I am sceptical for a number of reasons but primarily because I do not see a organic connection with anything that is unfolding on the ground.
What I see unfolding is quite different, and I believe our solutions must be in harmony with these more grassroots trends.

My starting point is the conviction that the famous double movement of Karl Polanyi, in which periods of market liberalization creating social chaos, make place for counter-epochs when the market is re-embedded in society under social pressure, is no longer functioning at the national scale.
We are now in the midst of such a Polanyan moment, in which the systemic crisis of 2008, has created a backlash of left and right-wing populisms, which are destabalizing countries, but do not seem capable to bring about any real systemic change at the nation-state level.

The main reason seems to me is that while Nation and State are operating at the national level, Capital is operating directly at the global level, and can destabilize any local/national attempt at reform. There isn’t any real form of internationalism at the level of political movements and institutions, and the left remains deeply embedded in nation-state logics of neo-Keynesianism. The exceptions, Varoufakis’ Diem25 movement, with its pan-European outlook, have not yet proven to have any real traction, and the inter-national sysem of cooperation is not strenghtening, but weakening.

However, in civil society, we see an entirely different situation. Global open source communities are characterized by the exponential growh of the numbers of code and coders; and a significant part of its workers is trans-nationally neo-nomadic, creating entirely different sub-economic systems; there is a tenfold growth of urban commons in the western cities (which I have documented myself in Ghent, Belgium, but is confirmed by various other studies), and their practices are moving from the mere redistribution of products and services, to actual cosmo-local production (shared code, relocalized material production) of energy and organic food. Many of the exploding number of local projects, are actually not local, but transnational in nature: as Enzio Manzini called them, they are ‘Small, Local, Open, Connected’.

For the network of commons and p2p-researchers associated and partnering with the P2P Foundataion, this means a changing focus, from the mere inter-national, to the truly ‘trans-national’. What is happening in the world today is that next to the geographic nations, there is the emergence of true global neo-nomadic ecosystems of cooperation.
So what I believe needs to happen is a change of focus. Of course, the national and the inter-national remain powerful and will do so for the foreseeable future, but at the same time, we need to build trans-national institutions, and strategies.

Elsewhere, we have argued for new models, such as the Partner State, and institutions for public-commons cooperation at the territorial level. But progressive forces should no longer see policy making as only focused on market value, on their own nation-state only, or on international political cooperation, but rather on the transnationalization of infrastructures. For example, right now, cities are coalescing to regulate the negative effects of Uber and AirBnB, but why not create, through city alliances, global open depositories for the ‘generative’ transformation of all bioregional provisioning systems, i.e. supporting the infrastructure for mutualization that is both local, but can benefit from global transnational knowledge sharing. Imaging having access to a global set of tools to develop FairBNB’s and MuniRide’s. Imagine, like it is already happening in France, building Assemblies and Chambers of the Commons, cooperating at a trans-national scale.

So rather than a World Political Party that would continue the paradigm of competitive politics, endlessly fighting on what is the ‘right program’, I would rather see the development of a global Commons Transition Coalition, rooted in actual reconstructive and prefigurative practice, but which can play a political role by representing the new forces of transformation, at the institutional level of inter-nationality. What we need, is a new configuration between the territorial nations, weakening as we speak , with the emerging transnational nations, growing rapidly.

Photo by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

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While Ostrom’s work revealed that legal relations governing resources invisibly structure the commons, what those legal relations in fact reveal is our social and economic relations about resources: Who makes what? How much of what? And who gets what?

In the commons, the answers to these questions are embedded in a social logic according to community norms and values. In market societies, the source of these answers are to be found in the non-social economic logic of capitalism. The catalyst for this non-social economic logic, according to social theorists like Karl Polanyi and others, was the separation of people from their means of subsistence through the enclosure of the commons: throwing people off their land, separating them from the basics of life — food, water, and shelter — and charging rent for access. In the feudal commons, access to the means of subsistence was guaranteed by one’s inclusion and social status in a community and territory. In the transition to market economies, one’s subsistence became a matter of one’s ability to pay rent and/or labor for a wage. This new system unleashed a logic of competition for productive land and work, the accumulation of capital to reinvest into labor and time saving technologies, and the expansion of instrumental relations and commodification into every space and sphere of life.

As Polanyi said: “Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.” Or to put it simply, instead of profit serving the needs of people, people came to serve the needs of profit. Polanyi’s optimistic outlook was that through property, welfare and finance regulation — through law — the market could be embedded once again to serve human and social purposes.

So, from this perspective, law is a tool for lawyers, judges, legislators, and most importantly citizens, to wield against the market, to combat the inequities that it produces in its unfettered wake-both top down and bottom up. And law can be utilized beyond property, welfare, and finance law to other domains. Law can be used towards decommodifying our means of subsistence by guaranteeing access to fundamental resources that are crucial to human life, both top down, by naming things like healthcare, education, and housing (just to name a few) as a right, to which access should be guaranteed, but also from the bottom up, by changing the structure of property and contract entitlements, for instance to allow for simultaneous use of shared resources, and curb unrestricted transfer rights. Law can also be used to reorganize work away from wage labor and towards workers’ ownership, by enacting through legislation the recognition of new legal entities like the Cooperative Corporation or the B Corporation that place non-market values at their center, or bottom up through the creation of workers cooperatives (a rapidly growing movement throughout the world). Law can also be used to alter the structure of intellectual property rights in ways that encourage sharing, collaboration, and innovation, top down by policymakers refusing to create certain kinds of property rights in these resources, but also bottom up through legal innovation and resistance through individuals adopting the Creative Commons license or “copyleft” policy over other proprietary forms of copyright.

In this new series on Shareable, “Law: The invisible architecture of the commons,” we will showcase new and emerging legal institutions that offer an alternative system of incentives for encouraging cooperation, sharing, and sustainability. These legal institutions demonstrate how citizens, working together with lawyers and policymakers, can successfully design legal institutions for themselves to decommodify our access to fundamental resources, alter the wage labor relationship through new types of legal entities, and create new ways of stimulating ownership, innovation, and collaboration around knowledge goods.

Cross-posted from Shareable

Photo by Sinéad McKeown

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