Another contribution from our good friend Helene Finidori, one of the most interesting thinkers writing about the Commons today. It was originally published in Kosmos Journal.

Time is running short for a paradigm shift. When it comes to our individual and collective engagement in making the world a better place, we often talk about uniting in diversity: uniting in harmony to multiply outcomes and uniting in diversity for multiple focus and resilience. But how can this concretely be achieved? We all acknowledge the critical need for systemic change and for collective intelligence, but we all have different opinions about the challenges our world is facing and the ways to address these challenges. We each try to convince others that we hold the best solutions and methodologies, which often prevents us from coordinating or communing in effective ways. But is this possible? What type of unity or communion are we talking about?

As agents of change, we gather around the social objects that our engagement and action logics attract us to, those that resonate the most with the way we see the world and that determine our priorities and the pathways we envision.

These social objects are the nodes around which emerging social movements converge and common visions and praxis are formed. That’s where meaning is created and shared through languages that help us understand each other, where conversations and repeated interactions are initiated, and where peer learning allows us to explore new territories.

The action frameworks that we build or are shaped from practice to serve our movements and communities provide a context for our co-individuation: the processes by which our identities as individual and collective change agents are formed, transformed and differentiated in relation to each other and to the forces that hold us together and fuel our capacity to act in cohesive ways.

At the same time, however, as these frameworks create natural boundaries around our niches of action, they become exclusive of alternative frameworks. This hinders relational dynamics and our capacity to collaborate across groups outside of our domains of action. Our territory of action as a whole is actually composed of islands.

We are facing a paradox. What seems to make us effective as agents focusing on our respective domains of engagement is specifically what prevents us from uniting and being effective as a whole. This is one of the greatest challenges for systemic change—something Occupy and other self-organized movements have worked to overcome, with some success but also shortcomings.

In practice, attempts to organize global responses and unite ‘across islands’ often result in diluted focus and the possibilities

of all parties weakened and in delusion. Alternatively, such attempts can foster the adoption of unifying ideologies, reductionist both in thinking and action in ways that can ultimately put systems at risk and lead to totalitarianism. Eventually, contradictions get crystallized and conflicts perpetuated.

Developmental approaches to systemic change that require that we transcend our levels of consciousness and the order of complexity from which we ‘interconnectedly’ or ‘dialectically’ develop and apply solutions are insufficient to bring about systemic change because they are prescriptive and not naturally generative and interconnectable.

Agency is distributed across islands and produces independent outcomes at various levels and scales. What needs to converge and unite or interconnect for systemic effects are outcomes, not necessarily the processes generative of these outcomes, or the people involved locally in these processes and the collective will that mobilizes them.

Think of an ecology for transformative action with a huge potential ready to be activated, where the various logics of engagement complement each other systemically and epistemically, interconnected by the invisible hand of common logic that underlies them.

There is a universal aspect to what drives social movements across the globe, even if we cannot clearly translate it in comparable terms across practices and languages. Much of what these movements are currently engaged in is dedicated in one form or another to protecting the environment, people and resources from enclosure, over-exploitation and abuse, and to generating thrivability in its various forms.

The commons as the timeless generative systems that humanity shares in common is such an archetype: “a collectively inherited unconscious idea, pattern of thought, image, etc., universally present in individual psyches,” a logic that, if discovered, has potential for further enactment in each domain of engagement. If recognized and manifested in each of these domains, the commons logic could act as a transition image for systemic change or as scaffold for the new paradigm to emerge so that disparate efforts for change can all together generate more significant impacts in their own territories of influence and coalesce to create greater outcomes, with no prescriptive orchestration.

So what if, in the end, unity is about recognizing our mutual niches of engagement and the many streams of commons logic that underlie them as bridges between our islands? What if unity is about acknowledging the health of the commons as the measure against which to assess progress?

By discovering each other in a Common World, suggests Spanish philosopher Marina Garcés, we get the world between us to emerge, helping us draw the coordinates for a common dimension.

The post Recognizing Each Other in the Commons: The Basis for an Alternative Political Philosophy of Systemic Change? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This column was published in STIR’s spring issue and is available to buy here

With the Free Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK) Society project, peer-to-peer commons-based economics have a good chance of being institutionalised in Ecuador, or in other words, of entering at a nation-state level through the front door. This would be a world first.

Ecuador may not be particularly advanced as far as urban P2P dynamics are concerned, but its indigenous and rural communities have a long history of sharing knowledge. And since the election of a progressive government in 2007, the country is politically ahead in its determination to continue developing an economy based on the creativity of its citizens and on the sustainable leverage of its internal resources.

The focus here is to transition away from cognitive capitalism where value is commonly extracted via technology transfers through intellectual property rights mostly held by large foreign companies, generating dependencies on the global north and increasing the internal social divide. The goal is to shift towards a ‘social knowledge economy’ where knowledge is freely accessible, produced and shared through co-operative and open processes, and where the resulting knowledge commons can be built upon to accelerate innovation and the distribution of wealth.

Integrated commons-based initiatives exist around the world. Co-operative systems such as Cooperativa Integral Catalana and Las Indias in Spain, or local and regional partnerships such as Villes en Biens Communs and Territoires Collaboratifs in France are examples. But nothing has ever been done at the national level. The challenge is to scale microeconomic initiatives into systems that can operate at a macroeconomic level as well. Such transformations require an institutional framework supported by political and social infrastructure, in particular to bridge new structures with existing ones during the transition phase.

The FLOK Society thrives on the interactions between a civil society empowered by peer learning and open education, a partner state that provides the institutional support and infrastructures required, and a commons based ethical market. This is a model developed by FLOK Society’s research team lead by P2P foundation founder Michel Bauwens.

The process is under way. A policy framework will be presented to the Ecuadorian people for national debate in May. Proposals are derived from existing and new research as well as participatory input collected from commoners around the world and from Ecuadorians both in urban and rural contexts through informal workshops where needs and challenges are discussed.

The key element of the framework is the introduction of the Peer Production License, a copyfarleft type of reciprocity-based license by which commons are freely accessible to those who contribute to create them, while companies generating profits from them without contributing are charged license fees. Revenues returned to value creators allow co-operative accumulation and the constitution of community-managed commons funds and community investment funds.

This empowers a counter-hegemonic reciprocal economy, where commoners can develop their commons for wider use including the creation of market value on top of them, encouraged by legal frameworks that support the organisation and operations of co-operative entities.

The expected outcome is the creation of a distributed network of microfactories using open hardware designs available from the internet to produce machinery and tools for local domestic industry, sustainable community farms or science labs at fractions of the cost of licensed equipment, enabling more resources to be allocated for further investment. Arduino electronic boards, RepRap 3D printers, and Motorola’s Ara smartphone project are examples of such open designs for ‘connected’ manufacturing. Farm Hack, Slowtools, Open Source Ecology provide blueprints for small industry and farming machinery.

These new forms of production, which create converging peer innovation networks where people customise solutions to specific needs at various levels and scales, are intended to transform Ecuador’s productive matrix. Further learning and the development of new capacities and know-how are supported by an infrastructure of hacker spaces, media labs and coworking spaces, complemented by the release of all publicly funded research and innovation under GPL license in formats adequate to a generalisation of open education.

The reciprocal Peer Production License provides means to protect natural and biological resources such as seeds and plants as well against the danger of private enclosure also known as biopiracy, while enabling their wider use. In particular, indigenous communities who have historically been reluctant to share their knowledge on plants and cures, after they witnessed multinationals generating significant amounts of income by patenting and exploiting existing knowledge and plants with nothing coming back to them, will be able to benefit from the development of a bioeconomy and sustainable agriculture that serves them, supported by community seed banks and open source seed sharing networks.

We are looking at large scale systemic change here that can set a precedent and revolutionise economic and social policy. Whichever the outcome of the political process in Ecuador, the FLOK Society project will provide the building blocks for other places in the world to develop autonomy and resilience while getting rid of enclosures as well as extractive and dependence-generating practices, whereever they may originate from.

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