apps.

The first platform built on CogniCity was PetaJakarta, a Twitter-based crowdsourcing map for flood data. It relies on Twitter to organize and display real-time information about flooding to Jakarta residents. PetaJakarta allows users to geotag Tweets to indicate flooded areas, which are verified and added to a map of government ood alerts that anyone can use to navigate hazardous, urban terrain. The platform has been so successful that it has received international praise from organizations such as the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. — Ryan Conway 

Longer versions of the above case studies can be found in our book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” 

Header image by Zach Meaney via Unsplash

The post 3 Projects That Show How Cities Can Use Technology as a Force for Good appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In an earlier post (here), I summed up Dardot and Laval’s position on how we should think the common. What I want to do now is focus on the nine key political propositions about how to build the common to which their thought leads them. I have inevitably had to condense their writings and leave out many of their key references but have done my best to convey the spirit of what they propose faithfully.

Proposition 1: it is necessary to construct a politics of the common

Although the politics of the common builds on the tradition of 19^th century socialist associationism and 20^th century workers’ councils, it can no longer simply be thought in an artisanal context or in that of the industrial workplace. Nor will it emerge from some sort of encirclement of capitalism from the outside, nor from some mass desertion. There can be no politics of the common without a rethinking of property rights concerning the land, capital and intellectual ownership. Rights of use rather than rights of property must be the juridical axis for the transformation of society. It is necessary to find the correct form for the common production of society by creating institutions of self-government (whose role will be the production of the common) in all its sectors. It must not be thought, however, that the existence of a common principle will simply abolish the distinction between different socio-economic, public or private, or political spheres. To prevent public deliberation being captured by the interests of any one socio-professional category, the sphere of production and exchange must be completely reorganized around the self-government of the commons. Each commons must also take account of all the ‘externalities’ of its activity so that the its governance includes the users and citizens concerned by the activity. The socio-economic arena thus becomes schooled in co-decision taking.

Proposition 2: we must mobilise rights of use to challenge property rights

Historically, the articulation between the socio-economic and the public has been constituted by the double principle, coming from Roman law, of dominium (exclusive private property) and imperium (the overarching power of the sovereign). The politics of the common must challenge this double absolutism. Traditional ownership rights grant owners completely free use of their property and therefore imply no accountability before others. In contrast, the user of what is in common is tied to the other users by the co-production of the rules that govern the common use.

It might seem that capitalism itself is moving away from traditional models of property attached to physical things as it moves increasingly towards the provision of services, rather than the selling of goods. Instead of buying property, service users increasingly buy access, something that might seem to announce new models of co-use, and a multiplication of types of rights (rights of use, rights to rental revenue, rights to buy and sell different rights). But we are in reality moving to new forms of enclosure that concern time rather than space: the user has to pay as long as (s)he continues to use something. At the same time, corporations retain ownership and control of the networks through which individuals interact. In this situation, the right of co-use is a hollow one entirely dependent on the will of a higher body that is alone empowered to take decisions. To be truly common, use must be decided by collective deliberation. This is very different from the idea that the common is the equivalent of the universal so that a piece of land, say, is available to be used by everybody. For there to be common and not simply shared things, there must be co-activity. Rather than seeking to develop a form of property right that broadens ownership to include everyone, there must be a right of use that can be mobilized against property rights. The care of a common can only be entrusted to those who co-use it and not to states.

Proposition 3: the common is the route to the emancipation of labour

We always work with others. We also work for others. To work is always to engage oneself in shared action with moral, cultural and often aesthetic dimensions. Work is a way of affirming ones belonging to a community or a peer group. If workers are still attached to their labour, it is not simply due to alienation, voluntary servitude or economic constraint. It is also because work remains the activity through which individuals collectively socialize themselves and maintain ties to others. But we should not think that, by assembling workers, capitalism somehow allows for the spontaneous emergence of a truly co-operative workplace. The neo-liberal enterprise practices forced co-operation. The enterprise demands the active mobilization of the workers while reducing them to simple operatives. The long neglected struggle for workplace democracy must therefore be replaced at the heart of our efforts. It is not enough to ‘enrich’ workers’ tasks or to ‘consult’ them from time to time on their workplace conditions. They must take part in the elaboration of the rules and decisions that affect them. In order for the enterprise to become a truly co-operative space, it must become a democratic institution freed from the domination of capital.

Proposition 4: we must institute the common enterprise

The liberation of work from capitalist control will only be possible if the enterprise becomes an institution of a democratic society and ceases to be an islet of management and shareholder autocracy. As Marc Sagnier famously said, ‘we cannot have the republic in society as long as we have monarchy in the enterprise.’ Any workplace democracy is incompatible with capitalism’s control of what it considers to be its exclusive property. Yet state control is not the way forward. This is the obstacle on which socialism has historically stumbled: so-called social or collective property has been reduced to state property unable to practice anything other than a centralized, bureaucratic and inefficient form of management. In this context, the traditional workers’ co-operative offers an interesting alternative model whereby workers choose their managers, vote on the direction taken by their company and subordinate the company’s capital to their decisions rather than the other way round. But, although an important testing ground for alternative models, this has traditionally been a minor alternative caught between capitalist competition on the one hand and state enterprises on the other. In any case, it is not enough to institute the common in the workplace, as an islet of autonomy. It is necessary to think about how we would reintegrate the economy within the social and introduce a plurality of points of view (worker, consumer) within democratic workplace governance. In the process, the notion of the market itself would need to be rethought to re-inscribe the freedom of individual consumer decisions within frameworks decided collectively, especially at a local level, so that the consumer would no longer be played off against the worker as is the case today.

Proposition 5: association within the economic sphere must pave the way for the society of the common

The third sector or non-lucrative economy is sometimes presented as an alternative economy or even an alternative to capitalism. But the third sector varies from country to country both in definitional terms and in practice and typically involves institutions with different logics: it can be associative, on the one hand, providing mutual support among members of a profession or social group; it can be charitable, on the other, building on a religious tradition. It is therefore difficult to present this diverse assemblage as an alternative to capitalism especially given that its activities are exposed to considerable pressure from both capitalist enterprise and state bodies. Far from promoting an alternative economy, the associative sector currently tends to play a low cost sub-contracting role for the welfare state with the number of its poorly protected and low paid workers rising even as state employers have seen their numbers stagnate or fall. Under certain circumstances nonetheless, the social economy can place in question the monopoly of the definition of the general interest by the state and of value by the market. The kind of locally anchored conviviality preached by André Gorz and Ivan Illich, involving new solidarities at the level of the village, the town and neighbourhood, is undoubtedly something whose potential we should not underestimate. On its own, however, it is not sufficient to create a politics of the common.

Proposition 6: the common must establish social democracy

For some people, the objective of a progressive politics should essentially be the rebuilding of the welfare state. We should never forget, however, that the common was perverted by the state and that the latter now seeks above all to reduce the scope of welfare and to adapt it to the constraints of competitiveness. The social (welfare) state negates the common as the co-activity of the members of society. Its social protection and economic redistribution is granted in return for the abandonment of any real economic citizenship within the enterprise and submission to the most pitiless norms of new forms of organization of work. Therefore, any politics of the common should first aim to return the control of the institutions of reciprocity and solidarity to society.

Proposition 7: public services must become institutions of the common

Nineteenth century associative socialism and twentieth century workers’ councils sought to separate the institutional form that socialism should take from the bureaucratic management of the economy by the state. But these movements generally failed to foresee the future scale that public services would take. Because the latter are sites of conflict and struggle, they should be seen neither as ‘state apparatuses’ working for bourgeois domination nor as institutions fully serving society. The question that therefore arises is how to make them into institutions of the common organized around common rights of use and governed democratically. To this end, the state should no longer be seen as a gigantic, centralized administrative system but as the ultimate guarantor of the satisfaction of needs collectively judged to be essential. The administration of services should be entrusted to bodies including representatives of the state, workers and citizen-users. While services should be administered locally, the state, through the constitution or some other fundamental juridical document, should make access to the common a right. A solution of this sort is needed to guard against the danger of state centralism but also to prevent the reactionary exploitation of localism and regionalism.

Proposition 8: it is necessary to institute the global commons

How can we make the common the political principle for the reorganization of the whole of society under conditions which preserve an irreducible plurality of ‘commons’ of very variable shapes and sizes, going from local commons to global ones? How can we ensure a coordination of the commons without undermining the self-government of each common without which there can be no meaningful co-obligation and therefore no true common?

Various types of solution have been proposed. Some have sought a way forward in the affirmation of the rights of humanity as the basis of new world legal order, with the recognition of ‘crimes against humanity,’ or ‘world heritage sites’ pointing towards the progressive emergence of ‘humanity’ as a rights bearing subject. We know, however, that by retaining the monopoly of the use of force, states can paralyse the development of such a system of rights. We also know how neo-liberalism structures the world according to norms of competition, predatory strategies and warlike logics rather than principles of co-operation or social justice. We note too how neo-liberal practices have led to ‘law shopping’ (shopping around for the most advantageous conditions) in the domains of taxation and commercial and employment laws. These practices make law itself an area of capitalist competition and an object of commerce. In questions of health, culture, access to water, and pollution, the logic which is imposed is that of free-exchange and absolute respect of (private) property rights. A whole globalized and globalizing juridical apparatus made by and for capital is working to produce the institutions of ‘cosmocapital.’ We are witnessing an authentic privatization of international law.

Another discourse seeks to use the tools of classic economic science to plead in favour of ‘global public goods.’ At the start of the 1990s, seeming to diverge from the dominant neo-liberal path, and influenced by figures such as Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen, the United Nations widened the definition of development to include criteria such as life expectancy and literacy. It is in this context that the notion of global good governance emerged and was linked to the production of ‘global public goods.’ Economists of the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) have put forward a tripartite categorization of global public goods: (overused) globally indivisible goods (the ozone layer, the climate); (underused) man-made global public goods (scientific knowledge, the internet); goods that result from integrated global policy (peace, health, stability). One problem with the definition of these goods is its negative, residual nature –it applies to those things that the market cannot ‘spontaneously’ produce. Another issue is who or what will ensure their production: a global state? One answer given by the UNPD is that private actors should be incentivized to take responsibility for them, if necessary through market mechanisms and the reinforcement of property rights, as in the case of global trading in CO2 emissions. The effective outcome is to appear to deal with major questions while actually neutralizing any real challenge to the existing global order. While capitalism takes on the progressive colours of corporate social responsibility, it needs in fact to profit from all the ‘externalities’ put at its disposition by governments, benevolent associations and NGOs. Corporations need political stability, urban infrastructures, ‘high performing’ university systems and even charitable support for low paid workers and prisons for criminals in order to enjoy the environment most favourable to them.

It is clear that dominant neo-liberal logics need to ensure that demands for defense of the global public good be channeled towards the economic terrain of reified common goods in order to restrict their grasp. Progressive political struggle, on the other hand, seeks to extend the reach of common goods by attaching them to fundamental rights so that they are not simply goods but also involve access to services and institutions. In a context where neo-liberal states have become active agents of de-democratisation, it is understandable that political progressives such as counter-globalisers should seek to transform what used to be citizen based welfare rights into universal human rights thus welding the universalist reach of the old welfare state to the problematic of the global commons. But apart from being quite artificial, this move is also an attempt to transfer the old western social model to a radically changed context. It is hard to see how existing states, dominated as they are by capitalist logics, will provide support for the global commons or dispense the common good. Citizen rights, on the other hand, are worth struggling over. They form a core component of modern political subjecthood. But for them to be meaningful, citizens must not simply be social citizens, consumers of services who evoke their rights to welfare. They must be politically and civically active citizens who are able to invent institutions that will allow them to be conscious co-producers of the common.

Without some major shift, the future is unlikely to be one of ordered pluralism. It is more likely to be the kind of re-feudalization evoked by Alain Supiot whereby the social function of states shrinks and the repressive function grows, nation-states may fragment into region-states and there is a multiplication of local and supranational powers following a logic of multi-facetted fragmentation. In the face of this, can the old Westphalian system of nation-states still be patched together without us being swept up in the vast reactionary, nationalist and xenophobic movement which everywhere threatens to grow? We should perhaps ask if we have not come to the end of centralist mode of organization of the state and the forms of subjectivation linked to it. We should then ask ourselves what form of political organization would be capable of giving institutional form to the co-production of the global commons.

Proposition 9: It is necessary to institute a federation of commons

The only political principle that respects the autonomy of local governments is the federal principle. A federation is a contract, treaty or convention whereby one or several communes, or groups of communes, enter into a relationship of mutual obligation for one or several ends. Its essential feature is the reciprocal obligation which excludes all subordination of one party to another in a way which contrasts directly with the kind of sovereignty exercised by the state.

Given the existence of different models of federalism, our task is to identify which particular model lends itself to the practice of shared use at all the levels of social life. Here the thought of Proudhon rather than the Marxist tradition offers the best way forward. While Marx focused on the need for the proletariat to conquer state power, Proudhon preached a dual federal model: a federation of units of production, on the one hand, and of communal units, on the other. This model shows how the political democracy of communes could be combined with the industrial democracy of the workplace. In Proudhon’s eyes, the shared principle that could co-ordinate these two types of common was mutuality and the mutual obligation enshrined in laws of contract. Yet, while in line with Proudhon’s project to replace laws with contracts, this extension of mutuality implied the application of an essentially economic concept to the political sphere. A more suitable unifying principle is clearly the common which is a political principle equally suited to the governance of the socio-economic sphere and the public, political sphere. In terms of the co-ordination of these different commons, there would be no pyramidal hierarchy whereby each higher instance would enjoy greater powers than lower ones. In particular, the state, or any supra-state body, would simply be one level amongst other, with no special privileges or prerogatives. The lower levels could interact among themselves, in a horizontal manner, and on the basis of shared activity, without needing to work through the higher levels. Socio-economic commons (of production, of consumption, of seed banks or whatever) would be constituted independently of any territorial logic and in accord only with the necessity to assume responsibility for the activity for which they have been formed. Thus, for example, a river common might traverse several regional or even state boundaries. Political commons, in contrast, would be constituted according to a rising logic connecting together territories of increasing scale up to an including the global level.

What kind of citizenship could correspond to this proposition for a global federation of commons? It could certainly not be some ‘global citizenship’ thought along the lines of the nation-state model. It would have to be plural and decentred. The problem is that, the more citizenship is extended in territorial scope, the more it tends to lose political density, so that it eventually coincides simply with the quality of being human, a sort of empty cosmopolitanism. We need to develop a citizenship that is neither statist nor national without falling back on something simply ‘moral, ‘commercial’, or ‘cultural.’ A non-statist, transnational citizenship can take very diverse forms: dissociated from any relationship of belonging, and from the rights attached to belonging, it must be thought of in relation to practices and shared activity rather than the granting of formal rights.

For a similar set of proposals principally concerned with workplace democracy see here. For an interview on the common with Dardot and Laval see here.

Cross-posted from La France et la Crise.

All images by Marko Milošević

The post Nine Key Political Propositions for Building the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“I have no expectations from technology, but I believe in the beauty,

in the creativity, in the surprising inventiveness of people,

and I continue to hope in them.”

Ivan Illich (Cayley 1992:111)

This creativity and inventiveness are not, as we often believe, products of extraordinary individual minds. Instead, they originate from a culturally shaped cooperation that they also serve. And this collaboration could be described more aptly as “conviviality.”

“Conviviality” is still a foreign word, one that triggers the question, “Well, what does it mean?” At the same time, it risks becoming an all-purpose word that can be fitted into globalized “Uniquac” (Illich) without further ado, a word that technocrats invented to justify their misdeeds, and that alternative-minded people happily imitate – and which both groups confuse with proper language. It is tempting to protect this beautiful world by not using it – yet that would obviously be futile.

“Con-vivial” has two parts. The prefix “con,” derived from the Latin cum, means “together with,” and “vivial” is easy to recognize as coming from the Latin verb “vivere” = “to live.”

Conviva is a fellow diner; convivium is a party of invited guests, a feast, a circle gathered around a table; convivere means “living together, dining together,” and in English, the adjective means “sociable, joyful,” certainly also in the sense of “slightly tipsy.” The kind of gathering called conviviality apparently requires a table around which people can gather, a pitcher of wine to be emptied and bread to be broken together in order to have a good conversation. Of course, the table can also be an empty circle around which people are seated on the floor. Ivan Illich mentions another utensil: a burning candle. After all: “In other words, our conversation should always go on with the certainty that there is someone else who will knock at the door, and the candle stands for him or her. It is a constant reminder that the community is never closed.” (Illich 2005:105-151) But is “conviviality” in this sense inviting? Or does it rather tend to be a threshold that people can trip over?

The difficulties that this word poses, besides its meaning, lie less in that fact that even people proficient in using foreign vocabulary are not familiar with it, but more in the fact that in our habits of speaking and hearing, we have become entirely deaf to the good sound of the little word cum, just as we have become unreceptive to its meaning because of the circumstances and the practices of our lives. Com/Cum is a very widespread prefix that appears in German as “kom” or “kon.” Yet most of the composite words formed with it have turned its former meaning on its head. The preposition cum, which used to denote cooperation on equal footing – as though it sought to capture the meaning of “commoning” in just three letters – is increasingly serving to describe a sharp, relentless conflict in the struggle for advantages, power, or influence. “Com-petition” no longer describes common striving, but the effort to outdo one another; competitors vie for scarce resources. “Con-sensus” is no longer a spirit generated jointly, but prescribed equality. “Con-sumption” no longer means using something jointly and thoroughly; instead, people consume things to become the object of other people’s envy. “Con-formity” does not mean taking on a form through a common effort, in other words, educating oneself together and through one another, but rather being put in shape to be utilized arbitrarily.

I selected these four distortions of the meaning of words with care. They represent the destructive force of the great monopolies that have set out to rule the world as an alliance: The economy holds the world monopoly on distribution and fuels competition for scarce resources; science has claimed the world monopoly on explanation and demands consensus about its authority to interpret; technology asserts the monopoly on designing the world and is grooming the world for consumability. And bureaucracy claims the world monopoly on regulation and does not rest until everything is brought into line in procedural conformity. “Thou shalt agree with me and trust my evidence,” says natural science. “Thou shalt desire to prevail over your neighbor,” says economy. “Thou shalt have machines work in your place, have them serve you and care for you,” says technology. “Above all, thou shalt not disturb things,” says bureaucracy.

But: “Places devoid of power can always be found. The institutional clutches on life exist partly in appearance only,” wrote Peter Brückner about the possibility of finding such a place, even under the conditions of the Nazi period (Brückner, 1982:16). It would take nerve to ignore the omnipotence of the system. What mattered would be to perceive its enormous power without recognizing it. But where might such places devoid of power be found?

Perhaps they are no longer to be found today, but first need to be established. A place devoid of power is a place for deserters. The deserter is the “no-longer-participant” par excellence; he disobeys orders, he deprives the authorities of his collaboration by going absent on the quiet, but above all, without leave. “Places devoid of power” emerge by people filling them through their presence, people practicing conviviality.

The word “convivial” is still able to resist being disfigured by consumerism and being incorporated into jargon. “Convivial” – as is “commoning” – is still a stumbling block in our path, helping us to remain vigilant in the face of smokescreens muddling both our senses and the meanings of words by devastating the most valuable good from which fruitful cooperation can emerge: our language. And there cannot be enough stumbling blocks in an increasingly bulldozed world in which all thresholds, borders, and obstacles have been made to disappear so that everything runs like clockwork, while at the same time, walls, fences, and insurmountable barricades are erected to keep everything and everyone foreign off our backs.

Conviviality needs a language that is both objectionable and triggers ideas, a language without which there is no understanding but only “consensus” achieved by manipulation, research that speaks a personal language full of experience; practice that does not compete, but cooperates and shares; and technology that helps to make the best out of the power and the imagination that everyone has (Ivan Illich). “Conviviality” aims to be:

– nonviolent, but not tame;

– appealing to the senses, but not inimical to thought;

– power-less, but not without strength;

– regulated, but not bureaucratic;

– modest, but not lacking in aspirations;

– cognizant/in the present, but not trendy;

– self-determined, but not overly self-assured;

– determined by others, but not patronized;

– unpretentious, but not simple;

– in love with success, but not with victory;

– oriented toward complementarity of differences, not toward marginalization of the other.

Commons are either convivial or only a variant of globalized (and institutionalized) sameness.

References

Brückner, P. 1982. Das Abseits als sicherer Ort, Berlin. [no English translation published, according to Library of Congress and British Library catalogs]

Cayley, D., Editor. 1992. Ivan Illich in Conversation, Ontario.

Illich, I. 2005. In the Rivers North of the Future. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.

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 website for more resources.

The post Patterns of Commoning: Conviviality 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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