In the meantime, I have been getting out and about a bit. On September 29, I delivered a keynote talk at the Prairie Festival in Salina, Kansas, hosted by The Land Institute. The annual festival, now 40 years old, brings together several hundred progressives from around the country concerned about agriculture, food, land, and social change.

The Land Institute, founded by a hero of mine, Wes Jackson, is a leading independent agricultural research center. Its plant breeders and ecologists have an ambitious mission: to develop “an agriculture system that mimics natural systems in order to produce ample food and reduce or eliminate the negative impacts of industrial agriculture.”

One of the most impressive achievements of the Land Institute is its development of a perennial wheat called Kernza, which could radically reduce the ecological impact of conventional agriculture. The Institute is also developing a range of other crops using the principles of “perennial polyculture,” which relies on complementary, mutually supportive crops in the same field.

The event’s main events were held in a large, open barn that felt unusual warm and intimate despite the chilly weather that day. A print version of my remarks are below; a video can be seen here. (My talk starts at the timemark 41:00 and goes through 1:22.)

Thank you, Fred Iutzi and the Land Institute for inviting me to this wonderful festival!   It’s a great honor to be speaking at an event at which so many illustrious thinkers, innovators, and activists have attended in the past. I want to thank the Land Institute for its pathbreaking research and leadership over the years – and give a special thanks to Wes Jackson for his vision, courage, and sheer persistence over so many years.

I’m not a farmer or seed-sharer, and I don’t have a specific role in the farm-to-table world except as a grateful eater. However, I do live in a small, somewhat rural town, Amherst, Massachusetts, a place of maple trees and CSA farms, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, and… a town common.

It is in that capacity that I come before you today, as a commoner. Much more about that shortly, but suffice it to say that the commons, to me, is a vehicle for social and political emancipation. My new book, written with my German colleague Silke Helfrich and due out next year, captures three touchstones of commoning in its title — Free, Fair & Alive. It’s all about lived experience, not ideology, and more about living systems that emerge from the bottom up than about policies imposed from above.

I want to start with a blunt and perhaps jarring statement, that we are embroiled in a deep and serious war – a war against the imagination. This phrase comes from Beat poet Diane di Prima, who wrote:

The war that matters is the war against the imagination

all other wars are subsumed in it….

the war is the war for the human imagination

and no one can fight it but you/ & no one can fight it for you

The imagination is not only holy, it is precise

it is not only fierce, it is practical

men die everyday for the lack of it,

it is vast & elegant.

“The ultimate famine,” di Prima warns, “is the starvation of the imagination.”

When an artist-friend shared these lines with me, I realized how profoundly they speak to our times. In today’s world, there seems to be very little room in respectable circles for wide-open dreaming and experimentation, or for stepping off in new directions to explore the unknown. But the realm of the unknown is precisely where we really start to see and live.

In today’s world there are certain presumptions that serious people aren’t supposed to question, such as the necessity of economic growth and capital accumulation, and the importance of strong consumer demand and expansive private property rights. The more of these we have, the better, we are told.

These dogmas have sucked all the air out of our public life and politics.  Which is one reason that I have come to see the commons as a precious patch of ground — an important staging area for thinking and living our way past the prevailing orthodoxies. The commons is a space from which an insurgency might be launched – indeed, it IS being launched, if you train your eyes to see it.

In the next few minutes, I’d like to suggest how the commons paradigm can help us develop a new social and cultural vision, and new strategies for practical change. Paradoxically enough, redirecting our attention away from conventional politics and policy may offer the most promising possibilities for developing a transformational vision.

We’re surely reaching a point of diminishing returns within the existing system. Real change and regeneration are going to require that we jump the tracks somehow. We need to start imagining different ways of being, doing, and knowing – and we need to invent new institutional structures to support such a paradigm shift.

Beyond the Tragedy of the Commons

Let me first clarify what I mean by the commons – a term that is greatly misunderstood and misused. For most people, the first thing that comes to mind when you mention the word “commons” is tragedy – as in the “tragedy of the commons.”

That idea was put into circulation by biologist Garrett Hardin in a now-famous essay published by the journal Science in 1968. Hardin said, Imagine a pasture on which farmers can put as many sheep as they want. The result, he said, would inevitably be the over-exploitation of the pasture. No individual farmer would have a “rational” incentive to hold back, and so the sheep would over-graze and ruin the pasture, resulting in the tragedy of the commons.

What a tenacious little smear this has been! Over the past two generations, economists and conservative ideologues have embraced the “tragedy parable” as a powerful way to denigrate the collective management of resources, especially by government. Hardin’s just-so story has also proved useful for celebrating private property rights and, by implication, free markets and government deregulation.

The problem is, Hardin was spinning out a fantasy. It has no empirical basis. He was not describing any actual commons. He was describing an open-access regime – a free-for-all — in which there is no community, no rules for managing resources, no boundaries around them, no penalties for overuse or free-riding, etc. That’s not a commons. A commons consists of a community plus a shared resource and a set of social agreements, practices, traditions, etc., for governing it.

The scenario Hardin was describing more accurately describes market economics in which everyone is a disconnected individual defined by their “utility-maximizing rationality” and competitiveness, which makes you a sucker to restrain yourself. You might say that Hardin was really describing the tragedy of the market – “Grab what you want and forget about the mess you leave behind.”

The late Professor Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University powerfully rebutted the whole “tragedy of the commons” fable in her landmark 1990 book, Governing the Commons. She won the Nobel Prize in Economics for this work in 2009 – the first woman to win the award. Ostrom and hundreds of scholars explained how countless communities around the world have self-organized themselves to manage natural resources without over-exploiting them – all of this outside of the market and state power.

Why, then, are these systems generally ignored by economists?  Because when you’re studying market transactions as the main event of life, anything that doesn’t involve cash and market exchange isn’t all that interesting.

And yet commons are everywhere. They are the ancient heritage of the human species. The International Land Coalition has estimated that there are over 2.5 billion people in the world whose daily lives today depend upon forests, fisheries, farmland, irrigation water, and wild game managed as commons. It’s the default mode of provisioning through nature! Yet to we moderns, commons remain mostly invisible – or misrepresented as ineffective and marginal.  Doomed to failure.

The huge achievement of Ostrom and her academic colleagues was to provide scholarly validation for the commons as a system of governance and provisioning. Ostrom showed that cooperation is actually economically consequential, something that her colleagues, most of them males, scoffed at.

A Movement of Commoners Arises

Meanwhile, outside of academia, a related story was developing on a parallel track over the past twenty years. A self-replicating movement of commoners was arising to build an empire of their own – an insurgent, diversified network based on the ideas of commoning. Yes, the commons is not so much a noun as a verb.

Commoning is the social process by which people come together, figure out the terms of their peer governance, learn how to devise fair systems, how to deal with rule-breakers, how build a cohesive culture, and so forth. Who are these commoners? They include:

• farmers, villagers, pastoralists, and fishers who use community systems to manage crops, pastures, irrigation water, trees, wild game, fish….

• “Localists” who want to restore the self-determination of their communities through community land trusts, CSA farms, alternative currencies and time-banking systems, among other commons.

• There are Croatians fighting enclosures of their public spaces and coastal lands, and Greeksdeveloping mutual aid systems to fight the neoliberal economic policies that have decimated that nation.

• There is a rich Francophone network of commoners, and others in Spain, Italy, the UK, and India.

• A new “municipalism” of urban commons is arising in cities like Barcelona, Amsterdam, Seoul, and Bologna to establish commons-based Wi-Fi systems, public spaces, social projects, limits on development, and more.

• Indigenous peoples are arguably the oldest commoners, fighting to defend their ethnobotanical knowledge and biocultural practices.

• A vast network of digital commoners are creating free and open source software….building open-access publishing systems….“platform cooperatives” as alternatives to Uber and Airbnb….wikis and makerspaces and Fab Labs.

Through some form of spontaneous convergence – or rising of a collective unconscious – these various groups are discovering the commons and using it as a lingua franca. While they all traffic in very different resources and in very different circumstances, most of them have a least one thing in common — a victimization by global markets and capital.

Enclosure and the War Against Imagination

This brings us to the word “enclosure.” It is a word that helps commoners fight the war against the imagination. Enclosure names the great harms that occur when the market/state system privatizes and encloses our common wealth. Enclosure happens when something managed by a social cohort or rooted in an ecosystem is redefined as a market commodity. It is ripped from its context, converted into private property, and sold. Its price becomes its value.

This is an act of radical dispossession – the kind that defined the English enclosure movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which millions of commoners were evicted from their forests and pastures, and forced to migrate to cities and England’s dark satanic mills.

We are now in the midst of a second major enclosure movement. This time, it is using less violent but even more effective weapons of dispossession. These include intellectual property law, digital technologies, Big Data and algorithms, and, as needed, raw state coercion and market power. As in the past, the mission is to seize the common wealth for private profitmaking.

Enclosure happens when the Hunt brothers buy up vast tracts of groundwater in the Midwest, turning priceless repositories of life into speculative commodities to be sold to the highest bidders.

Enclosure happens when biotech and pharmaceutical companies patent genetic information about plants and seeds, and medicines and diseases. One fifth of the human genome is now owned by companies as patents. The German company BASF owns more than 6,000 patents derived from genetic sequences in 862 marine organisms.

Enclosure happens when industrial agriculture converts a living landscape into a vast, quasi-dead vessel of soil to grow monoculture crops. It occurs when the traditional sharing and cultivating of seeds are criminalized – which is happening today.

Enclosure is happening today in Africa and Asia, as sovereign investment funds and hedge funds collude with governments to buy land that have been used for generations by subsistence communities and indigenous tribes. It’s a huge land grab that is displacing millions of people and triggering new migrations to urban shantytowns and future famines: the English enclosure movement revisited.

Amazingly, American politics and economics don’t have a name for the idea of enclosure.  Instead it’s usually called “innovation,” “wealth creation,” and “progress.” The language of the commons helps us debunk these modern-day fairy tales.

The Commons and Place-Based Stewardship

What does all of this talk of the commons have to do with rural America and farming, ecosystems and human well-being?

I’d like to propose that the commons discourse can help us break out of the claustrophobic mindset of contemporary politics and economics, especially as they apply to rural America. The concepts and language of the commons – and scores of real-life projects – can open up new ways of thinking that go beyond the traditional “progress narratives” of growth and “development.”

As the era of climate change descends upon us – as we begin to recognize the fragility and costs of global supply chains for food, energy, and water; as we learn how giant corporations work with government to consolidate market power and squeeze out small players; as we discover how markets tend to flatten the distinctiveness of place and identity, and propagate inequality and division – we are learning what pre-moderns have known for millennia: Place-based stewardship and community self-reliance can offer more ecologically rooted, humane, and satisfying ways to live.

But how can we possibly work for such a vision? One thing is for sure, it won’t come via Washington, D.C., or new trade policies or farm bills, at least not primarily. It will first require some deeper cultural and personal shifts from us – and the development of new sorts of commons-based institutions.

It will require that we wean ourselves away from a mindset that is transactional – which is the essence of capitalist markets and culture, a mindset deeply embedded within each of us – and learn to embrace a mindset that at its core is relational, where we see ourselves as interconnected and interdependent, and can show our vulnerabilities as humans without being taken advantage of.

That’s where I see the commons helping to catalyze a transformation. The language and framing of the commons helps name this different order of life. Evolutionary sciences are showing that the hyper-individualistic story told by conventional economics is an utter fantasy. As E.O. Wilson, David Sloan Wilson, and Martin Nowak (among others) have shown, we are a species that has evolved through cooperation.

We are not free-floating individuals without histories or social ties, untouched by geography or community. In reality, we are all nested-I’s – individuals nested within larger biological webs and within social collectives that profoundly shape us. Land and natural systems are not mere resources as the price-system implies. They are what I call care-wealth.

It’s this relationality that needs to be brought to the foreground. As Thomas Berry put it memorably: “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” This is the ontological shift – the OntoShift – that we need to make as a culture and find ways to enact through projects and express through language.

In a sense, that’s the purpose of the commons. It’s a rediscovered term that is being used to describe some ancient realities. It expresses the spiritual connections of indigenous peoples to the land and the cosmos. The commons is about the land ethic that Aldo Leopold wrote about. It echoes what Rachel Carson said about the subtle interconnectedness of all living things, and what Wendell Berry has so beautifully written about the human satisfactions of working with a landscape.

 A commons is about having responsibilities and entitlements that flow from them; stepping up to long-term stewardship; making up the rules of governance from the bottom up, with an accent on fairness, participation, and inclusiveness; and the inalienability of certain things. Some things just aren’t for sale.

In short, it’s all about relationality!  It is here where a new vision for rural America needs to begin.

Much has been made about the linkages between rural America and Trump voters – a linkage that I think has been vastly overblown. Trump brilliantly exploits genuine needs, and preys upon fears and desperation. But if we think more deeply about what’s important to us and what makes for quality of life over the long term, the answers won’t be ideological. They must be human, and they must grow their own new legal, economic, and institutional vessels.

The standard wisdom is that farmers, agricultural suppliers, and rural businesses should double-down and try to compete more effectively in integrated global markets. They should get leaner and meaner and smarter, goes the pep talk. They should demand greater government subsidies and new forms of support. This is fair enough, so far as it goes.

But we’ve seen how this approach is fraught with problematic risks. Are we really prepared to accept permanent subordination to the corporate seed, biotech, and chemical giants? Do we really want to build a future based on volatile energy and food prices in an era of Peak Oil and climate change? Can we depend on dwindling supplies of water from elsewhere and owned by someone else, and on the shifting sands of international trade policies and tariffs?

The Commons and Rural Futures

I’d like to suggest that the a more constructive and secure long-term vision is for communities to become more locally autonomous and self-directed….. to become less dependent on the global and national markets, many of which treat rural America as sites for neocolonial extraction in any case.

The more promising answers lie in greater relocalization and community self-reliance….in decommodifying our daily needs as possible; in working with the land and not abusing it; in sharing infrastructure and collaborations with other commoners; and in mutualizing the benefits that are generated.

This was roughly the strategy that civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer used fifty years ago when she and others purchased 680 acres of Mississippi Delta land and named them “Freedom Farms.” The goal was to provide access to land so that African-Americans could grow their own food cooperatively. “When you’ve got 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, nobody can push you around and tell you what to say or do,” she said.

That is the beauty of commoning. It’s practical. You could say that it draws from the best of all political ideologies: Conservatives like the tendency of commons to promote responsibility. Liberals are pleased with the focus on equality and basic social entitlement. Libertarians like the emphasis on individual initiative. And leftists like the idea of limiting the scope of the market. It’s all about cultivating a mindset of mutual support and building durable systems of relationality.

In the few minutes that remain, I’d like to quickly review some of these cooperative, benefit-sharing, relational approaches.

It seems appropriate to start with the Land Institute’s Kernza wheat and other perennial crops. Could one imagine an agricultural innovation more in sync with natural systems? It absorbs more water than conventional wheat, prevents runoff and erosion, captures more carbon, and provides year-round habitat for wildlife – while of course providing a tasty food for we humans. Kernza has enormous potential for bringing humans into a deeper, more regenerative relationship with the land itself – which will surely enhance the stability of agricultural towns.

I am thrilled by another commons-in-the-making, the Open Source Seed Initiative. Its basic purpose is to decommodify seeds to make them freely breedable and shareable, under terms set by commoners themselves. Currently, more than 400 varieties of seeds and fifty-one species have become what I would call “relationalized property” – legally shareable seeds that can participate in the gift-economy of nature and yet cannot be privatized.

Of course, land is another precious resource that has already been enclosed by capital or faces constant threats of enclosure. How can land be made more affordable and accessible, especially for young farmers, and be deployed as an object of stewardship, not simply ruthless market exploitation?

We know that community land trusts are a powerful vehicle for land reform. They are a way for communities to take land off the speculative market and use them for long-term community purposes, such as workforce housing, town improvements, sustainable agriculture, and recreation.

Again: the strategy of decommodify and share. A CLT is a kind of commons because it socializes and collectivizes economic rent, and then invests it back into the community that helps create it. It’s a social organism for regenerating value, through democratic governance and open membership in its classic form.

More recently, the Schumacher Center has been developing an offshoot of community-supported agriculture – community-supported industry. The idea is to use community land trust structures in novel ways to help decommodify land and buildings in a town. They can then be used for all sorts of “import-replacement” enterprises – production, retail, food – that recirculates dollars within the region.

In terms of re-purposing land, I recently learned about the FaithLands movement. It’s a small but growing movement of churches, monasteries, and other religious bodies offering up their land for community-minded agriculture, ecological restoration, and social justice projects. It turns out that religious organizations own a lot of tax-free land, and so they can potentially act like conservation organizations or land trusts.

A farmer working on church land said: “Our scripture starts with Genesis in the garden and ends with Revelation in a garden in the city—with Jesus in the middle inviting us to a meal. If we’re seeking to transform our food system in a way that’s going to be beneficial not only for ourselves, but for our great grandchildren, how can the church put [its] land into service?”

Simply asking, “What does the land want?” and “How can we feed the hungry?” lets us consider the radical idea of food itself as a commons. Why shouldn’t food be recognized as a basic human need available to all, and not merely as a private, transnational commodity? A famous essay published in 1988 called for returning a vast portion of the Great Plains to native prairie as a “Buffalo Commons.” That never happened, of course, but it did provoke valuable debates that have sparked some actual projects that move in this direction. A dialogue about food commons could have similar effects.

If a larger Commons Sector is going to arise and flourish, however, we will need more than small-scale, one-off projects. We need larger shared infrastructure to take things to the next level. This can open up new opportunities for commoning while thwarting the possibility of business monopolies and proprietary lock-ins, as we see in seed patents, exclusive supply chains, and the like.

I am thrilled to learn of the supply infrastructure created by farmers in the area north of Boston, along the seacoast of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine. The Three River Farmers Alliance has brought together a variety of local producers to aggregate and distribute their foods. The shared distribution system helps them escape a dependency on powerful middlemen and build new bonds of trust among themselves. An open source farm-management software platform lets each farm function independently while also letting each opt-in to share knowledge and cooperate with others. This works only because there are shared data protocols managed as a commons.

Or consider the Fresno Commons in Fresno, California, which is reinventing the whole farm-to-table supply chain under the control of a series of community trusts. This is helping farmers, distributors, retailers, and others to mutualize risks and benefits throughout the value-chain. The “profit” doesn’t get siphoned off to investors, but is used to improve wages and working conditions, grow food without pesticides, make food more affordable to low-income people, etc.

These stories point to the critical role that digital network technologies can play in bringing gig-economy efficiencies down to the local level. But this is not just about market efficiencies and automated administration; it’s about building tech-based affordances for new forms of cooperation in today’s world.

Another such platform is called cosmo-local production. This is an emerging production process in which knowledge and design – the light-weight stuff – are co-developed and shared with collaborators around the world via the Internet. Then the heavy, physical tasks of production are done locally, in open source ways — which is to say, in ways that are inexpensive, modular, locally sourceable, and protected from enclosure. This is the idea behind Farm Hack, a global community of open source designers of all sorts of farm equipment.

Cosmo-local production is also being used to design electronics (Arduino), video animations (Blender Institute), cars (Wikispeed), houses (Wikihouse), and furniture (Open Desk). The same general logic of global collaboration can be seen in the System for Rice Intensification, a global collaboration in which thousands of farmers around the world share their own agronomy innovations with each other, open-source style. It has improved rice yields four- and five-times over without chemicals or GMOs.

I haven’t touched on innovations in local government. Let me just quickly mention the ingenious uses of government procurement to help strengthen the local economy such as the pioneering work led by the Democracy Collaborative in Cleveland and more recently, in Preston, England. In Italy, dozens of cities are developing “public/commons partnerships,” also known as “co-city protocols.” These are systems through which city bureaucracies collaborate with neighborhoods and citizen groups, empowering people to meet their own needs more directly and on their own terms.

Lest I leave the impression that the commons amounts to a bunch of white papers and policy ideas, let me underscore that the commons is about providing convivial spaces for us as whole human beings. A commons can only work by drawing upon our inner lives, sense of purpose, and cultural and spiritual values. It is therefore imperative that artists and cultural organizations play a conspicuous role. They can express insights and feelings that our hyper-cognitive minds cannot. They can express embodied ways of knowing.

I think you can begin to connect the many dots. No single one of them is the answer, but together, they help us to begin to think like a commoner. That’s liberating. That opens up new vistas of possibility. It helps us fight the war against the imagination and give us hope.

In the 1980s, British Prime Minister Thatcher defended the harsh neoliberal agenda of privatization, deregulation, and fiscal austerity, with a line that was often shortened to its acronym, TINA: “There Is No Alternative!” she would thunder. In truth, as I hope I’ve shown, the more accurate acronym is TAPAS: “There Are Plenty of Alternatives!”

But these alternatives are only available to us if we can learn how to develop a new mindset, cultivate a new language to express our shared vision, and embark upon the hard work of building it out through commoning, project by project. That’s our challenge, which I am grateful to be able to share with this remarkable Prairie Festival!

Thank you.

The post The Insurgent Power of the Commons in the War Against the Imagination appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Last month, an interesting article on Jean-Luc Danneyrolles was published (in French) on the site Reporterre. Danneyrolles is the founder of “Potager d’un curieux” (The Curious One’s Garden), a place in the Vaucluse region of France which is dedicated to the preservation and promotion of free seeds. In particular, the article explains the obstacle course this farmer had to cross in order to have his activities accepted by administrative authorities. Fortunately, he has been able to stabilize the situation more or less, but one point continues to create friction: the marketing of the seeds produced.

When Jean-Luc is asked the simple question of the right to sell all his seeds, he reverses the question. “By what right would we not have the right to produce good seeds and to market them? It is the reappropriation of this heritage that I defend. We do not have the right, we take the right” To take a right is not to steal something, he explains. “I never imagined that the police would come to arrest me because I sell my seeds. We are supported by civil society, that is to say that there are plenty of people who encourage me to continue and that is enough for me.”

Prohibition on the marketing of free seed?

As I have already had occasion to mention on SILex, seeds can be the subject of intellectual property rights in Europe through Certificates of Plant Production (VOCs) which protect varieties obtained by seed producers. Moreover, in order to legally market seeds, they must be registered in a catalog based on criteria excluding by definition old varieties, as explained in the article by Reporterre:

For the marketing of seeds or seedlings, Decree No 81-605 of 18 May 1981 requires the inclusion of varieties in the official catalog of plant species and varieties. To be registered, the varieties must undergo two tests: DHS (for “distinction, homogeneity, stability”) and VAT (for “agronomic and technological value”). First hitch, the old, peasant, terroir varieties, call them as you want, are essentially unstable. They are expressed differently according to biotopes and climatic conditions. So, they are checked by the catalog entry tests.

The varieties which respect the DHS criteria are generally “F1 hybrids” produced by the large seed companies, which yield plants with identical characteristics, whatever their environment. They also degenerate from the first reproduction, which prevents farmers and gardeners from reusing the seeds and obliges them to repurchase seeds each year from the same manufacturers. Thus, the system has been designed to mechanically privilege varieties protected by intellectual property rights, while so-called “free” seeds (those belonging to the public domain) are disadvantaged, specifically because they can not be marketed.

The regulation has, nevertheless, been relaxed somewhat at the European level since 2011, with the introduction of a list complementary to the official catalog based on criteria of less drastic homogeneity, which makes it possible to include old varieties. But this margin of maneuver remains insufficient to cover all seeds in the public domain, which means that militant peasants such as Jean-Luc Danneyroles remain largely illegal when they want to market seeds that they produce. They risk fines imposed by the repression of fraud, which can be high (even if they are rarely applied in practice). A French association called Kokopelli decided openly to brave these aberrant prohibitions, claiming as a right the possibility of marketing free seeds, to defend it before the courts. Last year it was believed that the situation would change with the Biodiversity Act, an article of which explicitly allowed non-profit associations to market seeds belonging to the public domain. However, unfortunately, the French Constitutional Council declared this part of the text to be annulled, on the very objectionable ground that it entailed a breach of equality towards commercial companies.

Ambiguous links between enclosures and commodification

What I find interesting with this story told in Reporterre, but more broadly with the issue of free seeds, is that they illustrate well the complex relationships that exist between the common goods and the market. Indeed, free seeds are considered to be a typical example of “common” resources. They have reached us through a process of transmission from generation to generation of farmers, which has led the process of selection and crossing necessary to develop the varieties and adapt them to their environment. The so-called “old”, “peasant” or “traditional” varieties are not protected by intellectual property rights: they are in the public domain and are therefore freely reproducible. That’s why they are very interesting for farmers, especially to rid themselves of their dependence on the seed industries.

Since these seeds are in the public domain, they should also be free to be sold on the market as physical objects. It is clear that this is a prerequisite for activities such as “The Vegetable Garden of a Curious One” or Kokopelli to be sustainable and develop. Even if these structures generally adopt associative forms oriented towards non-profit or limited profitability, they need a connection with the market, at least to cover the costs incurred by the production and distribution of seeds. However, this is precisely what is now theoretically prohibited by regulations, which has been organized to exclude traditional seeds from the market, notably via the registration requirements in the official catalog.

We see here that the specific enclosure that weighs on seeds consists of forced exclusion from the market, and it is somewhat counter-intuitive, in relation to the general idea that one can make of the phenomenon of common property. Historically, enclosures first hit certain lands that were collectively used by the distribution of private property rights to convert them into commodities. Landowners have been recognized in several waves of the right to enclose land that was previously the subject of customary collective rights of use. This is particularly the case in England during the 18th and 19th centuries. In France, the dismantling of the Commons took the form, in the French Revolution, of a process of “sharing the Communals”, which consisted in the sale in certain regions of these lands so that they became private properties. In both cases, enclosure takes the form of a forced inclusion in the market of goods that previously were “protected” and it can even be said that enclosure is then explicitly aimed at the commodification of the good.

In this regard, we must re-read the analyses of the historian Karl Polanyi in his book “The Great Transformation” in which he explains how “market society” has been constituted and generalized by producing three kinds of “fictitious goods”: the Land (and more generally nature), labor (human activity) and money. In his vision, it was the forced inclusion of these three essential goods in the market mechanisms that allowed the latter to “disentangle” the rest of society and become a self-regulated system that allowed the rise of capitalism.

Exclusion from the market as an enclosure

From the foregoing, one may have the impression that enclosure is thus intimately linked to “commodification”. Moreover, many of the social struggles carried out on behalf of the Commons demand that certain goods be excluded from the market or subject to a specific regulation which protects them from the most destructive excesses. This is the case, for example, for the fighting on water, in particular in Italy, which has gone through opposition to the privatization of water management by large companies.

Nevertheless, the case of seeds shows us that the issue of enclosures is much more complex. In order to grasp what happens to the seeds, we must understand them in two different ways: in their immaterial dimension, through the plant varieties that the seeds express and in their material dimension, through the physical objects that are the seeds produced by the peasants. Old plant varieties do not (and have never) been subject to intellectual property rights, unlike the F1 hybrids produced by the seed industry. As such, these varieties are actually ‘de-marketed’, in the sense that they can not, as such, be subject to exclusivity subject to authorization and transaction. But the seeds produced by the peasants constitute rival physical objects, which are the object of property rights and can be legitimately sold on the market. Except that the legislation on seeds has been organized to prevent these seeds from entering the market and being able to be marketed, unlike proprietary varieties. The enclosure of the common good which constitutes traditional seeds, therefore, does not have the same nature as that which has struck land or water: it consists of a forced exclusion from the market.

Indeed, it could be said that free seeds are subjected to a double process of enclosure, both working in opposite directions. It is known that some large companies like Bayer or Monsanto are working to file abusive patents on some of the characteristics of old plants, such as natural resistance to diseases. They do this to reserve rights over the “immaterial dimension” of plants, by creating new GMO varieties in which they will inject the genes carrying these particular traits. In such cases, they use an intellectual property right to induce a forced entry into the market on an element which previously belonged to the public domain and was freely usable. One of the best known examples of this phenomenon known as “biopiracy” has, for example, concerned a patent filed by a Dutch company on an aphid resistance of a lettuce, allowing it to levy a toll on all producers’ seeds for these salad greens.

Enclosure may therefore consist of forced entry into the market and is often the effect of the enforcement of intellectual property rights. Another example which could be cited in this sense is that of scientific articles. The vast majority of these products are produced by researchers employed by public universities. They are collected by private publishers through the transfer of copyright granted by the same researchers at the time of publication. They then resold at very high prices to universities. They are then obliged to buy back with public money what had originally been financed by public funds (salaries of researchers). To use Polanyi’s vocabulary, we are here in a caricature of “fictitious goods”, created by the artificial application of intellectual property rights on goods in order to forcefully include them in a market.

But conversely, there are also intangible goods which undergo, like seeds, phenomena of enclosure by forced exclusion from the market. If one takes for example the case of free software, one knows for example the problem of tied selling (sometimes also called “forced sale”) which means that one can not generally buy computers without proprietary software pre-installed, which conditions users to the use of protected software to the detriment of free software. Last year the Court of Justice of the European Union refused to consider that the tying of PCs and proprietary operating systems constituted an unfair commercial practice. The seed analogy is not perfect, but there is a link as long as the problem of tied selling prevents free software from reaching the consumer under the same conditions as proprietary software. The machinery market would be important for their distribution and adoption by the greatest number. In the end, the consumer is deprived in both cases of the choice of being able to opt for a free solution, radically with regard to the seeds and relatively for the software.

For a complex approach to the links between Commons and the market

To be able to grasp the phenomenon of enclosures in its complexity is, in my opinion, important, in particular to avoid misunderstandings on the question of the Commons. It is sometimes said that the Commons constitute a “third way between the market and the state”, but this way of presenting things is rather misleading. It would be better to say that the Commons, with the State and the market, constitute a way for humans to take charge of resources. These three poles can, depending on the moment in history, have more or less importance (today we are going through a period of overwhelming dominance of the mechanisms of the self-regulated market, resulting in a marginalization of the Commons and a weakening of the State). But the Commons are always articulated to the State and the market: they never constitute a completely autonomous sphere. In particular, they may need market opportunities to exist and weigh significantly in social relationships. This is clearly illustrated by the example of free seeds.

Of course, there are also cases where we have to fight for a “de-commodification” of certain goods and many struggles for the recovery of the Commons go through this confrontation with the market to “snatch” from the essential resources. But there are also cases where, on the contrary, it will be necessary to fight for the right to have resources joining the market to be traded. At first glance this may sound confusing, but it seems crucial to keep this in mind so as not to sink into a romanticism that would lead us to believe that the goal is to “get out of the economy”, as one can sometimes read … There is also a struggle to lead “in the economy”, as Karl Polanyi rightly said, in order to “re-integrate” this sphere within the processes of social regulation and in particular in the logics of reciprocity.

That is what Jean-Luc Danneyroles expresses in his own way at the end of the article by Reporterre, referring to the question of barter and the commons. One senses at the same time his reluctance to consider the seeds as goods “like the others” and his need to connect yet to a market:

Quietly, in his open kitchen, at the time of the coffee, as almost every day, Jean-Luc receives the visit. A curious one looking for Roman chamomile for skin care. Jean-Luc gives him advice, names of plants and methods of cultivation. She will leave with her sachets of seeds, in exchange for soap and toothpaste that she has made. Jean-Luc always has a little trouble with getting paid. “The ideal is barter, I like the idea of common goods, which one does not pay for what belongs to nature. Utopian, yes, but feet on the ground. “Every work deserves salary,” he knows, and his seeds are his means of living.

Photos used by permission, Éric Besatti/Reporterre

The post Forced market exclusion as an enclosure of the commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Below is the text of the interview, conducted in March:

Some believe that the commons are incompatible with commodity markets. Others claim that markets and commons may form mutually beneficial relations with each other. What are your own views on this issue?

I think it is entirely possible for markets and commons to “play nicely together,” but only if commoners can have “value sovereignty” over their resources and community governance.  Market players such as businesses and investors cannot be able to freely appropriate the fruits of a commons for themselves without the express authorization of commoners.  Nor should markets be allowed to uses their power to force commoners to assume market, money-based roles such as “consumers” and “employees.”  In short, a commons must have the capacity to self-regulate its relations with the market and to assure that significant aspects of its common wealth and social relationships remain inalienable – not for sale via market exchange.

A commons must be able to develop “semi-permeable boundaries” that enable it to safely interact with markets on its own terms.  So, for example, a coastal fishery functioning as a commons may sell some of its fish to markets, but the goals of earning money and maximizing profit cannot be allowed to become so foundational that it crowds out commons governance and respect for ecological limits.

Of course, market/commons relations are easier when it comes to digital commons and their shared wealth such as code, text, music, images and other intangible (non-physical) resources.  Such digital resources can be reproduced and shared at virtually no cost, so there is not the “subtractability” or depletion problems of finite bodies of shared resources.  In such cases, the problem for commons is less about preventing “free riding” than in intelligently curating digital information and preventing mischievous disruptions.  In digital spaces, the principle of “the more, the merrier” generally prevails.

That said, even digital commoners must be able to prevent powerful market players from simply appropriating their work for commercial purposes, at no cost.  Digital commoners should not simply generate “free resources” for larger market players to exploit for private gain.  That is why some digital communities are exploring the use of the newly created Peer Production License, which authorizes free usage of digital material for noncommercial and commons-based people but requires any commercial users to pay a fee.  Other communities are exploring the potential of “platform co-operatives,” in which an networked platform is owned and managed by the group for the benefit of its members.

The terms by which a commons protects its shared wealth and community ethos will vary immensely from one commons to another, but assuring a stable, benign relationship with markets is a major and sometimes tricky challenge.

During the last years we saw a boom in digital-commons, developed in urban areas by collectives and hack labs. What are the potentialities for non-digital commoning in the city in its present form – heavily urbanized and under constant surveillance? Are its proportions incompatible with the logic of the commons or the social right to the city is still achievable?

There has been an explosion of urban commons in the past several years, or at least a keen awareness of the need and potential of self-organized citizen projects and systems, going well beyond what either markets or city governments can provide.  To be sure, digital commons such as maker spaces and FabLabs are more salient and familiar types of urban commons.  And there is growing interest, as mentioned, in platform co-operatives, mutually owned and managed platforms to counter the extractive, sometimes-predatory behaviors of proprietary platforms such as Uber, Airbnb, Taskrabbit and others.

But there are many types of urban commons that already exist and that could expand, if given sufficient support.  Urban agriculture and community gardens, for example, are important ways to relocalize food production and lower the carbon footprint.  They also provide a way to improve the quality of food and invigorate the local economy.  As fuel and transport costs rise with the approach of Peak Oil, these types of urban commons will become more important.

I might add, it is not just about growing food but about the distribution, storage and retailing of food along the whole value-chain.  There is no reason that regional food systems could not be re-invented to mutualize costs, limit transport costs and ecological harm, and improve wages, working conditions, food quality (e.g., no pesticides; fresher produce), and affordability of food through commons-based food systems.  Jose Luis Vivero Pol has explored the idea of “food commons” to help achieve such results, and cities like Fresno, California, are engaged with re-inventing their local agriculture/food systems as systems.

Other important urban commons are social in character, such as timebanks for bartering one’s time and services when money is scarce; urban gardens and parks managed by residents of the nearby neighborhoods, such as the Nidiaci garden in Florence, Italy; telcommunications infrastructures such as Guifi.net in Barcelona; and alternative currencies such as the BerkShares in western Massachusetts in the US, which help regions retain more of the value they generate, rather than allowing it to be siphoned away via conventional finance and banking systems.

There are also new types of state/commons partnerships such as the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban commons. This model of post-bureaucratic governance actively invites citizen groups to take responsibility for urban spaces and gardens, kindergartens and eldercare. The state remains the more powerful partner, but instead of the usual public/private partnerships that can be blatant ripoffs of the public treasury, the Bologna Regulation enlists citizens to take active responsibility for some aspect of the city. It’s not just government on behalf of citizens, but governance with citizens. It’s based on the idea of “horizontal subsidiarity” – that all levels of governments must find ways to share their powers and cooperate with single or associated citizens willing to exercise their constitutional right to carry out activities of general interest.

In France and the US, there are growing “community chartering” movements that give communities the ability to express their own interests and needs, often in the face of hostile pressures by corporations and governments.  There are also efforts to develop data commons that will give ordinary people greater control over their data from mobile devices, computers and other equipment, and prevent tech companies from asserting proprietary control over data that has important public health, transport, planning or other uses.  Another important form of urban commons is urban land trusts, which enable the de-commodification of urban land so that the buildings (and housing) built upon it can be more affordable to ordinary people.  This is a particularly important approach as more “global cities” becomes sites of speculative investment and Airbnb-style rentals; ordinary city dwellers are being priced out of their own cities.  Commons-based approaches offer some help in recovering the city for its residents.

Why bring the commons to the management and governance of a city?  Urban commons can also reduce costs that a city and its citizens must pay. They do this by mutualizing the costs of infrastructure and sharing the benefits — and by inviting self-organized initiatives to contribute to the city’s needs. Urban commons enliven social life simply by bringing people together for a common purpose, whether social or civic, going beyond shopping and consumerism.  And urban commons can empower people and build a sense of fairness.  In a time of political alienation, this is a significant achievement.

Urban commons can unleash creative social energies of ordinary citizens, who have a range of talents and the passion to share them.  They can produce artworks and music, murals and neighborhood self-improvement, data collections and stewardship of public spaces, among other things.  Finally, as international and national governance structures become less effective and less trusted, cities and urban regions are likely to become the most appropriately scaled governance systems, and more receptive to the constructive role that commons can play.

Contemporary struggles for protection of commons seem to be strongly intertwined with ecological matters. We can clearly see this in struggles like the one that is currently taking place in North Dakota. Is there a direct link between the commons and ecology?

Historically, commoning has been the dominant mode of managing land and even today, in places like Africa, Asia and Latin America, it is arguably the default norm, notwithstanding the efforts of governments and investors to commodify land and natural resources.  According to the International Land Alliance, an estimated 2 billion people in the world still depend upon forests, fisheries, farmland, water, wild game and other natural resources for their everyday survival.  This is a huge number of people, yet conventional economists still regard this “subsistence” economy and indigenous societies as uninteresting because there is little market-exchange going on.  Yet these communities are surely more ecologically mindful of their relations to the land than agribusinesses that rely upon monoculture crops and pesticides, or which exploit a plot of land purely for its commercial potential without regard for biodiversity or long-term effects, such as the massive palm oil plantations in tropical regions.

Commoning is a way for we humans to re-integrate our social and commercial practices with the fundamental imperatives of nature.  By honoring specific local landscapes, the situated knowledge of commoners, the principle of inalienability, and the evolving social practices of commoning, the commons can be a powerful force for ecological improvement.

What should be the role of the state in relation to the commons?

This is a very complex subject, but in general, one can say that the state has very different ideas than commoners about how power, governance and accountability should be structured.  The state is also far more eager to strike tight, cozy alliances with investors, businesses and financial institutions because of its own desires to share in the benefits of markets, and particularly, tax revenues.  I call our system the market/state system because the alliance – and collusion – between the two are so extensive, and their goals and worldview so similar despite their different roles, that commoners often don’t have the freedom or choice to enact commons.  Indeed, the state often criminalizes commoning – think seed sharing, file sharing, cultural re-use – because it “competes” with market forms of production and stands as a “bad example” of alternative modes of provisioning.

Having said this, state power could play many useful roles in supporting commoning, if it could be properly deployed.  For example, the state could provide greater legal recognition to commoning, and not insist upon strict forms of private property and monetization.  State law Is generally so hostile or indifferent to commoning that commoners often have to develop their own legal hacks or workarounds to achieve some measure of protection for their shared wealth.  Think about the General Public License for software, the Creative Commons licenses, and land trusts.  Each amounts to an ingenious re-purposing of property law to serve the interests of sharing and intergenerational access.

The state could also be more supportive of bottom-up infrastructures developed by commoners, whether they be wifi systems, energy coops, community solar grids, or platform co-operatives.  If city governments were to develop municipal platforms for ride-hailing or apartment rentals – or many other functions – they could begin to mutualize the benefits or such services and better protect the interests of workers, consumers and the general public.

The state could also help develop better forms of finance and banking to help commoning expand.  The state provides all sorts of subsidies to the banking industry despite its intense commitment to private extraction of value.  Why not use “quantitative easing” or seignorage (the state’s right to create money without it being considered public debt) to finance the building of infrastructure, environmental remediation, and social needs?  Commoners could benefit from new sources of credit for social or ecological purposes – or a transition to a more climate-friendly economy — that would not likely be as remunerative as conventional market activity.

For more on these topics, I recommend two reports by the Commons Strategies Group:  “Democratic Money and Capital for the Commons:  Strategies for Transforming Neoliberal Finance through Commons-based Alternatives,” about new types of commons-based finance and banking (http://commonsstrategies.org/democratic-money-and-capital-for-the-commons-2/); and “State Power and Commoning:  Transcending a Problematic Relationship,” a report about how we might reconceptualize state power so that it could foster commoning as a post-capitalist, post-growth means of provisioning and governance.  (http://commonsstrategies.org/state-power-commoning-transcending-problematic-relationship)

How essential is, in your opinion, direct user participation for practices of commoning? Can the management of the commons be delegated to structures like the state or are the commons essentially connected to genuine grassroots democracy?

Direct participation in commoning is preferred and often essential.  However, each of us has only so many hours in the day, and we can remember the complaint that “the trouble with socialism is that it takes too many evenings.”  Still, there are many systems, particularly in digital commons, for assuring bottom-up opportunities for participation along with accountable governance and transparency.   And there are ways in which commons values can be embedded in the design of infrastructures and institutions, much as Internet protocols favor a distributed egalitarianism.  By building commons principles into the structures of larger institutions, it can help prevent or impede the private capture of them or a betrayal of their collective purposes.

That said, neither legal forms or nor organizational forms are a guarantee that the integrity of a commons and its shared wealth will remain intact.  Consider how some larger co-operatives resemble conventional corporations.  That is why some elemental forms of commoning remain important for assuring the cultural and ethical integrity of a commons.

We are entering in an age of aggressive privatization and degradation of commons: from privatization of water resources, through internet surveillance, to extreme air pollution. What should be the priorities of the movements fighting for protection of the commons? What about their organizational structure?

Besides securing their own commons against the threats of enclosure, commons should begin to federate and cooperate as a way to build a more self-aware Commons Sector as a viable alternative to both the state and market.  We can see rudimentary forms of this in the “assemblies of the commons” that have self-organized in some cities, and in the recently formed European Commons Assembly.  I am agnostic about the best organizational structure for such work because I think it will be emergent; the participants themselves must decide what will be most suitable at that time.  Of course, in this digital age, I have a predisposition to think that the forms will consist of many disparate types of players loosely joined; it won’t be a centralized, hierarchical organization.  The future is a “pluriverse,” and the new organizational forms will need to recognize this reality in operational ways.

What is your vision of a commons-based society? How would it look like?

I don’t have a grand vision.  I stand by core values and learn from ongoing practical lessons.  We don’t know the developmental evolution that will occur in the future, or for that matter, what our own imaginations and capacities might be able to actualize.  Emergence happens.  Yet I do believe that commoning is far more of a default talent of the human species than homo economicus.  We are hard-wired to cooperate, coordinate and co-evolve together.  Especially as the grand, centralized market/state systems of the 20^th century begin to implode through their own dysfunctionality, the commons will more swiftly step into the breach by offering more local, convivial and trusted systems of survival.

The transition of “commonification” will likely be bumpy, if only because the current masters of the universe will not readily cede their power and prerogatives. They will be incapable of recognizing a “competing” worldview and social order.  But the costs of maintaining the antiquated Old Order are becoming increasingly prohibitive.  The capital expense, coercion, organizational complexities, and ecological instability are growing even as popular trust in the market/state and its political legitimacy is declining.

Rather than propose a glowing vision of a commons-based society, I am content to point to hundreds of smaller-scale projects and movements.  As they find each other, replicate their innovations, and federate into a more coordinated, self-aware polity – if we dare call it that! – well, that’s when things will get very interesting.

Interview by Antonis Brumas and Yavor Tarinski

The post The Future is a “Pluriverse”- An Interview with David Bollier on the Potential of the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

1. Radical Inclusion. 
Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.

2. Gifting. 
Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.

3. Decommodification. 
In order to preserve the spirit of gifting, our community seeks to create social environments that are unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. We stand ready to protect our culture from such exploitation. We resist the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.

4. Radical Self-reliance. 
Burning Man encourages the individual to discover, exercise and rely on his or her inner resources.

5. Radical Self-expression. 
Radical self-expression arises from the unique gifts of the individual. No one other than the individual or a collaborating group can determine its content. It is offered as a gift to others. In this spirit, the giver should respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.

6. Communal Effort. 
Our community values creative cooperation and collaboration. We strive to produce, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support such interaction.

7. Civic Responsibility. 
We value civil society. Community members who organize events should assume responsibility for public welfare and endeavor to communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They must also assume responsibility for conducting events in accordance with local, state and federal laws.

8. Leaving No Trace. 
Our community respects the environment. We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We clean up after ourselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave such places in a better state than when we found them.

9. Participation. 
Our community is committed to a radically participatory ethic. We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. We achieve being through doing. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.

10. Immediacy. 
Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience.

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

Photo by stuart updegrave

The post Patterns of Commoning: The Ten Principles of Burning Man appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Susana, tell us about your background, how did you end up being an activist working on financial reform and P2P/Commons Dynamics?

After becoming an economist, I worked for a long time in the internet business sector, but around 2003 I decided to undertake some research on the monetary system, and out of that came a book and other published works. I did this because I felt the need to. I wanted to understand, for myself, many of the dynamics that were taking place in the world, which mainstream economics were not explaining. When you understand the monetary and financial system, everything starts to make sense.

What does abundance mean to you?

Abundance is a new economic frame in which scarcity cannot be preserved. It’s funny to speak in these terms about scarcity, but it is appropriate. Economics used to be about managing scarce resources, but scarcity has turned out to be not a condition to overcome, but the Holy Grail to access monetary wealth for some. Meanwhile, it overlooks other types of scarcity, like our capacity to pollute the air without destroying the planet.

There is no economic value without scarcity. But scarcity is dying in the highest levels of innovation, in the very heart of the digital revolution. For the first time, the evolution of the economic system is not leading to higher productivity or sales, but just the opposite.

Economic evolution is leading to goods in new formats, with new ways of production that are extremely efficient and open by their very nature. That takes them very far from the scarcity context that creates economic value, sales, and profits. We need to adapt the way of organizing production and consumption to this new frame. I think it will be for the best. In general, I think that the end of scarcity is good news.

How can we create abundance in the material sphere?

I think the key to harnessing abundance is through a different monetary and financial system. But you have to bear in mind that this new trend is coexisting with the old trend of financialization and commodification, which goes exactly in the opposite direction. The centre of both of them is the monetary and financial system: it was the financialization that brought us to where we are now. Financialization started when the USA left the gold standard behind. It is only a new, deep evolution in the monetary and financial system that can allow us to adapt to this new economic frame in such a way that we can harness it to create prosperity for the majority of the people in an environmentally sustainable way.

Can you talk about the ongoing trend towards decommodification? Where do you think it will lead, and what are its advantages and dangers? Can we have ethical markets for sustainable livelihoods existing alongside non-monetary access to resources?

Technological innovation is bringing us to different scenarios of decommodification. One of the most important ones is when a corporation takes advantage of a certain innovation to destroy an industry, in order to create a competitive advantage for itself or weaken competitors. For example: Google created Android, a free OS for devices where Google products run smoothly, and destroyed the operating system business—for portable devices at least—where Microsoft and Apple were leaders.

But there is another decommodification trend, like Wikipedia, where voluntary contributors have created an online, free, collaborative encyclopaedia that has left the other ones behind as outdated, and has made it almost impossible to sell them in the foreseeable future.

I think that the disadvantages are that we need to change the way we were organizing the economy. People can’t depend on wages to live anymore, because wages are going to disappear altogether. The advantage is that we can get organized to produce and consume in a different way. In this new economic scheme, people won’t be divided anymore between workers or consumers. In this new units of production, people will have to provide funding, or endorsement for funding, labour and demand of the products. This is how the “prosumer” figure was born.

As Susan George said, we are used to seeing how companies look for the wealthiest markets to sell their products, and for cheaper countries to produce those products—but in reality, consumers and employees are the same people, wages turn into purchasing power, and this effort doesn’t lead to any situation that is sustainable in the long term.

We see this trend of commodities becoming commons and services becoming relationships as a positive thing. But what are the macroeconomic implications?

The macroeconomics implications are clear: we are going to see a reduction in income, in general. If the scarcity disappears, the value chain collapses. Business are no longer profitable and they stop paying taxes and wages…But it is very important to notice that it is not so clear that commodities will become commons thanks to the decommodification trend. For example, Amazon created a digital platform such as Kindle, so authors could publish their work in a “do it yourself” way. This has deeply disrupted the bookshop and publishing businesses, but books have not really become commons thanks to it. Epub format for digital books existed, it was a standard format, but Amazon decided to go with a non-standard format in a closed environment where you can only read these works if you are in their platform, in their apps, or reading with their devices. This way they can show adverts of their other products to you and put cookies in your laptop, to retarget you, so they can show you their adverts also everywhere when you surf the web. Monopolies are the only way scarcity can be maintained, but this won’t lead to a situation where wealth will be distributed at all. All of these global companies use fiscal optimization techniques that allow them to pay very little in taxes.

So, how can we avoid the hollowing out of a welfare state dependent on taxable income?

In my view, some public goods or services will need to start getting funded by a direct compensation, using an alternative means of payment. The people must be able to provide solutions to public needs and have it accounted as a public contribution. For instance, Prof. Bruno Theret from the Dauphine University in Paris has published a paper about how to introduce a time tax in order to fund political action. People would have to pay a time tax, payable with some kind of time money, and they would need to earn this time money by carrying out political participation in a decentralised way, or by paying for it in conventional money through a progressive scheme (the hour would be more expensive for those whose earnings are higher). There are two objectives here: to decentralise the political action so people carry out political action directly (instead of politicians), and to partly reduce the cost of political decision in conventional currency (political parties, consultants, etc.) There are many other currency schemes that can work to get to the same results, we can talk about what kind of currency we could use. We could even use euros, but euros created in a different way. Once this is proven to have worked with pilot projects, why not fund other expenses the same way? We could start with expenses that governments never have the money to undertake, like preventive medicine. That would save conventional state money expenditures in health care, as well as saving the suffering of the people.

As a social currency analyst, what is your opinion of cryptocurrencies? What do you think of the banking sector’s attempt to enter the cryptocurrency arena, will it succeed?

My opinion of currencies based on the block-chain technology is that they are a great invention. It is really interesting to explore what we can do with them. But the core of the transformation of the money system is not the technology of the payment systems, but the way money is created, and the way we build the confidence that underlies the monetary system. So, the social contract that underlies the money system. I understand that the banking sector enters the crypto arena, as Bitcoin, particularly, is designed to make redundant the whole banking system as electronic payment channel. There is a lot at stake for banks in this move; they understood it, and they are reacting quickly. I hope, in spite of this, that some new forms of money can emerge and nurture the creation of another kind of economy focused on people’s needs and the environmental limitations we really have. My only concern about Bitcoin is about the expectations it is creating. Bitcoin can best the banking system in its function of payment system, but it is not a solution for a money creation format that is linked to society. A money creation that is linked to society and its needs is a credit system, where money is created out of credit. A type of credit that will finance productive economy and not speculative bubbles, a different way of creating money out of credit than the one the banks carry out.

Som Energía, a solar, prosumer-oriented enregy cooperative operating in Spain

Tell us more about prosumers and self-provision. It’s also interesting to talk about this in the context of the Spanish state, and the slew of anti-P2P legislation it seems to specialize in, like the solar tax.

Well, the basis is that everybody has an asset which they don’t presently use to negotiate: their demand, their capacity to buy. Demand is scarce in the capitalist context. People should use their demand not only to get better prices, as we do now, but also to negotiate and get their share of income from the production process, in order to use that income to purchase the good that is being produced.

And do you see that could work in the public sphere as well?

The example of the time tax to fund political action that I just explained could be a case for it. That is, to self-provide political services by prosumer citizens. There are many ways in which people can collaborate to build means of production that will allow them to access the products and services they need. To offer the citizen the option to produce the capital for the commons (which is a way to own but without the right to sell or destroy), and be rewarded with a token that they can then use to pay for the service or product – this is going to be the key competitive advantage of a future without employment and without scarcity. People can collaborate to create solar energy plants, distributed factories, repair workshops, and almost any kind of means of production as a commons.

Is it like an economic closed circuit?

It doesn’t need to be closed. The circuits can be interconnected and the means of production can serve not only those circuits but also the market. The prosumer can fund the initiative, which they can do not only with their money but with their endorsement, too. If they can work to build it, and consume it with a self-made means of payments they have received for the work they have done to build it, such an initiative doesn’t need to fear global competitors, as the main part of their payment commitments will be paid in kind. For everything else, you should still have the market and the state, which you can also fund with a healthier form of money.

What do you mean by a healthier form of money?

I think the de-commodification trend needs to extend to the money itself. Most money is created by the banking sector out of lending. This is the commodification of uncertainty. I think uncertainty needs to be de-commodified by the self-provision of risk assumption in non-speculative projects. Credit risk needs to enter the P2P scenario, not only to provide credit in bank money as the crowdfunding platforms do, but also to create money out of lending, like banks do, for the creation of new kinds of money. This is the way many social and complementary currencies are created. It makes sense to split and spread the risk. It is not only a way of self-provision of the collaborative economy; it also brings about a much better financial system, free of systemic risk and speculative bubbles.

You’ve also examined possible scenarios for Basic Income. Do you think this should be based on fiat currency and taxation or on new money creation? How can a basic income be compatible with sustaining the provisions of a welfare state?

I see the basic income as a necessary means for a transition towards another type of system. Employment levels are never going to recover. People need to survive and basic income is a way forward. Its main advantage is that the beneficiaries of it can devote their time to building long term solutions to solve their needs, which many times won’t be achieved by getting a job, considering the jobs available. We need a different way of production and consumption but this takes time to get built. I think basic income would work if it is mainly paid in fiat or conventional currency. Basic income in complementary currency is being tested, for instance the social currency Moneda Demos, or the Universal Relative Dividend. I think this is definitely worth exploring. But where I think that complementary currencies could be of help the most is in providing a means of exchange for those new ways of production and consumption: for the self-provision of goods and services.

Continuing the conversation on Basic Income, tell us about Barcelona’s EU pilot project for Basic Income. How will it look like and what are your expectations?

The purpose of this project is to test basic income and its potential to take people out of poverty for good. Regarding the social currency project in Barcelona, the council is conducting research about its possible implementation in order to achieve the goals of the city’s government, as a tool that can serve the city’s productive model transformation increasing its sustainability, resilience and reducing its social and economic inequalities, which are among the highest in Spain and Europe.

What is your impression of the new city government a year and a half into the legislature? Do you think En Comú is really commons-oriented, although not overtly so?

I think it has been a very interesting period in which I have noticed the true aim of building bottom-up solutions with citizens. It has been a hard period, too, with some disappointments, projects that go too slow, etc. Facing reality is never an easy matter, but the important part of this is that the council is making an effort to face reality and listen to everyone. We will see if it is able to do it.

One of the things we’ve appreciated in the formation of the new citizen coalitions in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia is the incorporation of feminism and gender representation as a basic element. The P2P/Commons movement is sometimes characterized as being too male oriented; what can we learn from the post-15M political panorama in these “Rebel Cities”, and how do you see the gender question as it pertains to the Commons?

I think gender equality is important. As I have been able to notice, it is not only that women can access some environment like politics, or the commons, which is important of course; it goes further than that. I think the determination to integrate women changes the attitude towards “the others” in general. What I mean is that it changes the way men do things, too, making everyone more open, willing to listen, understand, and follow different people. This is key in many walks of life, but specially in politics. It makes everything richer.

Finally, how do you think we can achieve a real sharing economy, or a Commons Transition, as we like to call it?

It think the weak part of the commons is that very frequently it is not a business for anyone. So, nobody is interested in funding it. This is a real hurdle for its development. The solution is to create a new kind of money that can fund the commons. Conventional money taps into the scarcity. The new money that can help build the commons taps on the abundance.

SUSANA MARTÍN BELMONTE’S BIO:

Economist with a Bachelor’s Degree in Economic Theory from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (1993) and a Master’s Degree in Marketing Management from ESIC (1998). She was a market analyst in the Commercial Office of the Spanish Embassy in Mexico, as part of a Spanish Institute for Foreign Trade (ICEX) program for promoting foreign trade. Her professional career has been largely devoted to the new technology sector in private business, with an international focus. In 2003, she began research on the monetary system. The resulting work was published by the Spanish publisher Icaria, entitled “Nothing is lost: a healthy alternative monetary and financial system.” Since then, she has juggled her work in economic criticism, complementary currency development and developing the Institute for Social Money (of which she is co-founder). She is currently working in a research programe, with the council of Barcelona, on social innovation related to Basic income and a local currency.

Lead image by Alternativas Económicas

The post 100 women who are co-creating the P2P society: Susana Martín Belmonte on de-commodification and abundance appeared first on P2P Foundation.