Eurozone – P2P Foundation https://blog.p2pfoundation.net Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Tue, 18 Jul 2017 10:12:57 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 62076519 The rule of the market in East-Central Europe is absolute (Interview) https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/rule-market-east-central-europe-absolute-interview/2017/07/18 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/rule-market-east-central-europe-absolute-interview/2017/07/18#respond Tue, 18 Jul 2017 07:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=66636 It is no secret for any observer that democracy is under threat, and from within. The weakening of the labour movement has given free rein to authoritarian market forces, and nowhere is this as true as in Eastern Europe. Here’s a fabulously interesting interview on the new authoritarian regimes, mostly about Hungary, but it applies... Continue reading

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It is no secret for any observer that democracy is under threat, and from within. The weakening of the labour movement has given free rein to authoritarian market forces, and nowhere is this as true as in Eastern Europe. Here’s a fabulously interesting interview on the new authoritarian regimes, mostly about Hungary, but it applies equally to Poland and a number of states undergoing similar developments. In a recent meeting though, I met a Hungarian activist who told me, in the current conditions, the only thing we can do is constructing commons infrastructure, as local politicians are desperate about the increasing decay of pubic infrastructures and momentarily leave us alone.


This post by Jaroslav Fiala was originally published in Czech on A2larm.cz; the English version is from politicalcritique.org and reposted with permission to republish and digitally distribute, with the full support and consent of the A2larm team as well as their editor in chief, author Jaroslav Fiala.


Jaroslav Fiala speaks to about the brutality of capitalism, Orbán’s Hungary, and the failure of the European system.

Gaspár M. Tamás is a Hungarian philosopher, politician, and publicist. Before 1989, he was a dissident who protested against “real socialism”. He has lectured at English, French, and American universities, and was briefly an MP. Today, he is one of Europe’s leading public intellectuals and a critic of Viktor Orbán’s government.

Jaroslav Fiala: Recently, Europe has been experiencing dangerous times: the crisis of the Eurozone, terrorist attacks, the rise of the far right, Brexit, and so on. Is liberal democracy in peril?

Gaspár M. Tamás: Nobody can say that liberal democracy has not liberated some people and that some kinds of servitude have not been obliterated. But the current system has run into a number of contradictions. We are experiencing a serious crisis of liberal democracy, which coincides with the “death” of socialism. The necessary condition of liberal democracy was the existence of the workers’ movement. It was the result of a compromise in which, in exchange for inner peace and stability, social democracy had given up some of its revolutionary demands and had become part of the bourgeois state. As a result, the lower classes were represented. The inner balance between classes within Western welfare states, with privileges for the proletariat, its trade unions, social democratic and communist parties and the international equilibrium between reformed and limited capitalism and the Soviet bloc led to what we today call “liberal democracy”, which existed between 1945 and 1989. Western European labour legislation has followed Soviet and socialist legal patterns from the 1920s, so have legal measures concerning gender equality and family law. This is proven by recent legal-historical scholarship.

Paradoxically what is lacking from liberal democracy today, is socialism. This is the reason why there is no countervailing force that keeps liberal democracy democratic. Today’s ruling classes are not threatened from within. Thus, they can do what even fascists wouldn’t dare to do. They are smashing real wages, pensions, welfare systems, public schools, free healthcare, cheap public transport, cheap social housing and so on. Who will stop the ruling class?

Is it possible to save liberal democracy?

I don’t think so. Liberal democracy was an extremely complicated system. The ruling classes in liberal democracy were limited from the left by the workers’ movement and, from the right, by the forces of the past – by the remnants of the aristocracy, of the church and of monarchy. Liberal democracy on its own is unlikely to survive. In spite of what the liberals think, the far right is no danger for capitalism. Danger for life and limb, but not for capital and not for the state. Don’t forget that Adolf Hitler was considered to be the saviour of Western civilization from communism. Even people who despised him, such as Friedrich-August von Hayek – the free market zealot, who was after all an anti-Nazi émigré – claimed that Hitler might have been a monster but that he had saved Europe from communism. For people like Hayek, fascism was a preventive anti-communist counterrevolution. Which it was. That it ruined and exterminated half of Europe? Pity. Do you think the bourgeoisie would hesitate now? I don’t think so.

Paradoxically, what is lacking from liberal democracy today is socialism. This is the reason why there is no countervailing force that keeps liberal democracy democratic.

You live in Hungary. Many from the outside world are horrified by the government of Viktor Orbán, who is annihilating liberal democracy. On the other hand, some people see a certain alternative or an “interesting choice” in Orbán. What would you say to them?

Orbán is doing exactly what you dislike in your own country but since he is doing it without resistance, he seems to be more coherent and successful. There are some admirers of Viktor Orbán in Eastern Europe who wouldn’t put up with his system in Hungary for a single day. They admire his talk about national pride, they find it funny that he would “brutally” attack America, the EU, and so on. In reality, Hungary is sustained by Western European, mostly German capital. We have low taxes for big business, there are “sweetheart deals” for Mercedes and Audi, which aren’t exactly anti-Western or anti-capitalist forces. Orbán destroyed the social system. The hospitals are empty because there are no doctors and nurses. People are dying on the corridors. My little daughter goes to an elementary school in the centre of Budapest, and there is no toilet paper and no chalk to write on the blackboard. Orbán is a miserable failure in all respects. And a neoliberal failure at that. The budget is balanced, the debt is down, and the lower forty per cent are starving. Problems are solved just by silencing criticism.

Why Orbán has been successful as a politician then?

The majority of Hungarians are apathetic, indifferent, and devoid of hope. My country is a very sad place where people say that they can’t do anything in order to forward their aspirations or to change anything. Mr Orbán knows that the secret of success is to support this passivity and apathy. He realized that he should put a stop to the quasi-totalitarian mobilization of society. The first phase of his rule was to mobilize crowds with xenophobic and ethnicist slogans and use extreme militant groups. Now all the mobilization networks have been disbanded, as they could become a voice of social discontent. Orbán has destroyed functional bureaucracy, too. Public administration hardly exists, regional administration is officially and openly and completely terminated. Experts, intellectuals, “enlightened bureaucrats” are fired by their thousands. Inner controls don’t exist anymore. Cultural institutions, publishing, periodicals, research, higher education, quality press, good museums and theatres, art cinematography have been destroyed. So have independent media. The result is a dysfunctional state. So, when someone tells you that dictatorship means “law and order”, you should laugh. It means corruption, disorder, total chaos. And it also means the bitter  hopelessness of the body politic, which is the true secret of Orbán’s power.

There has been a lot of criticism of East-Central European countries because of their refusal of solidarity with refugees from the Middle East and Africa. But if we look to the West, there is a lot of racism and resistance towards the refugees as well. What has happened in Europe?

The same causes that explain Western racism have appeared immediately in Eastern Europe and have caused identical phenomena. First, the multinational states of East-Central Europe like Masaryk’s and Havel’s Czechoslovakia and Tito’s Yugoslavia had vanished. We have created small, ethnic, monocultural, monolingual non-republics, in which we are supposed to live.

After 1989, it seemed to us that in this part of the world, the normal shape of a state is one that is inhabited by a single ethnic group. Still, Prague and Budapest are full of rich but non-white people, tourists and business people settle here, and nobody is objecting. They are not beaten up as racial inferiors. There is no racial antipathy. Rich people don’t count as aliens, as Muslims, as blacks, as migrants…

“Orbán is a miserable failure in all respects. And a neoliberal failure at that.”

You mean there is also class hatred…

For the European poor, refugees are competitors on the labour market. They are considered “welfare rivals”, and the result is social and moral panic. But the anti-refugee hysteria is not totally crazy. The mass influx of refugees would be a great burden on the welfare system, especially in Central-Eastern Europe. These are poor countries. Of course, the problem could be solved. But when you see that our welfare system as it is now cannot take care of our own populations, can you imagine what will happen? The current Hungarian government is not able to sustain railways, post offices, elementary schools that have existed for two hundred years. People know perfectly well that their states are not functioning. The panic is explained by the conservative intelligentsia in culturalist or openly racist terms. Although the problem is the depletion of the welfare state and of social solidarity and a rigid, anti-popular class politics. Racializing and ethnicizing social inequalities is the oldest tactic of the bourgeoisie. In America, “unemployed” has been made to mean “black”, in Eastern Europe, “unemployed” means “Roma” or “Gypsy”. Recipients of  “welfare”, of unemployment benefit, of social assistance of any kind are classified as “criminal elements”, “single mothers” (i. e. “immoral women”) and, again, coloured people. Even indigents, members of the underclass are tolerant of the destruction of the welfare structure which is clearly advantageous to them, because it hurts racial aliens.

What should be the reaction of the left to this state of panic?

If we had a compassionate and egalitarian welfare system, we could enlarge it, and accept refugees. But at the same time, let’s be fair to ourselves. Am I or are you responsible for the dismantling of the welfare system? The responsibility rests with the ruling classes and political elites of the last thirty years. And if someone says, “You cannot just open the frontiers because you will destroy the fabric of society”, you can reply, “The fabric of society has already been destroyed, and this is why it is so difficult to welcome refugees. And this is the fault of the establishment”. Unfortunately, it is my generation that created this 100% capitalist utopia in East-Central Europe that does not exist anywhere in this radical form, certainly not in the West. The Czech Republic is more of a market society than Austria or Britain. Unlike what the liberals say, the rule of the market in East Central Europe is absolute and complete. If we are so-called serious intellectuals, we have to be objective, and recognize that our societies are facing insoluble problems. How can people show solidarity in a system which is not solidary at all, which is selfishness itself? Many politicians in today’s Europe, especially on the far right, promise some sort of welfare state, but only for “hard-working”, home-grown, respectful white people.

But the point is that they won’t do it. This is just talk. These are middle class movements that fear and despise the lower classes and the poor. They are open partisans of the class society – class warriors from above. They aren’t proposing anything new, they are just defending the repression, the exploitation and the injustice of today. Look at the situation in Poland or in Hungary. Have these societies had become more generous, more cohesive, and more collectivist at least within the white middle class? Of course not. This is just rhetoric.

Why do the people still believe in their promises?

There is no real left. A famous quote says: Every extreme right victory shows the failure of the left. And the remnants of the traditional working class have changed as well. 90% of the Austrian industrial working class voted for Norbert Hofer, the far-right candidate. But this is only 10% of the whole working population in Austria. This has become a relatively privileged group, which is defending its own class position against competitors on the labour market – against refugees, against the unemployed, against migrants and against women who’d work for less. Voters are blaming women, ethnic minorities and migrants, instead of demanding to be integrated into a higher wage/dole/pensions system. But for being integrated into a higher wage system, you need a strong left social democracy, which does not exist.

We need a countervailing power to present-day capitalism in order to insure, simply, the survival of humankind. Capitalism left on its own obviously cannot and will not do it.

Could a strong left-wing social democracy be created again?

Hardly. If a new left of any kind will come into existence, it will have to represent and to mobilize not only the remnants of the old industrial working class, but a much larger mass of people, the complete proletariat-precariat without capital property. If not, these people will become something like the ancient Roman proletariat. They will be kept alive by gifts, state donations, and spectator sports. They might become a reactionary force serving the interests of tyrants. That was the role of the “proletariat” in the late Roman republic and the early Roman Empire. We may end up in a society torn apart by competing class egotisms that will be uglier than what we have now. We are sitting here in the beautiful sunshine of Prague, it is quiet, pretty, and still there is peace. But so it was in June 1914. It was also very peaceful. The crash of whatever nature may not come today, it may come in ten years. But the system is highly unstable. That is the lesson of all of this.

Who are the main enemies of Europe today?

All governments of Europe, without exception. The riders of the apocalypse. They don’t know what they are doing. The conservative leaders of the past, however nasty they might have been otherwise, had some traditional sense of what you “don’t play with”. You do not play with your country, however defined, just for the hell of it. Look at people like David Cameron, François Hollande, Miloš Zeman. These people have no idea, they’re just blundering around. This is really serious. Then look at all the decadence around us – the falling intellectual level of most institutions, the general cultural crisis and illiteracy of the middle class, including so-called professionals and so-called intellectuals. We need a countervailing power to present-day capitalism in order to insure, simply,  the survival of humankind. Capitalism left on its own obviously cannot and will not do it. This is not the old and bad bourgeois system. It is much worse. We must create new political structures, if there is still time for it. I am not at all certain that there is.

This post by Jaroslav Fiala is reposted from politicalcritique.org

Photo credits: MTI/Mohai Balázs

Lead Photo by sjrankin

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Finding Common Ground 6: Collaboration is just a strategy – Overcoming the limits of commons https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/finding-common-ground-7-collaboration-is-just-a-strategy-overcoming-the-limits-of-commons/2017/01/09 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/finding-common-ground-7-collaboration-is-just-a-strategy-overcoming-the-limits-of-commons/2017/01/09#comments Mon, 09 Jan 2017 10:20:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=62626 Intro by Michel Bauwens: The following contribution is from Christian Felber, who has co-founded and co-organized the successful Economy for the Common Good network that is mostly active in Austria and German-language countries. This approach broadens the accounting and accountability of enterprises away from its sole reliance on financial achievements, and towards taking to account... Continue reading

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Intro by Michel Bauwens: The following contribution is from Christian Felber, who has co-founded and co-organized the successful Economy for the Common Good network that is mostly active in Austria and German-language countries. This approach broadens the accounting and accountability of enterprises away from its sole reliance on financial achievements, and towards taking to account both negative externalities (damage done) and positive externalities (active progress on matters of sustainability and inclusion, etc..). In this text, Felber also states however that ‘commons movements have no policy’. This is of course untrue as the readers of our blog will know. Felber seems unaware of initiatives such as FLOK, the Commons Transition project, but also the wider networks behind the procomuns.net policy proposals, the European Commons Assembly and lots of other policy work like that of Jose Luis Vivero Pol on the Food Commons.

Christian Felber discusses the Economy for the Common Good, and how it can be combined with the commons to form the basis of a fairer and more sustainable economic order.

“The commons are goods that were given to us by nature, or which were produced by people in a collective way; they are shared and managed jointly, by communities and networks, so that we can preserve them for generations to come. The idea doesn’t sound complicated, but it is nevertheless revolutionary at its roots, as it helps us overcome a dominant dogma of the current capitalist economy. We were all taught that competition is the driver of innovation – and there is no doubt some truth to this statement, but recent research has shown that competition is by no means the only path we can go down. Cooperation can be even more effective. It is by now evident that if people cooperate to find a shared solution to a problem, the product becomes more innovative and more efficient. Commons therefore won’t necessarily hamper progress, they won’t make our societies lazy and backwards; indeed, they will have the potential to guide us down a much more humane and sustainable path to progress.

We must not forget, however, that the commons are not good per se. Collaboration is just a strategy, and the cooperative nature of an endeavour doesn’t in itself mean that it produces something good or useful for society. Reality does not always follow our wishes or ideals.

Collaboration is something that we support only when there is a common good orientation – it is far less desirable when people who share and manage a good only look out for their personal or their group’s interests, at the cost of others. To put it a bit crudely: even murderers can collaborate to become more effective in taking the lives of people. There are a number of active cooperatives today that are profit-oriented, for example the Austrian Raiffeisen Bank, which is partly a capitalistic hedge fund that is eating taxpayers’ money, while its contribution to the common good is marginal. Moreover, there is also the much hyped phenomenon of the collaborative economy, which is a catch-all phrase for a number of different endeavours, ranging from common good-oriented enterprises to capitalist, self-interested organisations – many of them conflicting with the original intent of the commons. Uber or Airbnb are a far cry from what Elinor Ostrom meant when she wrote about the commons, and they are not at all the kinds of endeavours that we could use to build a new, common good-focused economy.

Values of society versus values of business

When contemplating whether or not it is possible to build a commons economy, we also should not forget that today we live in the frame of a capitalist economy, and a complete reshuffling of our world might not be feasible in the short-run. Moreover, it might not even be necessary: in Germany alone we have 4 million companies – and in Austria 400.000; it would not be a good idea to convert all of them into commons, especially if there are companies among them that don’t cause harm to the environment or to our society, such as the “GLS Bank”, the organic bakery “Märkisches Landbrot”, or the “Regionalwert AG” which is a project similar to CSA (community supported agriculture), but formally a shareholder company.

Not to mention that there are some limits to the theory that have not been addressed by the commons community. The best way to go would be the marriage between a number of alternative economic approaches (such as the commons, the solidary economy, the degrowth network, and others), within the democratic framework of the Economy for the Common Good (ECG).

The ECG is a holistic, alternative economic model which envisions a free market economy, in which the common good is the ultimate goal of economic activity. It strives to dissolve the contradiction between the values held by many business interests (such as profit maximization and competition) and values held by society in general such as solidarity, sustainability, or democracy. Proponents of the ECG believe that the values and goals laid down in most Western constitutions can and should be implemented in business practices, so that the current economic order won’t contradict anymore the spirit of these constitutions. A good example of the principles underlying such an economy can be found in the Italian constitution: “Public and private economic activity should be oriented to the common good,” while the Bavarian Constitution says: “The economic activity in its entirety serves the common good.”

Economic success should be measured according to a company’s contribution to the common good. Businesses should be rewarded for practices that improve their compliance to human rights, social justice, and environmental protection. This should be done by measuring their contribution with a so called common good balance sheet (already used by 400 ethical businesses in Europe), which looks at how a business’s activities advance or harm human dignity, solidarity, justice, ecological sustainability, and democracy through evaluating whether products and services satisfy human needs, whether companies’ working conditions are humane, the production processes are environmentally-friendly, etc.  It then informs consumers, employees, business partners, and government agencies of the companies’ social and environmental performance (relative to its business-related activities).

The limits of the commons

The cooperation of alternative economies with the economy for the common good would, among other things, help overcome a clear limit of the commons approach: debt. Commons work parallel to the state of law, and parallel to the legal structures of today – debt, however, is a legal structure. If we want to eliminate the massive amounts of (sovereign) debt that are crippling Europe today, we need to work on the legal level. To overcome this problem, the proponents of the economy for the common good propose ways to reduce or eliminate debt (for example stronger taxation on big properties and heritages), as well as the introduction of “positive money”, which would reform the monetary system and would change the way money is created and, as a side effect, reduce sovereign debt significantly.

Today, most of the money we use is created by commercial banks, while the positive money approach prescribes that money should become a public good, and should therefore be created exclusively by central banks. Democratised and public central banks, of course. The transition from the old monetary system to the new one would create a huge gain for societies, approximately in the same value as the now circulating non-effective money (also called book money or banking money). According to some estimates, this non-effective money amounts to as much as 50 percent of GDP in the Eurozone, so by getting rid of banking money you could reduce public debt by exactly 50 percent.

There is also no fiscal policy in the theory of the commons, as the proponents of the commons understand themselves as a different culture than the exchange based market economy which would create the basis for taxes within states of law. In contrast, the economy for the common good has a proposal for a fairer fiscal policy as well: it would start with curbing the unconditional free movement of capital, by making it conditional of an international collaboration in tax policy, which would put an end to tax liberalisation, tax competition, and tax dumping. Then, as a next step we would shift the tax burden from labour to speculative capital and overconcentrated capital; moreover, we would increase the share of tax that comes from the unsustainable use of nature, which is today at around 5 percent and would have to increase to up to 50 percent so that we can experience an absolute reduction in the consumption of biological resources in industrialised nations.

Beyond the fiscal policy approach, we propose “ecological human rights” which are consumption rights. The idea is that the yearly gift of the planet’s biological resources is divided by all human beings, and the outcoming share is our yearly consumption right which could be credited on our “ecological account” that works in the same way as a financial account: when it is empty, you do not have purchase power any more… On the other side of the coin, the ecological human rights are the rights of nature, of our planet. This idea, like virtually all other innovations of the ECG, can only be implemented within a state of law that proclaims and protects this human right and the rights of Nature.

That is the general shortcoming of the commons approach: there are no known proposals on how to change our world on the legal level, let alone how to change the democratic system in itself. The strategic choice to work on the cultural, but not legal level, marks a strong limit of the commons. The ECG works strongly, but not exclusively, on the legal level, inviting the sovereign citizens to recognise and use their sovereignty and try to change both existing legal decisions as well as decision procedures, starting from the democratic reform of our constitutions. Thanks to the outflowing “sovereign rights”, the now sovereign citizens could then legally promote and protect commons, as well as anything else.

How to kick start the project of the common good?

To create a fairer economy, we need to first show that what we currently call an economy has in fact nothing to do with a real “economy” in its original (ancient Greek) meaning, as its success is measured by monetary indicators such as GDP, financial profit, or the return on investment, instead of what the actual goals of economic activity should be: the advancement of the quality of life, as well as the fulfilment of human needs and fundamental values.

We need to ask ourselves the question, what do we want to achieve with our economic policy? Full employment or the fair provision of food, housing, education, health services to our people, together with letting them have a say in the design of the rules?

Secondly, we need to prove that we know the solution to the current problems. To do this we need to offer a simple and clear narrative, a comprehensive guide, because the many good solutions that were put forward by progressive theorists, such as unconditional basic income, the elimination of interests, or the 20-hour workweek, cannot be called a theory of change while they stand alone.

The economy for the common good, however, is clear and consistent, and provides a real theory of change: a comprehensive description of how and why the desired improvement of our economy is expected to happen. This, amongst others, is one of the reason why so many people have joined our initiative, and even many Green parties have expressed interest in the theory: in Salzburg (Austria) and Baden-Württemberg (Germany), for example, the local Greens have already adopted the basic tenets of ECG and made it part of the economic programme of these counties.

Why a market economy?

According to the categorisation of the ECG, there are 4 possible types of economic models: a planned economy, a market economy, a gift economy, and self-sufficiency. The economy for the common good falls under the category of the market economy, while the commons are a type of gift-economy.

The economy for the common good doesn’t say that the market economy is the best of all. The most important reason why we are a market economy is that today’s current capitalist system is also a market economy. We know that if we want to establish a more just economy, we need to start from here.

However, there are 3 restrictions to the market economy that we propose: firstly, it should be a non-capitalistic, cooperative, and fully ethical market economy; second, it should be a truly “liberal” market economy (meaning that every human being should have the same rights, liberties, and opportunities); and third, we envision a shrinking market economy: since we are consuming too much today, we believe that we should shrink the market economy to about half of its size, and with it halve the working hours of people, so that they only work 20 hour weeks in the monetary based market economy. This way there can be enough time for the people to engage in other kinds of economic activities, such as self-sufficiency, and gift economic practices. Moreover, the economy for the common good says that not only the time and space should be open for creating more commons, but there should also be legal opportunities and legal support to facilitate the commons – another argument for working with and on the state of law.

Our strategy

The strategy of the ECG is to work with companies, municipalities, universities, consumers, the general public, the media, and the representatives of other alternative economic approaches – first and foremostly the commons – to get the word out, and lay the groundwork for a new economic system.

The basis of this system would be the acceptance of a wide range of property forms: private property, public property, collective or cooperative property, social property (meaning big industrial companies in the hands of society, similar to the enormously successful but shortlived Yugoslav experiment of the early 1950s that enabled “workers’ self-management”), commons (which are not a form of property per se, but a cultural practice and a worldview), the use of nature without viewing it as some form of property, and finally the respectful non-use of nature. For me, all of these forms of property are acceptable in an economic order, but none should be exclusive or predominant. The economy for the common good therefore proposes a mixture of all of them, and gives limits and conditions to all.

In a nutshell, this means that the users of all these property forms need to show that their activities are not harmful to the rest of society, and are compatible with an economic order that aims to improve quality of life, satisfy human needs, and fulfil fundamental values.

Our envisioned economic system would exist in the current framework of a rules-based state of law – however, the flaws of current democracy would be fixed, in order to make the new system more functional. We aim to deepen democracy towards a sovereign democracy: this would mean that the fundamental rules and guiding principles of our lives would be elaborated and defined by the people.

The formation of the democratic constitution(s) would start with a one-year-long democratic process, in which we would organise assemblies for all policy fields (such as economic policy); and in these assemblies everyone would be able to make a proposal on the most important cornerstones of the economic system. All alternative economic approaches, like the solidary economy, degrowth, the Transition Town movement, and many others would be allowed to present their ideas on how to design and shape the twenty most important cornerstones of the economy, and then we would make a decision, using a procedure that has already proven extremely effective: the systemic consensus. That means that all the participants can propose several rules to guide the economy (at least two: the current state of the art and one other) and the winner will be the one that meets the least resistance. This procedure is particularly important because building a system around the widest support doesn’t work, and can easily become a door-opener for lobbyists. Our procedure, which was invented by two mathematicians at the University of Graz, however, would cause the least pain in society; every rule, norm, or system gives and takes freedom in a higher or lesser degree; the method of “systemic consensus” allows to find that alternative that restricts the liberty of all citizens in the least possible degree.

There is no doubt that the economic order in which we live today cannot stay as it is forever. The financial, economic, social, political, and environmental crises of Europe are clear signs that we need to fundamentally rethink the way we use our resources. As outlined in the previous paragraphs, the commons are one of the many ideas that can provide a solution that could be the basis of a just, solidary, and sustainable economic order. Added together with the economy for the common good, and other alternative economic approaches, they become a structural element of the economy of the future.


The Green European Journal, published by the European Green Foundation, has published a very interesting special issue focusing on the urban commons, which we want to specially honour and support by bringing individual attention to several of its contributions. This is our 6th article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by miuenski

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