This post is part of our series of articles on the Commons sourced from the Green European Journal Editorial Board. These were published as part of Volume 14 “Finding Common Ground”:

In May 2016 the European Parliament voted on an amendment for the “recognition of energy as a common good” as part of a report about decentralised local production, the “New Deal for Energy Consumers”. While the amendment was voted down by 298 votes to 345 votes, this vote reflects the support of almost half of Europe´s democratic representatives for seeing energy as a common good. The amendment was proposed by the “Commons Intergroup” which is part of the European Parliament´s Intergroup on “Common goods and public services” and is made up of Members of the European Parliament from different parliamentary groups, mainly Greens, the United Left (GUE/NGL), and several Socialists & Democrats Group (S&D) members.

In mid-November of this year, the European Commons Assembly was held in cooperation with that same Commons Intergroup in the European Parliament to promote the establishment of creative institutions and political alternatives, from the local to the European level. In the call for the Assembly, ‘commoners’ from around Europe stated: “We call upon governments, local and national, as well as European Union institutions to facilitate the defence and growth of the commons, to eliminate barriers and enclosures, to open up doors for citizen participation, and to prioritise the common good in all policies.”

The dominant European policy priorities are in stark contrast with the commons perspective – an ethical worldview favouring stewardship, peer-to-peer cooperation, and social and ecological sustainability.

Today, however, the predominant discourses that permeate political discussions in the EU and trump all others are economic growth, competitiveness, and efficiency. The majority of EU policy is focused on macro-economic indicators and the promotion of large commercial actors. Citizens are often uni-dimensionally viewed as entrepreneurs or consumers. For many Europeans and for many global citizens the business of the EU is big business and big member states. There is a growing concern among citizens that decisions affecting the well-being of local communities are often driven by distant centralised institutions with other priorities. In fact, the growing feeling of lack of control is eroding confidence in our political institutions on all levels, often sparking xenophobic and nationalistic movements.

The Commons across Europe

The dominant European policy priorities are in stark contrast with the commons perspective – an ethical worldview favouring stewardship, peer-to-peer cooperation, and social and ecological sustainability. The commons discourse considers people as actors deeply embedded in social relationships, communities, and ecosystems. This holistic perspective also tends to overcome dominant subject-object dualisms and to consider human activity as a part of the larger living bio-physical commons.

Across Europe, more and more people are co-governing and co-creating resources. Whether in small local initiatives or in larger networks, new civic and economic structures are moving beyond the rigid dichotomies of producer and consumer, commercial and non-commercial, state and market, public and private, to construct successful new hybrid projects. The commons use voluntary social collaboration in open networks to generate social-environmental value, in ways that large markets and exclusive private property rights do not and cannot. This enormous value, though it may not be monetised, nonetheless constitutes a significant part of societal well-being in academic research, energy production, nature protection, health, creative sectors, drug development, and digital innovation. However it is largely ignored by EU policymakers and institutions, resulting in the atrophy of such social value-creation or, even worse, its appropriation by large investors and corporations.

Notable examples are community renewable energy, Wikipedia, permaculture, the peer-to-peer collaborative economy, distributed solidarity structures, and open source software. Sometimes local commons initiatives are sparked by the scarcity created by economic crisis, or in response to political powerlessness, or just fuelled by the need for social-ecological connectedness.

The European Union is well placed on many terrains to strengthen, promote, and facilitate commoning activities and commons-based production.

Building the commons encourages EU institutions to take a more holistic ecosystemic approach by combining collaborative, participatory, and egalitarian principles with concrete conditionality in favour of social cohesion and environmental objectives. The moral notion of common goods refers to goods that benefit society as a whole, and are fundamental to people’s lives, regardless of how they are governed. Certain matters will need to be claimed as common goods politically in order to manage them as commons, sustainably, and equitably in terms of participation, access, or use. For instance, natural resources, health services, or useful knowledge, or – like the above example in the European Parliament – decentralised renewable energy.

The European Union’s Responsibility

Due to its central role in policy-making for all the Member States, and its significant funding budget, the European Union is well placed on many terrains to strengthen, promote, and facilitate commoning activities and commons-based production. These initiatives and practices demand more flexible institutional and legal frameworks that at once prevent centralisation of market-power and promote dynamic, collaborative, self-governed civic networking. This includes orienting policy to enhance the blossoming of vibrant and caring local communities. To some degree this also implies stimulating new economic identities, where an individual or group orients their economic activity towards caring for the common good of community and their natural, social, and cultural surroundings, instead of solely towards maximising material interests.

According to a 2015 report published by the European Committee of the Regions, a “commons-based approach means that the actors do not just share a resource but are collaborating to create, produce or regenerate a common resource for a wider public, the community. They are cooperating, they are pooling for the commons”. This means helping people and communities to generate and regenerate urban, cultural, and natural commons as active citizens, producers, designers, creators, care-takers, local organic farmers, and renewable energy promotors. It also means embracing an open knowledge economy while promoting the Internet as a digital commons based on open standards, universal access, flexible copyright rules, decentralised internet infrastructures, and democratic governance.

Knowledge Policies

With regards to policies on knowledge management, the EU puts great emphasis on what one could call the ‘enclosure of knowledge’. This enclosure happens through the expansion of intellectual property protection, both within and outside of Europe by means of trade policies. Aside from potentially spurring innovation and helping European industries, this also results in, for instance, long patent monopolies on medicines and long copyright terms.

The copyright reform discussed in 2016 is of crucial importance to the online information commons. It will determine the boundaries of innovative social value-creation through sharing and collaboration online. Sufficient exceptions and limitations to copyright are essential. For example, allowing for text and data mining would support scientific and academic research. Moreover, assuring the right to link information from one web to another is one of the key characteristics of sharing online.

On the global level, through the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Health Organisation (WHO), and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), the EU tends to defend the enclosure of knowledge, promoting further expansion of intellectual property rights of all kinds, from medicines and broadcast signals, to education materials and climate technologies. To allow for a collaborative knowledge sharing economy, the EU will have to be more open to socially inclusive and flexible business models that are more compatible with both the digital era and the urgent needs of people, in both the North and South.

The EU continues to allow the centralised infrastructures of giant telecom operators and monopolistic internet companies to control and commodify people’s online lives.

The European Commission has made some efforts that recognise the need to share knowledge and embrace the possibilities of the digital age. This is for example reflected in commitments on open access publishing mandate in the context of Research and Development funding, open data in some of its policies, and the exploration of open science. Recently, Members States called for a review of monopoly-extending rules on biomedical knowledge in the area of pharmaceuticals due to concerns over increasingly high medicines prices.

However, these moves towards knowledge sharing remain timid and are not at the centre of EU policy strategies as it remains mostly conformist to the interests of the cultural industries, the pharmaceutical industry, or agribusiness.

The Internet and the Collaborative Economy

The recent establishment of net neutrality in the EU, an essential prerequisite for a free and open internet, marks an important victory. Yet truly promoting an “internet commons” would include supporting a universal infrastructure based on public and community-controlled digital infrastructures. It would need to be structurally disengaged from dominant market positions and include broad non-commercial access to bandwidth in spectrum, and open source software.

In its “Digital Single Market” strategy, the EU continues to allow the centralised infrastructures of giant telecom operators and monopolistic internet companies to control and commodify people’s online lives. This is accompanied by the violation of our personal data for indiscriminate political-economic control, and the general extraction of profit from social interactions and peer to peer activity.

As part of the Digital Single Market strategy the European Commission released its “European Agenda for the Collaborative economy” in June 2016. The Agenda deals with issues of taxation, market liability, contractual agreements, and consumer clarity. However it fails to pay attention to democratic structures, social equity, and ecological health – the cornerstones of community-based peer-to-peer collaborative initiatives that regenerate the commons. In contrast, the EU Agenda seems to welcome – with just a few technical caveats – multinational “collaborative” platforms such as Uber and AirBnB despite their extractive, non-embedded nature and their tendency to undermine national laws that ensure fair competition and protect workers. The motor of a commons-based collaborative economy is not just a consumer seeking to possess or purchase a service. Instead the user is often also a producer and/or is involved in the governance of a collaborative platform that is serving social and environmental needs. The promotion of local platform economies requires a different regulatory approach than that currently taken by the European Commission. It requires an approach that understands and acknowledges the value of localised social relations and self-governed technologies, as well as having clear indicators that frame policy within high social equity and environmental sustainability objectives.

Energy

The EU can be an enlightened voice and a leader on global climate and energy commitments. Yet, while large energy companies are starting to invest in renewable sources, they may not be best suited for alleviating our social-ecological dilemma, primarily because they have little incentive to reduce overall energy consumption or to prioritise the social engagement of local communities in their commercial operations. At the same time, some climate technologies that can play an important role in energy transition are often not shared as quickly with developing countries as they could be. This is again partly due to intellectual property protections and a resistance to sharing know-how. In this conflict, the EU fights to enclose climate technology knowledge within UN forums.

In general, the EU’s energy strategy promotes large gas pipelines, giant energy infrastructures, and modest CO2 reductions. Despite more and more Europeans producing their energy locally or at home, most proposed European market regulations do not promote community controlled or self-produced renewable energy, do not offer financial risk facilities for community based energy, nor do they defend the right to sell electricity to the grid. While EU policy proposals are often unsupportive of feed-in tariffs or flexible grid infrastructures to support local renewables, little is being done to eliminate massive direct or indirect subsidies to large gas, coal, and nuclear projects.

A large part of the EU energy budget could be earmarked for community renewable projects and compatible infrastructures, with broad citizen participation. This would help optimise resilient energy supply costs through more efficient, short, and visible distribution loops while promoting flexible local energy autonomy. With this approach the EU could “commonify” energy as opposed to the current principal strategy of “commodifying” it.

Research & Development and Financing

EU research and innovation policy, such as Horizon 2020, the European Research Council, or public-private partnerships such as the Innovative Medicines Initiative, sadly also continue to allow the privatisation of knowledge generated by EU-financed scientific, technological, and academic projects. Instead, they could try to ensure a fair public return on public investments by mandating conditions such as social licensing, open source research, and open data.

To support the commons in the EU’s funding policies would include earmarking significant parts of EU funding programmes with criteria and indicators that give preference to commons-based economic, environmental, cultural, and research activities.

However, through its Horizon 2020 Research & Development programme the EU already funds important projects: Initiatives working on decentralisation of internet infrastructure, such as ‘DCent’ and ‘Netcoms’, as well as networks of renewable community energy cooperatives, such as RESCOOPS, and urban commons projects like Barcelona’s community wifi, guifi.net. This funding is hugely important and the expansion of such programmes could have a structural impact on our societies. The requirements and procedures for EU financing and grants could be especially adapted to commons-based projects to accommodate matching funds for peer to peer crowdfunding, municipal or community-based risk-sharing, small-scale, self-governed projects, and sliding-scale administrative demands.

Democracy for the Commons

The deep crisis of the EU and the lack of confidence of its citizens in the European project is to a large extent due to the lack of democracy in all its different forms, whether the lack of transparency, the power of corporate lobbies, the unaccountable role of national politicians vis-a-vis Brussels, or the lack of public debate on policies. People need to feel much more connected and have opportunities to engage with EU policy making.

The defence and regeneration of the commons depends on meaningful strengthening of EU participative policy processes, greater institutional and legal responsiveness to local civic communities, and concrete advances in creating transnational citizen collaborative instruments to influence EU policy. This means, for instance, wider political support for new digital tools that render visible EU political decisions and empower citizen opinions on concrete legislation, such as a recent Green pilot programme proposal in the European Parliament.

The European Parliament´s Petitions Committee should be a very important channel for citizen power in favour of the application of EU law in defence of environmental or social standards. Unfortunately, it sorely lacks political backing, visibility, and sufficient resources to respond diligently and responsibly to citizen concerns. The European Citizens Initiative petition process, which was instituted as an instrument for grass-roots transnational citizen legislative proposals has been a near total failure due to a series of byzantine processes, and the lack of political will to take it seriously. These institutions need more support, and at the same time the EU has to significantly invest in the creation of additional and innovative tools & institutions for participatory democracy while supporting civic decision-making on local issues.

Allowing the Potential of the Commons to Flourish

Pivotal choices about the commons are also being made today in EU decisions about agriculture, climate, fishing, transport, international trade, and financial markets, amongst other areas.

The crisis of the EU begs for new, unifying, and constructive narratives that will crowd out the xenophobic populist right with its demands for democracy and sovereignty. The commons narrative with its emphasis on participative democracy, community, ecology, and stewardship could reinvigorate progressive politics and contribute to a better, socially and ecologically sustainable Europe. The logic of the commons is able to give clear guidance on policy, and does not sit within one ideological framework of left or right. It does not pretend to be an answer to all our problems. Yet it gives a clear ethical perspective and helps us to understand what happens when people collectively manage and steward resources without the dominant, centralised roles of either the state or the market.

Overall, EU policy objectives and standpoints contrast strongly with the commons approach. The alignment we do see is in some funding programmes and in the knowledge realm where the dynamics of scientific discovery and knowledge creation make this almost unavoidable. What is needed to favour this shift, in addition to strong social pressure from civil society, is a pro-commons shift in the discourses and political proposals of political forces of change such as the greens, and left and social liberal parties.

Due to the general political and economic power relationship within the EU today one cannot expect a major strategic shift toward commons-based EU policies anytime soon. What can be achieved is a significant enlargement of favourable EU policy environments where commoning activities can more easily take root and flourish.

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 7th article in the series. It’s a landmark special issue that warrants reading it in full.

Photo by Shohei Hanazaki

The post Finding Common Ground 7: How the Commons can Revitalise Europe appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Cases such as Airbnb, Uber, and eBay have popularised the concept of the sharing economy. Digital platforms allow for the exchange of products and services, defying the business model of traditional companies. As it turns out, however, the expansion of these platforms often goes against the rights of their workforces. This is the dilemma that Trebor Scholz analyses in his book Platform Cooperativism. Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2016). As an alternative, he proposes platform cooperativism that complements the technological foundations of digital platforms with a cooperative organisational model.

The conference on Platform cooperativism organised by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider in 2015 helped to broaden the debate around the sharing economy, which is summed up in Platform Cooperativism. Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy. In this book, Scholz explains how the phenomenon of the corporate sharing economy took advantage of the situation that developed after the 2008 crisis as an opportunity to dismantle labour conditions, not as a means to rethink the economic system and make it fairer. The solution now is to go back to the cooperativist tradition as an alternative to the corporate sharing economy. As Scholz says, “The cooperative movement needs to come to terms with 21st century technologies.”

The Corporate Sharing Economy

One of the distinctive characteristics of collaborative production is versatility: cases of peer-to-peer production and consumption based on collaborative initiatives supported by digital platforms have emerged in a huge variety of sectors and areas of business. The map of collaborative production initiatives created by the P2Pvalue project includes at least thirty-three types of activities and more than 1,300 cases in Catalonia. Another characteristic of collaborative production is its ambivalence: it can take the form of social economy, scaling up cooperatives, or it can arise from the most ferocious capitalist corporate spirit.

In Platform Cooperativism, Scholz begins by analysing the corporate side through the examples of Uber and Amazon Mechanical Turk (a micro job marketplace), emphasising an aspect in which they both strongly coincide: the awful working conditions. These are companies which have an enormous supply of possible “employees” to absorb their demand, but do not consider them as such. Rather, they see them as “non-employees”, freelancers or independent workers, so they can externalise the means of work (asking workers to use their own cars, for example), as well as welfare and risks. This means they do not have to contribute to healthcare, unemployment insurance, accident cover, or social security. Scholz describes the corporate sharing economy as a situation in which workers are “losing minimum wage and overtime, as well as the protection of anti-discrimination labour laws.”

He also mentions the lack of equality in class terms, noting that “in the shadow of our convenience linger hefty social costs for workers”, particularly for blue-collar workers. Quoting Juliet Schor, he also notes that the sharing economy increasingly allows educated middle-class workers to access low-level jobs. The fact that the middle classes can now drive taxis to make ends meet also means that they are displacing low-income workers from these jobs – and from a steady source of income.

The impact of the corporate sharing economy on the regulatory framework is just as bad. The illegality of the “sharing economy” is a method, not a bug. We should not see it as an error or something that will eventually be fixed, but as a strategy for the creation and consolidation of markets. Moreover, these corporations spend millions to lobby public institutions to make regulatory changes in their favour. Scholz believes that the corporate sharing economy “isn’t merely a continuation of pre-digital capitalism as we know it, there are notable discontinuities – new levels of exploitation and concentration of wealth.”

Women pushing car, 1944. University of Oregon. CC-BY-NC-ND

Platform Cooperativism

“Silicon Valley loves a good disruption, so let’s give them one,” says Scholz, who believes that platform cooperativism is the solution, the way to stop relying “solely on digital infrastructures that are designed to extract profit for a very small number of platform owners and shareholders.” He adds “A People’s Internet is possible!”

Scholz’s approach to platform cooperativism is based on three key elements: the technological design of initiatives such as Uber, Task Rabbit, Airbnb, and UpWork; a more democratic ownership model – platforms can be owned and operated by trade unions, cities, and various kinds of cooperatives; and economic activities that can benefit many, reduce inequality, and favour the social distribution of profits. Scholz categorises the following types of platform cooperatives that already operate:

1.   Cooperatively owned labour brokerages (such as the freelancer-owned cooperative Loconomics)
2.  Cooperatively owned online marketplaces (like Fairmondo)
3.  City-owned platform cooperatives (like MinuBnB and AllBnb, alternatives to AirBnB for specific niche markets)
4.  Produser-owned platforms that generate and access content on shared platforms (like Stocksy, an artist-owned cooperative for stock-photography)
5.  Union-backed labour platforms (of which he mentions several examples linked to the taxi sector)

And two modalities that are still in their infancy:

6.  “Co-operatives from within”, forms of organisation and solidarity among users of corporate sharing platforms
7. The platform as protocol, decentralised models based on peer-to-peer interactions, for example.

Scholz suggests that platform cooperativism is not just limited to cooperativism as a kind of business, but can also go further. He defines 10 Principles for Platform Cooperativism: collective ownership of the platform; decent pay and income security; transparency and data portability; appreciation and acknowledgement of the value generated; co-determined work, with collective decision-making; a protective legal framework; portable worker protection and benefits; protection against arbitrary behaviour in rating systems; rejection of excessive workplace surveillance, and, lastly, the right of workers to log off. Scholz also points out that cooperative platforms are not islands, and that it is important to generate a cooperative ecosystem around them.

Is class the only inequality?

Scholz talks about inequality in terms of class, income, and education, but he does not mention other sources of discrimination and inequality in his critique of the corporate sharing economy or in his proposed alternative. One of the weak points of the book may be its limited gender perspective – although, unfortunately, that tends to be the rule in discussions around the sharing economy and critiques of the hegemonic economic approach. There is little emphasis on the links or dependence between the sharing economy and the domestic and care economies, or on the feminist reading of the phenomenon. Similarly, references to male authors prevail, with a notable absence of key female thinkers on the subject such as Elinor Ostrom on the commons, and Tiziana Terranova in relation to “free labour”. Aspects that receive a surprising lack of attention include other sources of discrimination and inequality such as origins, the lack of environmental awareness, and the connections between the corporate sharing economy and the circular economy.

The Sharing Economy: Cooperativist vs. Commons

The commons tradition is not a response to the corporate sharing economy: it pre-dates and inspired it. The digital commons, in the sense of projects based on collaborative production among peers, supported by collectively owned and managed platforms that generate free and/or public resources has been around for a long time. Examples include open source software communities, Wikipedia, Guifi.net and Goteo.org. The digital commons has also seen various waves of capitalist innovation: from the “Web 2.0” to the emergence of YouTube and Facebook in response to the dot-com crisis in 2000, and the sharing economy including Uber and AirBnb in response to the 2008 crisis. These forms adpot the collaborative discourse and mode of production of digital platforms, but at the same time turn their backs on the use of free, transparent technology, on the role of the community of creators in the governance of the process, on the collective ownership of knowledge, and on the distribution of the value generated among those who contribute to create it.

The tradition of the digital commons poses the challenge of the sustainability of the individuals who contribute to the common good. Some of the models that are being designed and implemented in response to this challenge were described by Philip Agrain in his 2011 book Sharing. In the commons, there is tension between the desire to maintain the predominantly non-commercial nature of projects and to emphasise other, non-monetary sources of value on one hand, and the need to secure income for those who contribute on the other.

The option of setting up cooperatives has also been an alternative in the digital commons – particularly in the world of free software – although foundations have been a more common model of institutional organisation. Another issue is the need to create legal figures that can allow for the fact that online collaborative production generates patterns of very different levels of participation (in which 1% usually generate the majority of the content, 9% contribute occasionally, and 90% participate passively as “audience”). Another challenge of the digital commons is to move towards decentralisation, which does not seem to adapt very well to the “traditional” cooperative membership model.

Scholz’s approach puts the spotlight on the labour conditions of the people who contribute to digital platforms, and on the creation of cooperatives as a means to guarantee ownership. These are certainly key issues, but they push important aspects of the digital commons into the background. On one hand, open knowledge, knowledge as a common good, and the public dimension of collaborative production through the use of licences (like Creative Commons) that guarantee access to the resources; on the other, free technology – platforms based on free software – as a means of communal control of the means of production in a digital environment.

In this sense, the best perspective from which to read Scholz is to focus on the integration of the aspects that he draws attention to – cooperativism as a means to ensure democratic governance of economic activity and the conditions of collaborative production that respect basic rights – while keeping in mind the strengths of other processes, including the digital commons – which emphasises the importance of the public and the commons, as well as free infrastructure –, the feminist economy, and the circular economy. And from there, to develop a new social, feminist, environmental commons economy.

The post A New Economy: Social, Commons, Feminist, and Environmental appeared first on P2P Foundation.