The idea of a rising ‘sharing economy’ is currently a hot topic in an international debate that builds on the emergence of peer-to-peer network exchanges that rely more on access than on property, on relations more than an appropriation,to call into question the sociological understanding of the relationship between the society and the market that goes back to authors such as Polanyi, Marx and Sombart.

The aim of this monograph is therefore to bring together a selection of contributions that will help identify the analytical categories and indicators needed to interpret this phenomenon from a sociological perspective on a global scale. Through a collection of original empirical research on this topic, from Western and non-Western contexts, by both established and junior scholars and experts, this monograph will make a pivotal contribution to the study of what themes, methods and issues characterise the rise of ‘sharing’ as a socio-economic model and a new frontier of sociological research. In particular, this monograph aims to answer the following questions: what do we mean with ‘sharing economy’? What kind of positive innovations or possible criticalities might this socio-economic model bring? Does ‘sharing’ really represent an alternative to capitalism, or an example of its transformation? In which areas, and how, is the way of doing business in society changing as a result of the diffusion of ‘sharing economies’?

Photo by Burns Library, Boston College

The post Essay of the Day: Unboxing the Sharing Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Republished from JOPP, Issue #10: Peer Production and Work

Arwid Lund: This article examines the relation between peer production and capitalism on a systemic and theoretical level. One problem with understanding peer production as an alternative and potentially competing mode of production in relation to capitalism is that the main bulk of economic theory deals only with capitalism. Alternative economic theories from an emerging theoretical P2P movement have done important pioneer work on commons-based peer production, and in discussing its sustainability as a mode of production both on a systemic and individual level (for the peer producers) within capitalism. This article argues that the disadvantages of the P2P movement’s theoretical framework, compared to a Marxist one, have their roots in an evolutionist motif, and the article aims to situate peer production more clearly in relation to the workings of capital, and in relation to a Marxist understanding of the potential for political agencies and counter-powers to emerge from capital’s outside.

Photo by Mantissa.ca

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Michel Bauwens: Karl Polanyi, in his landmark book, ‘The Great Transformation’, famously posited the ‘double movement’ of industrial civilisations, characterized by periodic swings between liberal and more labour oriented periods, such as the welfare state model vs the neoliberal period. Yet, though the latter is in deep crisis, it is not very clear that there are workable alternatives at the nation-state level, that won’t be derailed by transnational capital movements and strikes. Perhaps this means that social movements need to radically re-orient themselves to translocal and trans-national solutions and create adequate counter-power at the appropriate level to counter the increasing corporate sovereignty of ‘netarchical capital’? Just as capitalism is moving from the commodity-labor form to commons-extraction, perhaps now is the time for commoners to practice reverse cooptation? As a case study, we will look at the situation of the thousands of cognitive workers living and working in the global capital of digital nomadic workers, Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, but also about the new solidarity mechanisms being developed by a new wave of labour mutuals (such as SMart) in old Europe, who are organizing solidarity mechanisms for autonomous workers. Reviewing the emergence of new trans-local and trans-national organized networks, including how the token economy is used by sectors of cognitive labor to reclaim surplus value from capital investors, we will inquire into potential alternatives at different scales of governance (urban, bio-regional, nation-state, and beyond).

Our review of the emerging answers will lead to the concept of the Partner State, i.e. a community-state form that enables and scales commons-based cooperation at all levels.

The annual conference of the European Artistic Research Network (EARN) will be hosted in 2018 by the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM) and Dublin School of Creative Arts & Media (DSCA) at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT).

Key-note speakers include:

Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation); Conflict Kitchen – Dawn Weleski & Jon Rublin (artists); Bernard Stiegler (philosopher)

This two-day conference seeks to address the impact of contributory economies on tradi- tional understandings of the nation and state. Since the 2008 financial crisis, alterna- tive economies have been increasingly explored through digitally networked communities, artistic practice and activist strategies that endeavour to transgress traditional links between nation and economy. Developed at a crucial time on the island of Ireland when Brexit is set to redefine centre/margin relations the conference seeks to engage with a number of themes within this context: nation and inter-nation; the nation and aesthet- ics; art and economy; P2P networks; digital economies; modes of exchange and modes of production; alternative economies; network aesthetics; populism and counter populism; aesthetics and the imagination; activist practices; geo-politics; island, archipelago and continent; centre and margin.

The guiding concept of the conference ‘Inter-Nation’ comes from the work of anthro- pologist Marcel Mauss, who in ‘A Different Approach to Nationhood’ (1920) proposed an original understanding of both concepts that opposes traditional definitions of state and nationalism. More recently, Bernard Stiegler has revisited Mauss’s definition of In- ter-Nation as a broader concept in support of contributory economies emerging in digital culture. Contributory economies are those exchange networks and peer-to-peer communities that seek to challenge the dominant value system inherent to the nation-state. Such dig- ital networks have the potential to challenge traditional concepts of sovereignty and geo-politics through complex technological platforms. Central to these platforms are a broad understanding of technology beyond technical devices to include praxis-oriented processes and applied knowledges inherent to artistic forms of research. Similarly, due to the aesthetic function of the nation, artistic researchers are critically placed to engage with the multiple registers at play within this conference, and to address these issues through multiple forms as they play out live on this island.

Photo by bookgrl

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This post is part of our series of articles on the Urban Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 16 “Talk of the Town: Exploring the City in Europe”. In this instalment, Lorenzo Marsili of DIEM25 interviews Joan Subirats, founder and director of the Institute for Government and Public Policy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Lorenzo Marsili: A spectre seems to be haunting Europe: the spectre of the cities. Why do you think there is such symbolic power in what you are doing in Barcelona?

Joan Subirats: There are certainly various factors. One general factor is the transformation to a more platform-based capitalism – a monopolistic, digital capitalism – in which states have lost the ability to respond because the big players are the investment funds, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. States are then trapped in the logic of debt and austerity policy. At the same time, the population faces increasing difficulties and there is a sense of uncertainty and fear, a feeling of not knowing what will happen in the future; what will happen to my standard of living, what will happen to my country, and what will happen to us? Many years ago, the philosopher Karl Polanyi talked about the movement towards commodification and the countermovement of protection. Where do you turn today for protection?

Many would still argue to the state.

Yes, the state is the classic place to turn to demand protection. Following a more conservative, closed, and xenophobic logic, the state is still a space where you can claim protection, in many cases by closing borders and closing societies. However, cities are different in nature because they were born to be open. “The city air makes us feel free”1, as the adage goes. Cities are spaces that gather opportunities and possibilities. The proximity of city authorities and political actors offers another kind of protection, much closer and tangible to citizens, albeit admittedly with fewer policy competences and powers than the nation-state. This means that cities seem to be a space where some things – but not everything – can change and change for the better.

Speaking of Polanyi, the philosophy professor Nancy Fraser claims that the second movement, the movement of protection, is one that historically defended primarily the male, white, Western breadwinner against women, minorities, and the Global South. And so she introduces the need for a third movement: one of autonomy and emancipation. To what extent can the ‘protection’ of the city differ from traditional state protection?

It’s a very good question, because it links in with the Ada Colau factor, the Barcelona factor, the PAH factor [Platform of People Affected by Mortgages], and the antieviction movement. There is a specific type of change happening in relation to the PAH, which I think is highly significant. When someone goes to the PAH saying they are having problems and cannot pay the mortgage, and that they will be evicted, they meet others facing the same problems who tell them: “We are not going to solve your problem. You have to become an activist, so we can solve our problems together.” This means that you are not a client of the PAH – you must become a PAH activist, so that you can change things together. And this is a process of emancipation, not a process of service provision, and it does not follow the outsourcing logic of unions or political parties: “Come and delegate your issues to us, then we will defend your ideas in your name.” This delegating approach does not exist in the PAH. The PAH involves making people more active.

How does this become institutionalised? To what extent do these processes of politicisation, of activation – which are also at the basis of the discourse on the commons in the end, with co-ownership and co-management – end up in the policies of the administration?

This is the big initiative that started in May 2015. There were four basic points in the Barcelona en Comú manifesto in the elections, and these could be adopted by other similar platforms elsewhere in Spain. The first was to give control of institutions back to the people, institutions have been captured, and they are not serving our interests. Secondly, people are being put in an increasingly precarious situation, financially and socially. Inequality is increasing, basic social protection mechanisms are being destroyed. We still need to recover the capacity to provide protection, so there is a social emergency that demands a response. Thirdly, we have to build up a more participative democracy that does not delegate. It is not easy, but we must make people more involved in the decisions that affect them. That is where you get onto co-production of policy, co-creation of decisions, etc. The fourth point is that we have to end corruption and cronyism in politics, which people perceive as privilege. Salaries need to be reduced, things have to be done transparently, mandates must be limited – in short, there needs to be more morality in politics.

And how is it going?

To start with, I would say that the most significant progress has certainly been made on the second point: making better thought-out policies to respond to the social emergency. This has in some ways restored legitimacy on the first point: recovering institutions for a different type of politics. Secondly, there are no corruption scandals anywhere in the ‘cities of change’. The rather difficult point that I think still poses difficulties is making institutions more participative, and developing co-production of policy. This is because the traditions, routines, and working methods of the institutions are a long way from this approach. Our institutions have a very 19th and 20th century approach, they are very pre-digital, and discussing ‘co-production’ involves talking about methods for including collective intelligence in such processes – it’s not easy.

There is a very interesting international debate on technological sovereignty, moving beyond a system where all data and all social interactions are monetised by the giants of Silicon Valley. What exactly are you are doing on the digital commons?

We have begun changing the base of proprietary software used by the municipal council, and ensuring that contracts made between the council and software providers do not cede the data used for those services to the companies. This also means ensuring that, in a city that is home to Smart Cities and the Mobile World Congress, technological innovation alters the city’s approach, whilst at the same time changing the thinking behind these forums, although this is no easy task. This is why we appointed a commissioner for innovation and technological sovereignty. For instance, we are working on a new contract for a joint transport card to cover trains, buses, and the underground. This card will be manufactured by a provider, and the contract should specify that the local public transport data of all the residents of Barcelona will be controlled by the public authorities. It is a debate about sovereignty – not state sovereignty, but energy, water, food, and digital sovereignty. Those are the public priorities and the needs that are being debated.

I like the concept of ‘sovereignty of proximity’ or ‘sovereignties’, as too often sovereignty is equated simply with national sovereignty. But many constitutions, such as the Italian one, state that “sovereignty belongs to the people”, not to the nation-state! Yet, in constitutional arrangements the role of cities is still very limited; their actual competences are narrow. Wouldn’t any attempt to place the city at the centre of a renewed governance require a national-level political fight to change the allocation of competences between the different levels?

I like talking about the question of the ‘level of responsibility’ of municipalities, which is high because they have very broad agendas, in terms of responding to the demands of citizens. However their ‘level of powers’ – what they are able to do – is much lower. Not everything can be solved locally, it is obvious. And surely, that is why Barcelona en Comú is trying to build a movement across Catalonia. It is called Catalunya en Comú and it works within a logic of federal alliances with Podemos. This is because if you are unable to have influence at the level of Catalonia itself – where education and healthcare policies are decided – or at the state level, you are not able to act. But at the same time, it is true that at the local level, you are able to intervene more than your powers may suggest. My political mobilisation can reach further than my powers. In other words, the conflict is not only legal, but also political. For example, you may not have powers regarding housing in Catalonia. In Barcelona, these powers are in the hands of the autonomous Generalitat or the state. But you can also take it to the streets with political mobilisations to solve housing problems, and there you can make alliances against Airbnb – with Berlin, with Amsterdam, and with New York. That dynamic will force Airbnb to respond, even though the Spanish, U.S., and Dutch states are unable to solve the problem. So I think we should not be limited by the idea that there are no legal powers.

The opposition between city and state is interesting here. We have a paradoxical situation, as you know, where many cities across Europe – Barcelona is one of them – would like to welcome refugees and yet their nation-states often block this. The Spanish government is no exception. Could we envision a disobedient act, where a city would unilaterally welcome a certain number of refugees? Interestingly, you would be disobeying the national government but paradoxically you would be obeying the European scheme on refugee relocation that the national government is itself disobeying in the first place.

Yes, that is a good example and I think it could be implemented. It would certainly have more political effect than real effect, as you would not solve the big problem of refugees. However you would be sending a very clear message that it is possible to do things at city level and that people are prepared to do things, and it would not just be rhetoric. Certainly, in other cases similar things could be done. In fact, action has been taken here, for example on the ability of property investment funds to buy buildings. The municipal council of Barcelona cannot legally break the law, but it has made it more difficult in many ways for investment funds to make those deals. In some cases it has even foiled these purchases by buying a building itself to prevent it becoming a target for speculation.

German politician Gesine Schwan is bringing forward a proposal to directly connect the European-level relocation of refugees with municipalities, by essentially bypassing the nation-state. Do you think that we need to review the institutional levels that currently govern the European Union, which are mostly organised according to a ‘nation-state to European Union’ structure, thinking instead of a ‘municipality to European Union’ structure?

Yes, I think that this is an area where we can connect existing experiences. There are organisations like EuroCities that have been created for benchmarking and learning between cities. There are working groups dealing with mobility, social policy, and so on. I think that we should follow up more on this approach of coordinating at local level, and we should look for opportunities to have a direct dialogue with the European Union, skipping the state level. I think it will not be at all easy because nation-states have captured the European decision-making structure. So even if cities had an ally in the European Union, it would not be easy, but it could be done. I believe that the European Union would be rather reluctant to take that step. I think the way would be to create a European forum of local authorities, which would grow in strength, and would be able to make the leap in this area.

Can you imagine a European network of cities of change that acts a bit as a counterpower, as much to the European Union as to nation-states?

I think it is not only possible but desirable. I think that the Barcelona municipal authority is already moving in that direction. Many years ago, Barcelona made Sarajevo its eleventh district, and there is also a strong collaboration between Barcelona and the Gaza Strip in Palestine, including a very close relationship with municipal technical officials working in Gaza. The municipality of Barcelona’s tradition of international cooperation is well-established, so building on this would be nothing new.

There seems to be a particularity about Europe, namely the existence of a transnational political structure that governs the spaces that we happen to inhabit. The political theorist Benjamin Barber proposed a global parliament of mayors – which clearly is a very interesting intellectual proposal at the global level because there is no global government. But in Europe we do have at least a simulacrum of a European government. Do you think one could envisage creating an institutionally recognised space for cities, like a European parliament of cities?

It could be done but for it to be really constructive and powerful and for it to make progress, it should not be shaped initially by institutions, bureaucrats, or organisations. It should rather work on the basis of encounters from below and building the legitimacy of mayors that have made an impact (in Naples, Madrid, Barcelona, etc.). It should be seen to be a process working from the bottom up, without any desire to make quick political capital from above. This would be much more resilient and it would ultimately be powerful.

Building a European and international role for cities is a very demanding task. Often when I go and advocate for these ideas with city administrations I notice that municipalities very often lack the staff and the offices to deal with this more political or diplomatic work. If we posit a new global or European role for cities then cities need to invest in an institutional machinery that can actually perform this work.

This is certainly true. The shortcomings that you mention could certainly be addressed if we worked with a more metropolitan approach. The term municipality does not always refer to the same thing: Madrid covers 600 km2 and Barcelona 100 km2. Paris is divided into the City of Paris and Greater Paris. If we worked to build the concept of a Greater Barcelona rather than the City of Barcelona, this would mean moving from 1.5 million inhabitants to 3.5 million. The 25 town councils that make up the metropolitan area would certainly agree to invest resources to foster international processes. Paris may already be working on this, and it has a metropolitan dimension that could be strengthened. It is certainly true that there is a lack of staff and tradition. People think in global terms without stopping to think that cities always have to go through the state to work internationally. This situation would be eased by focusing on the metropolis.

Let’s close with the global dimension proper. More than half the world’s population lives in urban areas, while the top 100 cities produce just under half the world’s GDP. In June 2017, Barcelona hosted a global summit, Fearless Cities, bringing together mayors from across the world to commit to joint initiatives to tackle precisely the global challenges that national leadership seems increasingly unable to address. How do you see this developing further? What concrete actions could be put in place?

In my opinion the best way would be to work with a concrete agenda, and to find the issues that can most easily draw cities in and connect with them. For example, the issue of redistribution, the question of the minimum wage – which has sparked debate in London, Seattle, and New York – and issues of housing, primary education, energy, and water. We could start with issues like these, that are clearly cross-cutting and global, affecting everywhere in the world, and start linking agendas across Europe in a more specific way. This would facilitate the political and institutional side, and we could make the leap more quickly. When people see the shortcomings in the area of policies, this will highlight the shortcomings in the area of polity.

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 1st article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

1 After ‘Stadtluft macht frei’, a German medieval dictum describing a principle of law that offered freedom and land to settlers who took up urban residence for more than “a year and a day.”

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Two years after our first encounter, as the 2008 financial crisis was starting to unravel, the daily agenda of Greek politics was marked by enclosures of natural and civic commons, through privatizations and commodification of public goods and services. In the name of “green development,” the government has been working closely with private companies to develop industrial wind parks along the mountain ridges of most of the Aegean islands. A new Land Plan was also legislated for the island, which re-designates uses of land in ways that seem incompatible with traditional uses of land. Perhaps the most characteristic example has been the designation of some areas below the mountain range, traditionally pasturelands, as “industrial zones.”

In 2012, the government announced its decision to downgrade the Hospital of Ikaria into a branch of the hospital of the nearby island of Samos, thus downgrading the quality and quantity of health services provided at Ikaria. That measure, along with other measures which promoted the commodification of health, threatened to sweep aside the very reason Ikarians, locals and immigrants had built the Panikarian hospital in 1958 – to give all Ikarians equal access to health services. For Ikaria, an island of 8,000 inhabitants, legislation promoting the privatization or commodification of natural resources, public goods and services was seen as a serious threat to their way of life.¹

Frosini Koutsouti and I soon realized that Ikaria was a real-life laboratory for some key themes of our times: the various enclosures of the island’s commons, the people’s resistance in defending and/or reclaiming them, and their invention of innovative new commons. But how could we explore and document these phenomena? We concluded that such an endeavor could not be neutral, as if we could stand apart from local struggles. We could not ignore global neoliberal forces that are violently transforming citizens into consumers of goods whose production depends on relentless enclosures.

In 2012, Frosini and I formed a nonprofit group, the Documentation Research and Action Centre of Ikaria (DRACOI), as a “shelter” for our collaborative work on the commons. One major source of inspiration has been Ivan Illich’s Intercultural Documentation Center in Mexico, which he established in 1961 to document the role of “modern development” in the dismemberment of local cultures, the loss of traditional ways of life and the creation of poverty. Like Illich, we entered into collaboration with various locally based village associations, action committees, cooperatives and other collectivities. Our shared goals lay in protecting basic human rights like equal access to health, education and water. We also wanted to use the commons as a lens for understanding the larger processes of political and sociocultural transformation.

We began to realize that local responses to enclosures of commons could be “read” not merely as isolated moments of resistance against a neoliberal wave, but part of a much larger historical process of enclosure that began in England and elsewhere during the late Middle Ages. Local struggles can be seen as part of the double movement described by economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi, who explained that enclosures driven by the international market economy inevitably provoke countermovements of people seeking to reclaim their commons and create new ones. Seen in this light, the ideals of “green development”² promoted by corporatists as a “solution” to the crisis resembles the “improvements” of nineteenth century Britain that require ongoing enclosure of natural and civic commons.³

In the course of our journey in the immense sea of literature, activism and dialogue on issues of the commons, we came across thinkers posing issues relevant to our own questions and aims. Each added to our navigational horizons. Some became passengers, joining us in common endeavors, for varying periods of time. We also joined larger “ships” of shared inquiry. Such was the “Mataroa” seminar, named after the historical ship that in December 1945 left Greece, loaded with young scientists, students and artists, who, over the course of their lives, contributed to the formation of the thought and visions that was culminated with May 1968. Our ambitious idea for Mataroa was that now an imaginary ship would return to Greece, loaded, this time, with concepts and ideas proper for a critical and radical understanding of contemporary reality. Those were the concepts of crisis, critique, and commons and their enclosures, as well as the idea of a Mediterranean imaginary – a vision of what the region could be.⁴

In 2013, the Mataroa seminar “arrived” at the port of Ikaria, bringing together twenty-seven researchers and commoners from the Mediterranean Sea and beyond, to share their stories. One participant brought the other, some found out about the meeting through its blog (mataroanetwork.org), and each found the main concepts of the seminar to be fruitful organizing concepts for telling many different stories. All participants agreed on the need to deconstruct the idea of “crisis,” which was not to be taken as an objective condition of contemporary reality but as a powerful discourse for “Othering” as a powerful means of legitimizing conspicuous violations of the social contract and fundamental human rights.⁵

The question posed by the “Mataroans” was whether the main components of a new imaginary challenging the capitalist one could be identified. Instead of conceiving of more and more aspects of life in terms of market norms and “development,” could we imagine one that protects and regenerates the very sources of life? Could we discover whether a “Mediterranean Imaginary” existed in contrast to the imaginary of a Hobbesian “war of all against all” – a vision defined by such core values as offering and conviviality within communal institutions,⁶ and within familial and friendly ties?

The seminar was convened without a budget and depended entirely on the local gift economy of Ikarians, who provided hospitality to researchers and commoners. The logic of the gift also penetrated the organization of the seminar, which would “open up” to local society through a series of public talks on current political and social developments in the Mediterranean and beyond, and on issues relevant to Ikarian experiences. With that in mind, the organizing committee invited some of the “Mataroans” to publicly share their experiences and ideas. Some discussed the popular uprisings in Egypt (Samah Selim), Turkey (Merve Cagsirli) and Kentucky (Betsy Taylor). Others addressed the international experience of privatizing systems of water management (Dimitris Zikos), the experience of neoliberal environmental management of commons in Tanzania and Senegal (Melis Ece), and the idea of degrowth (Giorgos Kallis). Another presentation, inspired by American and European press accounts of Ikarian longevity, examined “slacker politics” (Kristin Lawler). (“Slackers” are people who always seek to avoid work.)

The Mataroa seminar-ship left the port of Ikaria for unknown destinations of new initiative, leaving behind a wealth of material available to anyone through a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. As a kind of countergift to our hosts in Ikaria, the Ikarian stakeholders of the Mataroa initiative prepared a publication that documented this dialogue about the commons.⁷ Instead of just publishing the proceedings of the seminar, we created a collection of essays that extended the dialogue sparked by the public talks during the seminar. We invited citizens and groups who are fighting privatizations and commodifications of natural resources, public goods and services, to share their thoughts and experiences. These included the vice chair of the local Association of Health Workers at the Hospital of Ikaria, for example, and SOS Chalkidiki, a coalition of collectives struggling against a huge gold mining plan that will have great environmental, economic and social consequences.⁸

This experience convinced us that, if we are to place the notion of the commons in our analytical epicenter, or use this notion as a compass, we cannot but do it in collaboration with people of praxis, within their own moral and social economies. The journey in this immense sea of the commons continues and new initiatives are already planned with new partners and enduring friends.⁹ The endeavor of creating a methodology of the commons has just started, many collaborations are to be made, and many more lessons remain to be learned.

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.

Maria Bareli-Gaglia (Greece) is an economist, currently pursuing her PhD in Sociology/Social Anthropology (University of Crete). Her thesis involves the study of the annual festivals (paniyiries) at Ikaria. She is chair of DRACOI, a nonprofit, which aims, among others things, at creating the conditions for an equal exchange of knowledge between locals and researchers.

Photo by almekri01

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Today’s WIR-Bank, originally the Wirtschaftsring (“Economic Circle”), was founded in 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression. It was based on the ideas of Silvio Gesell, a German-Argentine merchant and economist who saw how ordinary money circulation had collapsed. Money fearfully clutched rather than freely exchanged only makes a downturn worse.

By reinventing their own currencies based on long-term reciprocity among community members – rather than gold or central bank limits – communities can break this vicious cycle. Hundreds of such currencies sprang up in the Great Depression, as noted by Yale’s Irving Fisher, the early monetary economist.¹ Recent research by the authors² confirms that WIR circulation does indeed accelerate in a recession; as people hoard their limited holdings of Swiss Francs (SFr), they are more willing to use WIR for market exchanges.

WIR are actually somewhat less valuable than SFr because they are less negotiable: not easily changed for another currency, nor accepted outside the circle of WIR users. But that circle of Swiss circulation is fairly wide. In 2013, WIR counted some 50,000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) among its clients, enabling 1.43 billion Swiss Francs (SFr) of trade, or US$1.59 billion.³ About 80 percent of WIR users are SMEs and larger firms; the rest are households.

What is the social basis of the WIR’s long-term reciprocity among people? Textbooks on the origin of money usually start with the “double-coincidence of wants” problem: If you and I are both to benefit from barter, it’s not enough for you to want what I have – you also need to have what I want. As the division of labor grows, such double-coincidences are harder to find. We need to find long circular chains of single coincidences, wherein A gives Bread to B, who gives Cheese to C, who gives an Apple to A. Money helps solve this problem by serving as an intermediary “good” that everyone wants.

This explanation begins and ends with individual wants. But our species has not survived primarily by such exchange. A century of anthropological and historical research shows that it was gifts – not money or barter – that brought the original human economy into being.⁴

In his Great Transformation, Polanyi characterizes the gift economy as “free gifts that are expected to be reciprocated, though not necessarily by the same individuals – a procedure minutely articulated and perfectly safeguarded by elaborate methods of publicity.” This is the original solution to the “double coincidence” problem – a network of multilateral gifts and reciprocity between individual and group – not just two individuals.

Even the earliest forms of currency were community records, not impersonal stores of value. Lietaer’s Mystery of Money describes pottery-based currencies centered on ancient temples to Mother Goddesses and medieval shrines to the Virgin Mary. These early monies were a way of remembering personal indebtedness. The Latin root for “monetary” – deriving from the temple of , the mother goddess who “monitors” all exchange – reflects this fact. The WIR is Juno’s descendant, a way of monitoring multilateral (not just bilateral) reciprocity, within a community of named individuals.

Impersonal money as the basis of trade came much later, allowing the economy to stretch far beyond interpersonal community. But this new impersonal money creates its own new problem – How should its quantity be controlled? Too much means inflation and wasted resources; too little causes deflation and unemployment. Precious metals are an arbitrary form of control, and central banks a blunt one. History shows shortages and gluts for gold and silver, and the limitations of central banks are confirmed by current conditions.

The supply of WIR is not limited by gold or central bank “base money” – it grows by as much or as little as people are willing to trade in it. That willingness is greatest (a) in a recession, (b) in highly cyclical industries like construction and hospitality, and (c) among those shortest on cash. Unlike ordinary money, it flows where it is most needed.

WIR is a community currency, but at even its small-nation scale, it is no longer highly “communitarian.” Time Banks (US), LETS (Canada) and Fureai kippu (Japan) are other notable currencies that are closer to their community roots. But like all of these, the WIR recreates an awareness of need-based gift exchange. It may be the form of exchange to which our species is best suited.

James Stodder (USA) teaches economics and econometrics in the School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Management Department at the US Coast Guard Academy. His research is on exchange systems, behavioral economics, inequality and economic anthropology.

Bernard Lietaer (Belgium) is the author of The Future of Money (translated into eighteen languages), and an expert in the design and implementation of currency systems.  He codesigned and implemented the convergence mechanism to the single European currency system (the Euro) and served as president of the Electronic Payment System at the National Bank of Belgium (the Belgian Central Bank).

Photo by AlicePopkorn

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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

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Photo by Daniel Mennerich

The post Karl Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation” in five minutes appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The world – and chiefly among it, first world countries – seems to me, to be moving away from a purely industrial model, aimed mainly at production, to a new type of society which contours and goals have yet to be clearly defined.”

Vicent Lassalle: Michel Bauwens is the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He is a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, organizing major global conferences on the commons and its economics. In the first semester of 2014, Michel Bauwens was research director of the floksociety.org research group, which produced the first integrated Commons Transition Plan for the government of Ecuador, in order to create a ‘social knowledge economy’, with fifteen associated policy papers.

Q: I usually ask the people I interview if they feel we are living through a transition. As one of the main contributors to the Commons Transition website, I might forgo the question and simply ask you to describe what the Commons Transition is.

The reasons why these Commons are so necessary today are first, that we are amid a systemic crisis and that many of the solutions to solve our issues are hidden away in the hands of private companies. These solutions are not being used because no one has found a way to make money out of them or because they threaten their existing legacy systems. To have such solutions available as Commons, i.e. to have them available as shared resources for all who can use and improve them, would enable the transition to take place much faster. I cannot see solutions such as the circular economy working if they are not open source.

Secondly, we have to consider the way we collectively use the Planet’s resources. Some figures tell us that we are currently using 1.5 Planet Earth’s worth of resources every year, but others, from REBus for example, have calculated that we are using 3 Planets worth of raw materials. So, the sharing and mutualisation of resources is vital to our survival. According to the study of the French engineer Francois Grosse, who was asked to do this by Veolia, the circular economy cannot work if the growth of consumption of raw material is above 1% per year. If we grow more, we can only postpone ‘peak resources’ for maximum 60 years. We simply cannot maintain a modern civilization at the current rate of resource usage.

We are currently experiencing both a failure of the State and of the market, and so we need new initiatives from civil society to address and solve these issues. I can give you an example: Wikispeed is a community project that has led to a car that claims to be five times more fuel-efficient than any other on the market but, they can’t seem to gain interest from financiers because they refuse to use patents, and so their ‘business model’ is teaching their method, which means such a car is not being produced.

We must rethink the way our economic system works. I believe in “cosmo=localization”: everything that is heavy should be local and everything that is light is global. Another way to name this would be to talk about ‘subsidiarity in material production’, i.e. to produce as close as possible to the place of need.  This is important because transportation nearly has three times the environmental cost of production. We need to reorganise the world’s industrial system with distributed manufacturing. Think about the coffee cups you get from your local Starbucks. They are made from petrol extracted in Saudi Arabia, which has taken nature one million years to produce (!), this is then shipped to China to be turned into those plastic covers, then reshipped across the world. Think of all the resources used for items with an average lifespan of 15 seconds for an espresso cup. There is such a waste in our current system, that we desperately need a transition. A transition towards decentralised, on-demand manufacturing which has access to common global knowledge, using only what we need, with biodegradable and modular constituents, rather than ‘planned obsolescence’.

I am not at all against globalization, quite the contrary. However, concerning physical goods we need to relocate production. It is absurd that a tennis ball used in a Wimbledon match has travelled 40’000km during its production.

To lower this growth of our usage of materials  to under 1%, the mutualisation of goods is our best way forward. A shared car can replace a very large number of individual cars for example. We need to apply this principle systematically.

Q: You mention sharing or putting in common knowledge, how do your answer criticism about the lack of competition in such a system, so useful for innovation in classical economics?

Today, it is as if we were playing football. There are teams (companies), within these teams there exists cooperation, but outside is permanent competition, and you never share the ball.

I would prefer to see a revolution in how we deal with technical knowledge. I am not for the abolition of competition, which I think is rather impossible, and not sure it is a good thing either, but for its contextualisation in larger collaborative ecosystems. Companies collaborate on the technical knowledge but compete for the deployment of said technology. This is to stop the artificial scarcity of ideas and knowledge and to locate the competition where it belongs, i.e. a struggle for excellence in servicing customers. This being said, I am also positive about new ways of production and consumption that create solidarity between consumers and producers, for example such as in community-supported agriculture. The huge Seikatsu cooperative clubs in Japan are a great example of this.

Some people are afraid that this would reduce innovation. Actually, the opposite is true. There is more innovation before and after a patent than during its lifespan. The patent only allows a company time to recuperate its investment in research in development, which does work but only during the initial 5 years. I am not for the eradication of patents but for example the reduction of their length and I am for the restriction of the duration of copyright terms, which are now an absurd 90 years after the death of a composer, which mostly serve to make money for corporations late after an artist’s death.

Compare Polio and Aids. The research for Polio was in the public domain and a vaccine was massively distributed within 5 years of its discovery. The research for Aids was held privately in pharmaceutical companies during 15 years during which these companies refused to sell the drugs at a reasonable price. Millions died waiting, and millions more got infected. In the greater scheme of things, I am not convinced our current model works so well for society. To stay with the pharmaceutical industry, 99% of investments are directed to 1% of illnesses, mainly those affecting developed nations. For example – I read this yesterday –  the number one cause of death for Americans under 45 years of age is physical violence. There is very little money being directed towards fighting trauma because it mainly is an issue for underprivileged segments of society.

I’ll give you another example. I’m from Belgium and over there, we have universal healthcare and the choice in the hospital you wish to go to. So, we have the best of the competitive American model let’s say, and the best of the British NHS mutualistic model. There is still incentive for a hospital to be good but the fact that its income comes from the State insures that all citizens have the same quality care, which is not the case in privatized systems.

In Commons, companies share knowledge but there will always be companies that will be better at developing better services and will be more competitive that way.

Q: Reading some of the research and proposals on your site, I understood that, as an answer to the “threat” of automation, you were for the development of co-ownership of machines which work would generate income for the coops that owned them. Did I understand this proposal correctly and if so could you tell me more of this one-one exchange between man and machine?

I am for open cooperatives. The real challenge in this transition is to find the right interaction between the entities that work within the Market and the contributors to Commons. I am for a transition from extractive models to generative models.

Let’s take Über or Airbnb for example. There is a mutualisation of means but these companies generate a heavy social cost: Über undermines the social security of workers and Airbnb has an extremely fast gentrification impact on some neighbourhoods which drives out permanent residents. Could we imagine models in which companies that use commons instead of negatively impacting society, generate social value? A good example is industrial agriculture where each year the soil is loses in nutrients compared to ecological agriculture where each year the soil is richer than the previous year. We need a pro-generative approach.

The solution for me is to use open cooperatives: coops that create commons and those commons then need to be integrated into generative business models. This can be applied to machines as well. The problem is not automation, bu that the gains of automation are not put in the productive economy, but in the speculative activities, creating huge inflation in housing and other non-productive stocks. In contrast, if the machines are owned by the direct producers, the surplus can be re-invested in new activities.

Surprisingly in the world today, there are more people who work for coops than for multinationals. A French study I believe has proved that ecologic coops have a lifespan 3 to 5 times greater than their purely for profit start-up counterparts. So, the change I am describing is not going to be easy but neither is it impossible. Through mutualisation we can achieve lower production costs which make these models competitive.

Q: Maybe a stupid question but who gives ownership to these commons? Who enforces the right to ownership?

At an international level, the answer can only be a political one. Peter Barnes, in his book With Liberty and Dividends for All, describes what he calls a “Sky Trust”, a national organisation where citizens agree to consider air as a common. Everyone has a right to use the resource to a certain percentage. If you over use, you pay people who underuse it. It resembles Cap and Trade but it has the added advantages of means redistribution among citizens, on top of incentivising prudent management of resources and taxing waste.

There are also a lot of very interesting initiatives at city-scale, particularly in Italy. There was a constitutional change during the Rodotà Commission ten years ago. Also the Bologna Regulations on the Caring and Rejuvenation of Urban Commons gave the right to citizens to legally claim a resource such as industrial blithe or an under-cared for park, and turn it into a common and manage the resource. Usually the citizen groups who take advantage of this law install a polycentric governance with representatives from the city, neighbourhood, local businesses, etc.

Q: This actually leads me to a question I had on the governance models you recommend. Which are they?

With regards to material resources, Elinor Ostrom has published much on the topic of the governance of physical resources, but that is not my speciality. I am more focused on digital organisations. The difference there being that one is dealing with non-rival goods, so there is a lesser need for negative management such as sanctions. What we see emerge in these cases are tri-archical structures. There is a self-managed community made up of the contributors (for Wikipedia, the content writers and editors), then you have an entrepreneurial coalition and finally, there is often a Governance Foundation (for Wikipedia again, the Wikimedia Foundation) that manages the cooperation infrastructure. The Foundation doesn’t direct the work and doesn’t function following market rules but it guarantees that both the contributors and the entrepreneurs can work on the long run.

My hypothesis is that these foundations form a  kind of State for the commons. They constitute a virtual territory, and constitute a “for-benefit association” which manages the ‘common good’ of this virtual territory.

I imagine using the Commons and in particular Digital Commons, for the creation of new transnational structures, which would live next to existing inter-national structures. Karl Polanyi, in his book The Great Transformation, talks about what he calls the “double movement”. The History of capitalism moves back and forth between free market periods, which are phases of economic liberalisation, and regulatory periods, roughly changing every thirty years. Unfortunately today, this pendulum is broken. Capital is transnational but regulations are still decided at a State level, so popular revolts (either on Bernie Sanders’ side or Donald Trump’s side) are incapable of leading to market regulation. So, our economic system is broken.

The solution I propose is that the ethical and generative coops and civic coalitions which great commons throughout the world, start being organised transnationally and trans-locally. This includes city coalitions such as the 40-city coalition to regulate Über. This shows that this transnational regulatory movement is both top-down and bottom-up. The crisis in the Nation-State model is leading to the emergences of this new counter-power.

Nobody knows where this will lead to but I believe we are slowly moving to a post-Westphalian model. Our time resembles the 16th century in a way. Before the Peace of Westphalia, there were many forms of public governance: Germany was somewhat of a feudal federation, you had the Hanseatic League, city-states in Italy, etc. Before the hegemony of the Westphalian State model, there were many models and we may be returning to such a plurality of models, at least during this time of transition.

I like quoting Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters”. He said this to describe fascism but today, one can wonder if it doesn’t apply to right-wing movements of national-protectionism that we see with Trump, Brexit, Marine Le Pen in France, etc. I doubt that these reactionary movements or a continuation of neo-liberal deregulation are realistic given their consistent failures of such a long period of time. Cosmo-localisation would be for me a better way forward.

Q: You are for Universal Basic Income (UBI) and we could talk about this complex topic for a long time, so I will just ask one question. How would you finance it?

There is currently in left-wing parties, a great debate about UBI. After initially being very keen on the idea, there are a growing number of critics favouring other solutions. For example in the U.S., a growing number of people support a “Job-guarantee” scheme, in which the state doesn’t provide an income but a job to everyone. I believe both solutions are actually compatible but the arguments for each go as follow:

UBI gives the opportunity to an increase minority of people to finance their transition. I believe UBI is a transitional demand to allow people to develop a more social-oriented life. On the other hand, the Job-Guarantee scheme remains within the existing societal system which has too many external negative externalities. Within our given context, UBI is a better solution but I do not know how realistic it is so, I prefer to speak of “Transitional Income”. By which I mean, that society decides to transition from our current Market / State bipolar system to one with the added Civil Society power balance – and I am happy to witness a growing number of people who wish this – and society decides to subsidise let’s say 10% of people to work out the transition. The way I imagine it would be to start creating Common platforms (of food, clothing, housing, etc.) and redesign the way these sectors are currently structured to minimise their negative external impacts on society and the environment.

There is a historic precedent to all this. If during the Middle Ages, people were capable with their limited education and means to subsidise 15% to 25% of people to exit the feudal system and work as monks, we should be capable to do the same today for the survival of the species. The argument that we cannot “afford” to finance a UBI or any other scheme enabling the transition is a false argument, since we are massively subsidising the banks through compound interest. It is just a question of priority.

To answer more specifically your initial question on how to finance a UBI, I am a big supporter of Yanis Varoufakis’ idea to finance it with Commons. The idea is that today, we have many perpetual annuities generated by commons, for example real estate speculation. You own a house and the city decides to put a metro station nearby, the price of your home will increase but not thanks to anything you have done. This added-value is not yours but society’s and should be returned to the community when you sell the home (at least to a certain degree of course, it is okay for individuals to make a moderate profit). We need to start taxing non-deserved incomes. Yann Moulier-Boutang also proposes a variation on the Tobin tax to finance the Commons.

Q: One of the most interesting large scale explorations of Commons is the FLOK Society in Ecuador. Could you please give me an update on where this project is today?

At the national level, it finally did not have many results except concerning reforms of their  Intellectual Property regulations. The country has decided to maintain its extractive economic system and has even strengthened it, massively leasing their forests to Chinese mining firms. However, it gave birth to a number of local and municipal projects, for example in the district of Sigchos.

A piece of good news is that I will soon be working with the city of Ghent in Belgium, to study in partnership with all the local actors of the collaborative economy to propose a set of public policies in favour of Commons.

All this shows me that cities are the right partners to move forward, because nation states are in crisis. Many cities are doing very interesting things such as Bologna which I have already mentioned, but also Seoul, Barcelona,…

Q: You have started to answer this in part (partnering with municipalities, basic income, etc.) but I wanted to ask you specifically, how do we move gradually from our current state to the next? How do we transition?

The way we see things is to change through “seed forms”. By which I mean, that when a crisis arises, people try to find solutions. Because of the systemic nature of our current crisis, the solutions we need to adopt must come from outside our current framework. We will find our solutions in seed form among social innovations. For example, during the feudal systemic crisis at the end of the Middle Ages, we see the creation of Italian City States which laid the groundwork for capitalism, through the creation of accountancy, financial instruments like bonds, etc.

I believe we are witnessing today the seeds of the “Commons system”, a system centred around Commons which doesn’t mean that will be the only economic or governance form. There will still be States and a Market, it is just a question of what the centre of the system will be. Today, we are centred around the market, tomorrow, I believe we will be centred around Commons, as Paul Mason and Jeremy Rifkin have also been predicting.

We can’t predict the future but we can analyse in detail what is happening. Oikos, a Belgian ecological think tank, showed in a study recently that in the last ten years, civil and citizen initiatives have increase 10-fold. This was confirmed by other studies. So, at the very least for western cities, in particular in Europe, we are seeing a real explosion of alternatives. In East-Asia for example, Taiwan also shows some very interesting examples in terms of civil governance. I just finished a project which analyzed 40 urban commons project, half of these from the Global South, so it is really happening across the globe to some extent at least.

Q: As an expert focused on Digital Commons, what is your point of view on the use of the Blockchain in the future you describe?

There are a couple issues with the Blockchain. First, the environmental cost is currently much too high. Because the chains need to be checked with high computing power, the energy cost of the blockchain is not sustainable. Secondly, there is a lot of hype but very little reality as of yet, though I expect to see a number of prototypes and pilots in 2017.

I believe more in other tools. I actually just recently wrote a report entitled Value in the Commons Economy: Developments in Open and Contributory Value Accounting. Another study on P2P Value, showed that out of 300 commons analysed, 78% of them used or were working on contributory accounting. I also have just read an analysis of fisheries in Africa by Chimere Diaw, showing the existence of similar practices for hundreds of years. We are not very familiar with this in the West, but there are very sophisticated systems which combine Commons and market functions, long before the advent of capitalism.

Today, Open Design Communities in the digital space are doing the same thing but in a digital environment.

The second tool I am very interested in is Open Logistics. If we wish to create a circular economy, it is not possible to stay within a given private competitive company, no matter how large, even in one sector of the Market economy. We need to develop participatory ecosystems, entrepreneurial coalitions centred around certain commons and the best way to do this is to create Open Supply Chains. And maybe for this, the Blockchain could be useful, maybe to guarantee the provenance of goods or services, their quality, etc.

Again, some people might criticise opening Supply Chains, which are seen today as areas of strong competitive advantage within the Market economy but as I mentioned, we need to exit our current system somehow because we can’t continue consuming multiple planets which we don’t have.

We need to develop alternatives so that when crises hit, we have them available as prototypes that others can learn from. Similar to the monastic world which offered a way out of the war-based Roman economy in crisis at the time, and eventually led to feudal economies with a entirely different functioning based on local domains and production. Jean Gimpel gives a very interesting description of this transition in his book La révolution industrielle du Moyen Âge. In it, he shows that 90% of technical innovations at the time came out of monasteries. They did this at a cost which was much lower than that of the Roman elite.

[1] Ecuador’s FLOK Society (Free-Libre, Open Knowledge) project was originally commissioned in 2013 andmarked the first time a nation state commissioned a practical plan to transition to a mature Peer to Peer Economy. It was initiated to “fundamentally re-imagine Ecuador”, based on the principles of open networks, peer production and a commons of knowledge.

[2] You can find more on this example here.

Photo by Moyan_Brenn

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At the outset Balthazar briefly summarizes his own intellectual journey as an economist, looking back on his earlier assumption that the economy as a whole was the spontaneous result of innumerable interacting trends interacting in a complex manner, and could be ultimately traced to individual preferences. This is the common perspective of most mainstream economists, who view the economic system as something that “just is,” arising naturally or inevitably, and not the result of power or vested interests.

Balthazar gradually came to question this assumption: Is our economic system really something that “just happened,” because most people want things more or less this way? He noticed, in particular, the absence from public debates of any consideration for the possibility that a majority of people, absent institutional constraints, might have preferred increased leisure over increased consumption. From there he considered the destructive effect such a preference would have on the conventional economic paradigm of avoiding idle productive capacity and idle investment capital, and preventing general deflation. The long-term results of abundance and leisure — post-scarcity — would be the collapse of capital asset and securities values, the collapse of the tax base, and default on public debt.

In examining this question — whether an economic system geared towards consumption rather than leisure is truly the result of spontaneous individual preference — Balthazar goes back to Keynes’s Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren. In that work, Keynes envisioned a world of superabundance and leisure, with an average work week of 15 hours, by the year 2030. He considers whether Keynes was correct that the natural outcome of technological advances in productivity, absent any institutional forces to thwart that natural course, would have been a future society of increased leisure and abundance, and radically reduced work hours. And if he was correct, what institutional forces have prevented that outcome?

Balthazar suggests that the institutional mindset of those making macroeconomic policy, and the Keynesian orthodoxy itself, are geared toward maximizing the utilization of production capacity, finding profitable outlets for investment capital, and avoiding deflation. These institutional goals of American capitalism, and the capitalist state, are directly at odds with the possibilities of a post-work, post-scarcity society. And the economy’s tendency towards increasing GDP rather than leisure may reflect, not the sum total of revealed individual preference, but systemic imperatives.

We face the real possibility that, far from a case in which we are the principals and those in charge of the economy are honest agents — with the state reflecting the spontaneous preferences of the public and the corporate economy functioning as a sort of “dollar democracy” — the actual state of affairs is one of the alleged “agents” pursuing interests of their own and using the “principals” as means to an end.

Specifically, the doctrine of “economic maximalism,” or growth for its own sake, is at the heart of a legitimizing ideology actively promoted by all the centers of cultural reproduction, that not only present growth and increased consumption as desirable, but present a state of affairs in which these goals are maximized as natural, inevitable, and — yes — the “spontaneous outcome of individual preferences.” In short, we live in a system whose complex of ideological institutions conditions to view its dynamics as a fact of nature rather than something that results from the application of power and reflects the interests of those who are in control. The system conditions us to believe in a legitimizing ideology, that is, precisely identical to what Balthazar himself believed fresh out of school.

In developing this thesis, Balthazar first does an in-depth content analysis of political and economic commentary on the Great Recession in The Economist, examining the ways in which the overwhelming dominance of the economic maximalist ideology in the pages of that publication. In all its commentary and reporting, The Economist took for granted that getting people to work and consume more was the only common sense path, and that the desirability of these things was an overwhelming collective social consensus.

He next conducts a broad survey of the history of political economy to trace the origins of that ideology, and the path by which it attained the status of orthodoxy. Especially interesting in this regard is the prevalence, in the political economy of the 18th century, of the idea of the spontaneous preferences of ordinary working people as an obstacle to be overcome, and the need to coerce or manipulate them — for the sake of some “higher good” — into working harder than they would have chosen to if left to themselves. And as I have documented elsewhere, there is a large body of commentary by propertied advocates of Enclosure arguing that depriving the rural population of their rights to subsistence on the common was absolutely necessary to get them to work as hard as their masters wanted them to, rather than simply working until their own perceived wants were satisfied.

And even Adam Smith, Balthazar notes, for all his break with mercantilism, shows a great deal of continuity with it in treating the good of the commonwealth as a thing in its own right over and above the revealed preferences of actual working people. In this he anticipated commentators today who treat the “economy” as an end in itself. The most egregious example I ever heard was a neoconservative commentator on one of the cable news channels during the Iraq War in 2003, gloating that Americans preferred to work longer hours and forego the six weeks of vacation their German counterparts enjoyed so that “their country” could afford to maintain carrier groups in the Indian Ocean.

Despite the pretense of value-neutrality in mainstream economics, the one question neoclassicals and Keynesians compulsively avoid addressing is the source of their own implicit valuation of “jobs,” full employment and maximizing output. And there is no consideration of the ethical problem of whether maximizing those values amounts to “nudging… Keynes’ grandchildren into higher levels of work and consumption. There is, in other words, virtually no discussion about the legitimacy of a general (economic) interest that would supersede the sum of all private (economic) interests.”

In the second part of his essay, in order to “examine the desirability of economic growth from a perspective other than that of neoclassical economics,” Balthazar “step[s] outside of economic science altogether.” Specifically, he examines the process of individual preference formation, and once again calls into question “the mainstream view that such a collective preference [for economic activity] is merely reflecting the aggregation of individual interests and is therefore not superseding them.”

In his critique of the framing of economic maximalism as simply the reflection of cumulative individual “revealed preference,” he refers to four narratives. The first narrative is the radical historiography of primitive accumulation, in which capitalism as a historic system is shown to have been established by large-scale coercion rather than emerging spontaneously. The second is Keynes’s assessment that the value placed on growth, production and consumption, to the extent that they are a genuine and widespread cultural phenomenon, are an atavism or holdover from the age of scarcity, one that should be superseded by the superior values of abundance and leisure. (I would add here that, to the extent that it serves as the legitimizing ideology of a system established by a history written in letters of blood and fire, as examined in the first narrative, it is doubly atavistic and undesirable.) The third, while recognizing that the ideology of growth maximization supersedes spontaneous individual preferences, nevertheless sees it as potentially useful in some cases for remedying the less desirable consequences of individual preferences (here Balthazar focuses on the neoconservatives, who resemble the enclosing Whig magnates in their desire to motivate the working class to more industry). And the fourth narrative (of special interest from the perspective of post-scarcity technology)

searches plausible alternatives to the tendency of markets to commodify both goods and labor services. More generally, this literature is searching for production and exchange arrangements that rely on motivational frameworks other than the hedonistic self-interest of homo economicus.

Balthazar finishes his essay by drawing the conclusion that there is no basis, either in neoclassical economics or in any generally accepted moral theory, for justifying the commanding institutions of our society in promoting growth maximization as a systemic goal overriding individual preferences.

One thing that would have benefited this essay — and it’s odd that it’s missing, considering Keynes’s scenario in Economic Possiblities For Our Grandchildren assumed technologically-based increases in productivity — would have been for Balthazar to address the possibility that technologies could actually increase consumption (in the sense of use-value) even as labor hours and nominal GDP decrease.

The problem is that, in the context of post-scarcity technologies, the very concepts of “growth” and “consumption” are ambiguous. Traditional metrics of “growth” like GDP measure the total monetized value of inputs like material resources and labor consumed to create a given unit of consumption. But as smaller and smaller amounts of labor are required to produce the same use-value, and the ephemeralization of production technology has the same effect on capital expenditures and natural resource inputs, use-value is increasingly becoming decoupled from exchange-value. To take the extreme example, in a world of Star Trek matter-energy replicators the possibilities for consumption of desired goods would be for all intents and purposes unlimited — and yet both GDP and ecological footprints would be virtually zero. As technology pushes us into the realm of abundance, the material standard of living improves even as the processes by which we produce that standard of living disappear from the cash nexus.

I examined this phenomenon at some length in an article for the P2P Foundation Blog, “Abundance Creates Utility But Destroys Exchange Value” (Feb. 7, 2010).

From this standpoint, the state’s Hamiltonian policy of propping up the artificial exchange value of material inputs and labor and creating an artificial need for them — snatching scarcity from the jaws of abundance — serves the same function as the artificial scarcity imposed by the landed classes of England in the Enclosure movement. It compels laborers to do extra, unnecessary work in order to support a parasitic class in addition to themselves, and encloses the production process within the control of an institutional structure that serves no technically necessary function.

An explicit examination of the autonomists (particularly the “Exodus” model Negri and Hardt discuss in Commonwealth) would also have been of value in Balthazar’s treatment of the fourth narrative. That is, their thesis that networked communications and other modern technologies are
reducing the significance of physical capital, making human social relationships in society at large increasingly the most important factor of production, and blurring the lines between social life and work in a way that makes the capitalist and wage employment increasingly superfluous — and overdue to be bypassed.

The section in which Balthazar discusses Mauss and Polanyi on gift economies would have benefited from some reference to David Graeber.

Finally, it’s worth noting that analysts as far back as Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops have argued that it would be possible to immediately reduce the work week to 15 hours with no reduction in standard of living, simply by eliminating waste production, guard labor, and the surplus labor consumed by rentiers.

Overall, I recommend Balthazar’s essay highly as a contribution to post-scarcity literature.

Photo by kenteegardin

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