Click here to download the German edition. The forthcoming English edition will be available in September 2019.

Video reposted from YouTube, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung

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On April 12, the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin, which sponsored the writing of our book, will be hosting a public event to launch the book. Silke will be there, of course, and after speaking she will have a conversation with the prominent German sociologist and political scientist Hartmut Rosa; Robert Habeck, the Federal Chairman of Alliance ’90/The Greens; and Elisabeth von Thadden, editor of DIE ZEIT.

There will be a livestream of the event at 19:30 CET. A 96-second trailer about the German edition of the book can be found here.

We have been working on this book for much of the past three years, so I am thrilled by its completion (from which I am still recovering). Let me hoist a transatlantic toast to my dear friend for her brilliant ideas, warm collegiality, and sheer persistence throughout this odyssey.

I will offer a longer introduction to the book as the release of the English edition draws closer. For now, let me just say that our book is an ambitious attempt to build on Elinor Ostrom’s work by providing a deeper understanding of the commons as a living social organism. Our new framework – the Triad of Commoning — focuses on the commons in three interrelated aspects – the social, the political (peer governance), and the economic (provisioning). We also look at how one’s view of elemental reality shapes one’s sense of political possibility, and how language plays a critical role in making commoning visible.

This approach emerged after months of working on our book. Silke and I concluded that we just couldn’t convey the realities of commoning if we remained captive to the rational-actor, resource-focused framework used by so many economists. Much of that language points us in the wrong direction by downplaying or ignoring the social, personal, and ecological relationships that live at the heart of a commons.

For example, the word “resource” implies something external and inert that can be bought and sold, or used however one wishes. But to a commoner, shared wealth such as a forest or river is alive. It has emotional and cultural meaning. The word “resource” ignores this whole affective dimension and implies a norm of human dominance. Similarly, to focus on the individual as the primary agent of action – the lone genius or leader – overlooks the collaboration and contextual factors that are essential in a functioning commons.  

To deal with such issues, Silke and I set out to develop a “relational theory” of the commons, complete with some new concepts and vocabulary. If we are going to stop destructive acts of enclosure, if we are going to get beyond the misleading conceits of standard economics, we need to get beyond the unexamined premises of market individualism and private property. We need to get beyond the theory of value that market economics relies on and rethink concepts such as “development,” “rationality,” and “scarcity.” We must develop new and richer vocabularies that point to the aspects of commoning that are typically ignored. We invented the terms “care-wealth,” the “Nested-I,” and “OntoShift” to name some neglected shifts of consciousness that commoning entails.

Language is important in building new cultural understandings for how the world might be structured differently, so we realized that we need to rethink some of our received notions of “property.” Instead of seeing property in the traditional way as private dominion over a “resource” and the exclusion of others, the idea of “relationalized property” offers an alternative way of having and using, via a commons. While our book has plenty of new theoretical concepts, we also worked hard to keep our analysis grounded in actual examples. One appendix itemizes more than 70 specific commons that are mentioned in the book.

Silke will soon venture out on a book tour through June with some forty events planned. For those of you in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland (and readers of German), here is Silke’s speaking schedule in the coming months.

Originally published on bollier.org

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David Bollier and Silke Helfrich: If there is one recurring theme described in this book, it is the importance of exploring the inner dimensions of commoning as a social form, moving beyond economistic notions of the commons as a mere resource to be managed. Commoning is an attitude, an ethic, an impulse, a need and a satisfaction – a way of being that is deeply inscribed within the human species. But it is up to us to make it thrive. We must choose to practice commoning and reflect on its impact on our lives and the Earth, the more consciously, the better.

The great appeal of commoning is simultaneously a reason for its invisibility: it calls on us to see the world from a fundamentally different perspective, acknowledging that the self emerges from relationships with others and can exist only through these relationships and as a result of them. Failing to perceive the diverse types of “we’s” that exist and their complex dynamics and logics is tantamount to trying to live on Earth without an atmosphere. Our lives are enframed and defined by “we’s.” These collectives are not merely the sum of individuals, but distinct systems of organization that emerge from our encounters with each other and committed joint action.

More: a commons is dynamic and evolving, and therefore proposes a more realistic idea of human life. It does not propose a static economic perspective that assumes what we supposedly are; it recognizes that we are always becoming. Commoning draws upon our distinct, situated identities, cultures and roots as essential elements of governance, production, law and culture. This perspective helps us grasp that we not only create the world; the world in turn shapes and creates us. So we must attend to the larger, holistic consequences of our own world-creating capacities, to make sure that the selves that we each cultivate through our relationships and world-making are the selves that we truly wish to be and worlds we wish to live in. Or as Lau Tzu put it with such wisdom, “Be a pattern for the world.”

The commons quivers with aliveness precisely because it is a reflexive, open system that resists attempts to make it schematic, regularized and tightly controlled. The commons is alive because it offers space for people to apply their own imaginations and energy to solve problems – and human ingenuity and cooperation tend to produce many surprising results. In their self-created zones of freedom, commoners have the latitude to build their own worlds without the tyranny of the Market/State, bureaucratic procedures or confining social roles (consumer, seller, employee, expert).

Needless to say, an economy and society that truly respects commons requires a re-imagination of politics itself. They require social processes that invite collective participation and express collective sentiments, not “leaders” who may be only crudely accountable to people and captive to capital and its imperatives. Commons require a primary focus on meeting everyone’s needs, not on catering to the ever-proliferating wants of the few. Expanding the scope and scale of commons so that they can become a powerful alternative to capital driven markets, and spur mutual coordination and federation, introduces a whole new set of challenges, of course. It requires that we work for new configurations of state authority and clear limits on market power. Yet there are many promising scenarios of policy, law, governance and politics that seek to advance this vision: the focus of our next anthology.

Photo by bruskme

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Fortunately, there exist many experiments with non-capitalist modes of assessing and exchanging value, sharing goods and services, and making decisions that can help us transition to a more sustainable political economy based on principles of degrowth. One of the best ways to generate non-capitalist subjects, objects, and spaces comes from systems designed to manage common pool resources like the atmosphere, ocean, and forests. Commons-based systems depend upon self-governance and reciprocity. People rely on and take responsibility for each other, finding mutually beneficial ways to fulfill their needs. This also allows communities to define the guidelines and incentives for guiding their own economic behavior, affording people more autonomy and greater opportunity for protecting and cultivating shared values. Commons-based systems cut across the private/public, market/state dichotomy and present alternative economic arrangements defined by communities.

According to David Bollier, “As the grand, centralized market/state systems of the 20th century begin to implode through their own dysfunctionality, the commons will more swiftly step into the breach by offering more local, convivial and trusted systems of survival.”³ Already, there is evidence of this happening. The commons is spreading rapidly among communities hit hardest by recent financial crises and the failures of austerity policies. In response to the failures of the state and market, many crises-stricken areas, especially in Europe and South America, have developed solidarity economies to self-manage resources, thus insulating themselves from systemic shocks in the future. It seems likely that a community’s capacity to share will be crucial to its survival on a wetter, hotter, and meaner planet.

From the perspective of researchers, there are several different ways to define the commons. In most cases, the commons are understood to be material objects. For example, the atmosphere and ocean are global commons, because they are resources we must all learn to regulate and share collectively. This notion of the commons as material resource goes hand-in-hand with another notion that the commons can be both material and immaterial, a product of either nature or culture. Using this second definition enhances our appreciation for what is often undervalued by traditional economic measures such as care work, shared knowledge production, and cultural preservation. Together, both these perspectives are helpful in devising political and economic strategies for managing the commons, which remains the dominant interest of most commons researchers and policymakers.

Nevertheless, whether material or immaterial, the commons are viewed as a given concept or thing, ignoring that more fundamentally they are generated by social practices. In other words, there are no commons without commoners to enact them. From an enactive perspective, commons are not objects, but actions generated by many different actors in relationship. Whereas the prior notions assume that individuals need to be regulated and punished to prevent overconsumption (an assumption known as the tragedy of the commons), an enactive perspective on commons conceives the individual in relation to everyone (and everything) involved in co-managing the more-than-human commons. It therefore diverges from the prior two notions in assuming a relational epistemology rather than being premised on a liberal epistemology based on the individual. From a Buddhist perspective, one could say that the commons emerges co-dependently with a field of objects, forces, and passions entangling the human and nonhuman, living and non-living, organic and machinic.

The more-than-human commons thus does not dualistically separate the material and immaterial commons, the commons (as object) from the commoners (as subjects), nor does it separate humans from nonhumans. Instead, the commons are always understood as a more-than-human achievement, neither wholly produced by nature or culture. Commoning becomes, as Bayo Akomolafe points out, a material-discursive doing shaped by practices and values that engage humans with their environments.⁴ In Patterns of Commoning, David Bollier and Silke Helfrich argue that all commons exceed conceptual distinctions, because they are not things; rather, they are another way of being, thinking about, and shaping the world.⁵ Commoning is about sharing the responsibility for stewardship with the intent to construct a fair, free, and sustainable world—a goal that is all the more important given the unequal distribution of risks posed by intensifying climate change.

Read the entire essay/issue at The Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture & Politics.

Zack Walsh is a PhD candidate in the Process Studies graduate program at Claremont School of Theology. His research is transdisciplinary, exploring process-relational, contemplative, and engaged Buddhist approaches to political economy, sustainability, and China. His most recent writings provide critical and constructive reflection on mindfulness trends, while developing contemplative pedagogies and practices for addressing social and ecological issues. He is a research specialist at Toward Ecological Civilization, the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China, and the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany. He has also received lay precepts from Fo Guang Shan, an engaged Buddhist organization based in Taiwan, and attended numerous meditation and monastic retreats in Thailand, China, and Taiwan. For further information and publications, please connect: https://cst.academia.edu/ZackWalsh, https://www.facebook.com/walsh.zack, and https://www.snclab.ca/category/blog/contemplative-ecologies/.

Illustration by Alicia Brown

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Cecosesola has been making history for almost half a century. It all began in 1967 when a cooperativista in Barquisimeto, a city in Venezuela with a population of more than a million, died, leaving behind a family not only in mourning, but also unable to meet the funeral expenses. Soon thereafter, ten cooperatives, not wishing to leave death to market forces, came together and formed a single cooperative – a funeral home, Cecosesola.

Today, the Central Cooperativa de Servicios Sociales des Estado Lara is a network of about sixty cooperatives and grassroots organizations in the Venezuelan state of Lara, with about 20,000 members. The cooperatives sell at weekly markets in Barquisimeto and provide community-backed loans, among many other services.

One of its proudest achievements is its health center, the Centro Integral Cooperativo de Salud, which serves 200,000 patients every year. To start the health center in March 2009, Cecosesola raised US$1.8 million by selling fruit salads at the markets; by soliciting short-term, fixed interest deposits from cooperatives and individuals; and through consensus-based contributions made by all full-time staff.

What follows is an edited interview that Silke Helfrich conducted with several members of Cecosesola in Mexico City in 2012 and in Berlin in 2013.¹Pillku and Remix the Commons. The interviewees were Jorge Rath, born and raised in Germany, who has worked with Cecosesola since 1999, chiefly as an acupuncturist; Gustavo Salas, a Cecosesola member for forty years who is active in the Escuela Cooperativa and the markets; Noel Vale Valera, a member of the Cooperativa El Triunfo since he was 15, who works mostly at the markets and in the computer team; and Lizeth Vargas, whose grandparents cofounded the federation and is active at the weekly markets and the health center.

Helfrich: Growing food, taking care of the sick, doing business, and burying the dead. How does all that fit together?

Salas: That’s just one way of describing what this is really about. We are in a communal process in which we are constantly educating ourselves and arranging our lives. In the process, we are affected by the usual forces: patriarchal structures, property, and so on.

Rath: But we turn those forces toward our own ends, as it were. In philosophical terms, one could say: “We suspend property without abolishing it.”²

Salas: That’s right. Nobody can say: Cecosesola is mine.

Rath: ….and the same thing is – gradually – happening with hierarchies, too. We don’t have a manager or a chair or a vice-chair.³ The only formal thing is our assemblies. And there are loads of them! We are basically one big conversation.

Vale: You have to know something about our history in order to understand that. In the 1970s, many of our members took part in demonstrations against doubling the local bus companies’ ticket prices. In 1974, they finally established their own transportation company as a cooperative, a business run by the workers themselves. It failed later on, mostly because of entanglements with political power struggles. Cecosesola learned from this bitter experience. In 1982, the general manager of the funeral home quit. Cecosesola didn’t hire a new one. The warehouse manager left. The position remained vacant. The same thing happened when the building manager left. In the end, the secretaries learned how to drive trucks, and the drivers took on administrative tasks.

Helfrich: How are members assigned to their tasks nowadays?

Rath: They rotate. From one task to the next. Everybody is supposed to be able to learn as much as possible. That also helps people to keep their focus on the whole operation rather than claiming their own little fiefdoms.

Vale: But there is no rotation plan. It’s like agendas at our assemblies. We don’t have them, either. We always start out with the principle that everything is voluntary; it depends on what each individual wants to do or learn just then.

Rath: But may I gently remind you that you haven’t rotated voluntarily for quite a while now. (laughs)

Vale: Let’s use a concrete example. I work in our health center and do massages and hydrotherapy. I take care of bookkeeping and staff scheduling. Sometimes I update the website or work at one of the markets on weekends. It’s free-flow rotation, not fixed in advance. I might be working in the office one day, mopping the hallways the next, and cooking the third. Who does what and for how long depends on people’s preferences, skills, and the needs at any particular time.

Salas: When we rotate, we encounter new people again and again, and that’s in line with our culture of personal contact. These contacts come to life wherever we happen to be working, not only in the assemblies. That’s anything but abstract. It’s very concrete. We touch the other person – literally.

Helfrich: Sounds exciting, but it also takes a lot of time and effort.

Rath: Well, it isn’t easy, but that’s how we want it to be. After all, Cecosesola isn’t our work. It’s the project of our lives.

Vale: In any case, I never have the feeling that I’m working.

Rath: Well, we are less interested in producing “something that’s ours” than creating “us.” We want to understand and change ourselves. That generates a kind of collective energy. Of course, there are situations in which we don’t feel it, but we generate this energy again and again, collectively.

Vale: It’s also a question of perspective. We try to conceive of Cecosesola as a personal process of development, not as work. Work! Just thinking about it makes you tired! It isn’t always successful, and it isn’t for everybody. But we’re taking this path, for example, in our assemblies without a fixed agenda. We talk about what needs to be done. Sometimes the same issue is discussed two or three times before we find a consensus.

Helfrich: That brings us to an important question: How do you make decisions?

Rath: Our goal is to reach decisions by consensus. So we never vote, because we don’t want to split into a majority and a minority. Instead, we take the time to talk, to deliberate together, and to develop “our common criteria.”

Helfrich: Could you describe that in more detail?

Rath: They’re criteria that we can use for orientation in all kinds of everyday situations when individual groups or people make decisions. One of the criteria is that whoever makes a decision in the end is also responsible for the decision and for communicating it.

Vale: We never expect to make decisions together in our assemblies. We just talk a lot about how a decision can come about and according to which criteria. In the end, the decision itself can be made by one, two or three people.

Helfrich: And that really works?

Vargas: Yes, and it has been working for decades. Of course, it isn’t easy. After all, we’re a group of 1,300 people. But we don’t have to discuss everything together. We’re often confident that the other members will represent us well and tell us about decisions.⁴

Helfrich: What about pay?

Vale: We don’t pay ourselves wages. Instead, we pay an advance on what Cecosesola will presumably make.

Rath: ….but we don’t work in order to make a profit or to accumulate goods. That isn’t what drives us, and that’s why our surpluses are relatively modest. A large part of any surplus we make is spent on things for everyone, for the cooperative. In other businesses, you would call that reinvestment. In addition, we have to set aside reserves as required by law. If any money is left over after that – and that usually isn’t the case – we adjust the advance. In recent years, we used the inflation rate as our criterion so that the advance wouldn’t be eaten up by inflation.

Helfrich: Who gets paid how much?

Vale: In principle, everybody gets the same amount. The cook earns the same as the bookkeeper, but we also take different needs into account, for example, if someone has just had a baby. The only exception is the physicians. They get about twice as much, and their pay also depends on the number of patients they treat. Only a few doctors are prepared to work full-time in Cecosesola for the advance we pay.⁵

Helfrich: So – the more patients, the more they earn?

Vale: Exactly. We would like to change this system, but we haven’t been able to agree on a solution. It’s easier with the vegetables. We decouple the price of the vegetables from the time and effort we put into them. We use an average price per kilogram.

Helfrich: Does that mean that peppers cost as much as potatoes?

Vale: Yes, it does. We produce a lot of vegetables in the cooperatives. So we explore exactly what is necessary to produce them. We add up the number of kilograms produced – across the entire product range – on the one hand and the costs on the other. Then we divide one by the other to figure out our average price per kilogram. Our yardstick is simply the production costs including what the producers need to live.

Salas: This is how we produce a considerable part of the food eaten by up to 300,000 people. It’s pretty tricky to manage such growth and still be as creative as in the early days when five to eight of us brought vegetables to market.

Helfrich: And does your system work?

Vale: Yes, it does. Compared with others, we’re doing very well. Of course, there are losses, just like everywhere else. Food goes bad, things are stolen, and so on. We have to “juggle” with that. That is why we are very careful to keep losses as small as possible; we make sure the lettuce doesn’t go bad and that we don’t damage the manioc.

Rath: By the way, this system saves people quite a lot of money. Many kinds of vegetables cost disproportionately more “outside.” Our price per kilogram reduces red tape, we don’t work with middlemen, and seasonal fluctuations don’t make a difference, either.

Vale: The decisive factor is that we don’t follow the market or the market price. If prices for tomatoes and potatoes go up someplace, that doesn’t mean that we’ll raise prices, too. What matters for us is that we earn what we need.

Helfrich: What is actually the most important thing for your process?

Salas: Respect! Respectful relationships in the comprehensive sense of the term. I don’t just mean tolerance, but respect for the other person we are living with. We cannot treat our counterparts like things that we want to profit from. We must perceive the entire person. In order to do that, we need transparency, honesty and responsibility. They are the basis for trust, and that is fundamental. Because trust is the foundation for what we call “collective energy.”

Vargas: And that can move mountains.

Salas: By the way, trust can be developed infinitely. That is why we say that our process is limitless. We show that is it possible to relate to other people in a different way. Anyone can take this with them into their own context if they want. We don’t have a toolbox for it, though, because we don’t assemble things; what we do is shape relationships.

Helfrich: What is your relationship to the state?

Salas: Independence is very important to us. That is why we don’t apply to the government for financing. We try to work within our own means, and that is why we always start small. But we work together respectfully where necessary. By the way, working within your own means creates something mystical. Great enthusiasm for what we are doing.

Helfrich: What do commons mean to you?

Rath: There are many theories about the commons. That isn’t really our issue. We show what an example of the practice of the commons looks like, or what it can look like. We need more experience, but not in the sense of “models.” Cecosesola is not a model and doesn’t seek to be one. The theory of the commons can develop only from a collaborative practice, from concrete processes. Cecosesola is our commons.

Salas: We don’t assume a dream about what the world or society should be like. Notions about “this is what the world should be like” often end up with the ideas being forced down people’s throats. We start out with ourselves and our culture, and we’re very much aware that cultural transformation takes time. All this individualism! It isn’t the same thing as individuality, which we strongly support. How are you supposed to build up trust if everybody is “chasing after their own opportunities”? That is why we often analyze how our culture affects our relationships, and what constructive things might come out of it.

Helfrich: Could you give an example?

Salas: At some point, the idea came up to start using cash registers at the markets. Cash registers are the norm everywhere, but we don’t use them. The cooperativistas at the markets take the money to the office in envelopes. That’s it. So at some point, this idea to use cash registers came up to make it easier to monitor the transactions. We discussed it in countless assemblies for almost three years. And then we finally realized that these cash registers serve one function above all: to monitor the cooperativistas at the markets. That would amount to withdrawing trust. And we didn’t want to do that. So we continue as before, without cash registers, and using envelopes. We saved the money for the investment. And we gained trust.

And then, the Venezuelan tax office made cash registers a legal requirement …”

Helfrich: Thank you very much for this informative conversation!

In December 2014, after this interview was conducted, the Venezuelan government decided to tax the country’s cooperatives at a rate approximately 35 percent higher than the rate applied to for-profit businesses, starting immediately. Until then cooperatives had enjoyed special protections under Article 118 of the constitution passed in 1999. The government justified the new tax rate by saying the income of cooperativistas should be considered taxable surpluses – a claim that Cecosesola says cannot be reconciled with other official statements. On the basis of its revenues in January and February 2015, Cecosesola calculated that its additional taxes total roughly 50 million bolivares (US$7.25 million) – a sum that would put many cooperatives out of business.

Cecosesola is resisting the new tax rate. It has launched a number of large and small responses, including a petition drive that had collected more than 200,000 signatures by July 2015, and urgent alerts to its international networks. Cecosesola is also seeking a dialogue with the state, especially the Regulatory Authority for Cooperatives or the Ministerio de las Comunas. On May 4, 2015, Cecosesola led a march of more than 1,000 of its members from five federal states to the headquarters of Corpolara, a development organization representing the state in the federal state of Lara. The three-kilometer protest walk took place in a “thoroughly playful/peaceful atmosphere,” as Jorge Rath wrote. Cecosesola members now realize that they must consider the fundamental question of what kind of cooperativism they desire as well as whether and how the government can differentiate between authentic cooperatives on the one hand and capitalist businesses and pseudo-cooperatives on the other. The conflict, which has not yet been resolved, can be followed on Cecosesola’s website, http://www.cecosesolaorg.bugs3.com.

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.

References

All images sourced from Cecosesola.net

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Monica Bernardi: Commons represents an issue which has been subject of many studies and discussions. LabGov used to deal with the topic of the commons and its co-founders themselves (Prof. Sheila Foster and Prof. Christian Iaione) talk of  “The City as a Commons”.

Today, indeed, we witness a rise of commons-oriented civic initiatives as a result of a growing inadequacy of Market and State. A commons can be intended as a shared resource co-governed or co-owned by its user community according to their rules and norms. In both Bollier, Bauwens and Helfrich’ opinion there is no commons without commoning, namely without active co-production and self-governance.

A commons emerges from the dynamic interaction of three related aspects: a resource, a community that gathers around it, and a protocols for its stewardship. As pointed by Bollier, it is simultaneously:

• a social system for the long-term stewardship of resources that preserves shared values and the community identity;
• a self-organized system by which community managed resources with no reliance on the Market or State; the wealth that we create and pass on to the next generation (based on gift of nature, civic infrastructure, cultural and creative works, traditions and knowledge);
• a sector of the economy that create values in ways that are often taken for granted – and often jeopardized by the Market-State.

The commons becomes a challenge for the city, that should become what Bauwens defines a “partners city”, enabling and empowering commons-oriented civic initiatives. For the market, that should sustain the commons and create livelihoods for the core contributors; and for the civil society organizations, that still have bureaucratic forms of organization and management, not in line with the commons initiatives.

Bauwens has recently released a report based on the study of the City of Ghent, conducted together with Yurek Onzia – project coordinator and editor-in-chief, with the support of an artistic makerspace (Timelab), the P2P Lab scholar Vasilis Niaros and Annelore Raman from the city council. The study was commissioned and financed by the City of Ghent, in the northern Flanders, with the support of the mayor, Daniel Termont, of the head of the mayor’s staff, the head of the strategy department, and the political coalition of the city (Flemish Socialist Party SPA, Flemish Greens – Groen, and Flemish Liberal Party – Open VLD).

The main request of the administration was to document the emergence and growth of the commons in the city and identify strategies and public policies to support commons-based initiatives, involving the citizens. The three-month research took inspiration from other cities (such as Barcelona, Seoul, Bologna) already engaged in the recognition and promotion of commons practices. It culminates in a Commons Transition Plan that describes the role, the possibilities and the options for optimal public interventions in terms of reinforcing citizens initiatives.

During the research, the team:

• Mapped 500 commons-oriented projects per sector of activity (from food to transportation, energy, etc.) using a wiki
• Interviewed 80 leading commoners and project leaders
• Administered a written questionnaire to over 70 participants
• Managed 9 open workshops divided per theme (Food as a commons, transportation as a commons….)
• Developed a Commons Finance Canvas workshop based on the Hinton methodology (economic opportunities, difficulties, models used by the commons projects)

Bauwens described the city of Ghent (300,000 inhabitants) as a city with a distinct presence of commons-oriented initiatives (more than 500), a lively urban tissue sprinkled by smart young, as well as coworking, fablabs and maker spaces, active civil society organizations that support urban commons projects, and an active and engaged city administration. The city indeed is already involved in actions for carbon and traffic reduction, and it has a staff of social facilitators, connectors, street workers engaged in enabling roles at the local level. In addition, there is an important policy to support the temporary use of vacant land/building by community groups.

Nevertheless, the research highlighted some weakness points of the city:

• the initiatives are often fragmented;
• there are some regulatory and administrative obstacles (especially about the mutualized housing);
• fablabs and coworking spaces lack of real production’s activities;
• there is no connection between university and the commons project, neither a propensity to open source and design projects;
• many commons-project are set in post-migration communities and limited to ethnic and religious memberships;
• civil society organizations often perceive the projects as mainly directed towards vulnerable categories and not as general productive resources; the cooperative sector gives a weak support; the major potential commons are vulnerable to private extraction.

Despite these weakness points, the City showed a great commitment in finding ways to improve and expand the urban commons at local level since it is aware of its potentials for the social and economic life:  1. “the commons are an essential part of the ecological transition”;

2. they “are a means for the re-industrialization of the city following the cosmo-local model which combines global technical cooperation in knowledge commons with smart re-localization of production”;
3. they “are based on self-governance of the value producing systems and are therefore one of the few schools of true democracy and participation”

The report is divided in four parts:

1. The context on the emergence of urban commons (largely increased in the Flanders in the last ten years). This part provides information on the challenges for the public authorities, for the market players and for the traditional civil society organisations and on the opportunities related with the spread of the commons (i.e more active participation of citizens as city co-creators, in solving ecological and environmental issues and in creating new forms of meaningful work at local level).
2. An overview of urban commons developments globally and especially in European cities.
3. The analysis of the urban commons in Ghent with its strengths and weaknesses.
4. A set of 23 integrated proposals for the creation of public-commons processes for citywide co-creation.

The part 3 with the map of the urban commons projects highlights some similarities with the commons-driven digital economy, demonstrating some specificities:

1. productive communities are based on open contributions;
2. the urban commons and their platforms may bring to generative market forms;
3. the communities, platforms and possible market forms require, and receive, facilitative support from the various agencies and functionaries of the city, and the civil society organisations.

About the proposals in the part 4, the report presents:

• some public-social or public-partnership based processes and protocols to streamline cooperation between the city and the commoners. Taking as example the Bologna Regulation for the Care and the Regeneration of the Urban Commons, the report suggests that commons initiatives present their projects and ideas to a City Lab in order to sign a “Commons Accord” with the city. With this contract the city sets-up specific support alliances combining the commoners and civil society organisations, the city itself, and the private sector;
• a cross-sector institutional infrastructure for commons policy-making and support divided in transition arenas and based on the model of a pre-existing practice around the food transition.

Among the recommendations and suggestions listed in the report there are:

• The creation of a juridical assistance service consisting of at least one representative of the city and one of the commoners, in order to systematically unblock the potential for commons expansion, by finding solutions for regulatory hurdles.
• The creation of an incubator for a commons-based collaborative economy, which specifically deals with the challenges of generative start-ups.
• The creation of an investment vehicle, the bank of the commons, which could be a city bank based on public-social governance models.
• Augmenting the capacity of temporary land and buildings, towards more permanent solutions to solve the land and housing crisis affecting commoners and citizens.
• Support of platform cooperatives as an alternative to the more extractive forms of the sharing economy.
• Assisting the development of mutualized commons infrastructures (‘protocol cooperativism’), through inter-city cooperation (avoiding the development of 40 Uber alternative in as many cities).
• Make Ghent ‘the place to be’ for commoners by using ‘Ghent, City of the Commons’ as an open brand, to support the coming of visitors for commons-conferences etc.
• As pioneered by the NEST project of temporary use of the old library, use more ‘calls for commons’, instead of competitive contests between individual institutions. Calls for the commons would reward the coalition that creates the best complementary solution between multiple partners and open sources its knowledge commons to support the widest possible participation”.

In addition, the team also propose:

• A specific project to test the capacity of “cosmo-local production” to create meaningful local jobs (organic food for school lunches) and to test the potential role of anchor institutions and social procurement.
• The organisation of a CommonsFest on the 28th of October, with a first Assembly of the Commons.
• A pilot project around circular finance in which “saved negative externalities” which lead to savings in the city budget can directly be invested in the commons projects that have achieved such efficiencies (say re-investing the saved cost of water purification to support the acquisition of land commons for organic farmers).
• The setting up of an experimental production unit based on distributed manufacturing and open design.
• Projects that integrate knowledge institutions such as the university, with the grassroots commons projects.

The report is the executive part of a short book on the Ghent experience that will be soon available. Many useful indications and more precise recommendations can be found in the “COMMONS TRANSITION AND P2P: A PRIMER”. This Commons Primer co-published with the Transnational Institute, explains the Commons and P2P, in terms of interrelations, movements and trends, and how a Commons transition is poised to reinvigorate work, politics, production, and care, both interpersonal and environmental.

The post Urban commons initiatives in the city of Ghent: a Commons Transition Plan by Bauwens appeared first on P2P Foundation.

As an alternative that has been tried and tested in practice by communities past and present, the paradigm of the commons goes beyond the state and the market and implies the radical self-instituting of society, allowing citizens to directly manage their shared resources. 

Yavor Tarinski, writing for New Compass, shares a great overview of the Commons. He draws, among others, from the work of Ostrom, Helfrich, Arendt, Castoriadis, Bollier and the P2P Foundation’s Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis.

Yavor Tarinksi: In their book The Economic Order & Religion, Frank H. Knight and Thomas H. Merriam argue that “social life in a large group with thoroughgoing ownership in common is impossible”.[1] William F. Lloyd and later Garret Hardin, in the same spirit, promoted the neo-malthusian[2] term “Tragedy of the commons”[3] arguing that individuals acting independently and rationally according to their self-interest behave contrary to the best interests of the whole group by depleting some common-pool resource. Since then, the thesis that people are incapable of managing collectively, without control and supervision by institutions and authorities separated from the society, have succesfuly infiltrated the social imaginary.

Even for big sections of the Left resource management in common is being viewed as utopian and therefore they prefer to leave it for the distant future, lingering instead today between variations of private and statist forms of property.[4] Thus, the dilemma between private-state management of common-pool resources is being maintained, leading to marginalization of other alternatives.

However, a growing number of voices are trying to break with this dipole. For the autonomists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, this is a false dilemma. According to them,

“the seemingly exclusive alternative between the private and the public corresponds to an equally pernicious political alternative between capitalism and socialism. It is often assumed that the only cure for the ills of capitalist society is public regulation and Keynesian and/or socialist economic management; and, conversely, socialist maladies are presumed to be treatable only by private property and capitalist control. Socialism and capitalism, however, even though they have at times been mingled together and at others occasioned bitter conflicts, are both regimes of property that excluded the common. The political project of instituting the common … cuts diagonally across these false alternatives.”[5]

The falsity of the state-private dilemma can also be seen in the symbiotic-like relationship between the two supposedly “alternatives”. Author and activist David Bollier points to the historic partnership between the two.[6]According to him, the markets have benefited from the state’s provision of infrastructure and oversight of investment and market activity, as well as providing free and discounted access to public forests, minerals, airwaves, research and other public resources.On the other hand, the state depends upon markets as a vital source of tax revenue and jobs for people – and as a way to avoid dealing with inequalities of wealth and social opportunity, two politically explosive challenges.

At first sight it seems like we are left without a real choice, since the two “alternatives” are pretty much leading to the same degree of enclosure in which the beneficiaries are tiny elites. During the last years, however, the paradigm of “the commons” has emerged from the grassroots as a powerful and practical solution to the contemporary crisis and a step beyond the dominant dilemma. It is an alternative that has been tried and tested in practice by communities, past and present.

The Logic of the Commons

The logic of the commons goes beyond the ontology of the nation-state and the “free” market. In a sense it presupposes that we live in a common world that can be shared by all of society without some bureaucratic or market mechanisms to enclose it. Thus, with no enclosure exercised by external managers (competing with society and between each other), the resources stop being scarce since there is no more interest in their quick depletion. Ivan Illich notes that “when people spoke about commons, (…) they designated an aspect of the environment that was limited, that was necessary for the community’s survival, that was necessary for different groups in different ways, but which, in a strictly economic sense, was not perceived as scarce.”[7]The logic of the commons is ever-evolving and rejects the bureaucratization of rights and essences, though it includes forms of communal self-control and individual self-limitation. Because of this it manages to synthesize the social with the individual.

The commons can be found all around the world in different forms: from indigenous communities resisting the cutting of rainforests and Indian farmers fighting GMO crops, to open source software and movements for digital rights over the internet. The main characteristics that they all share, are the direct-democratic procedures of their management, the open design and manufacturing, accessibility, and constant evolvement.

The commons have their roots deep in the antiquity, but through their constant renewal they are exploding nowadays, including indigenous communal agricultural practices, new ‘solidarity economic’ forms, as well as high-tech FabLabs, alternative currencies, and many more. The absence of a strict ideological frame enhances this constant evolvement.

The logic of the commons is deeply rooted in the experience of Ancient Athens. The Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis describes it as a period, during which a free public space appeared, “a political domain which ‘belongs to all’ (τακοινα – the commons in Greek).[8]The ‘public’ ceased to be a ‘private’ affair – i.e. an affair of the king, the priests, the bureaucracy, the politicians, and/or the experts. Instead, decisions on common affairs had to be made by the community.

According to the anthropologist Harry Walker, the logic of the commons could also be found in the communities of Peruvian-Amazonia, for whom the most desirable goods were not viewed as rival goods. This in contrast to modern economics, which assume that if goods are enjoyed by one person they can’t be enjoyed by another. The Peruvian-Amazonian culture was focused on sharing, on the enjoyment of what can be shared rather than privately consumed.

The Swiss villages are a classic example of sustainable commoning. Light on this has been shed by Elinor Ostrom and her field research in one of them. In the village in question local farmers tend private plots for crops but share a communal meadow for herd grazing. Ostrom discovered that in this case an eventual tragedy of the commons (hypothetical overgrazing) is prevented by villagers reaching a common agreement that one is allowed to graze as much cattle as they can take care for during the winter, a practice that dates back to 1517. Other examples of effective communal management of commons, Ostrom discovered in the US, Guatemala, Kenya, Turkey, Nepal, and elsewhere.

Elinor Ostrom visited Nepal in 1988 to research the many farmer-governed irrigation systems there.[9] The management of these systems was done through annual assemblies between local farmers and informally on a regular basis. Thus, agreements for using the system, its monitoring and sanctions for transgression were all done at the grassroots level. Ostrom noticed that farmer-governedirrigation systems were more likely to produce not in favor of markets, but for the needs of local communities: they grow more rice and distribute water more equitably. She concluded that although the systems in question vary in performance, few of them perform as poorly as the ones provided and managed by the state.

One of the brightest contemporary examples for reclaiming the commons is the Zapatista movement in Mexico. The zapatistas revolted in 1994 against the NAFTA agreement that was seeking the complete enclosure of common-pool resources and goods, vital for the livelihood of indigenous communities. Through the Zapatista uprising the locals have reclaimed back their land and resources, and have successfully managed them through a participatory system based on direct democracy for more than 20 years.

The digital commons, on the other hand, include wikis, such as Wikipedia, open licensing organizations, such as the Creative Commons, and many others. The social movement researcher Mayo Fuster Morell defines them as “information and knowledge resources that are collectively created and owned or shared between or among a community and that tend to be non-exclusivedible, that is, be (generally freely) available to third parties. Thus, they are oriented to favor use and reuse, rather than to exchange as a commodity. Additionally, the community of people building them can intervene in the governing of their interaction processes and of their shared resources.”

In other words, the logic of the commons is the strive towards inclusiveness and collective access to resources, knowledge and other sources of collective wealth, which necessarily requires the creation of human beings that are socially active and devoted stewards of these commons. This means a radical break with the current dominant imaginary of economism, which views all human beings simply as rational materialists, always striving at maximizing their utilitarian self-interest. Instead it implies the radical self-instituting of society which allows citizens to directly manage their own commons.

The Commons as Model for the Future

A main characteristic shared between the different cases of commons is the grassroots interactivity. The broad accessibility of resources and their ownership being held in common by society, presupposes that their management is done by society itself. Thus a state involvement is incompatible with such a broad popular self-management, since statist forms are implying the establishment of bureaucratic managerial layers separated from society. That is, the commons go beyond (and often even detrimential to) the various projects for nationalization.

The same goes for the constant neoliberal efforts of enclosing what’s still not privatized, against which during the last couple of years social movements across the globe rose up. The alternative proposals of the movements included in one form or another a broad project of direct democracy. It inevitably includes every sphere of social life, and that goes for the commons as well.

A holistic alternative to the contemporary system, an alternative that incorporates the project of direct democracy and the commons, can be drawn from the writings of great libertarian theorists like Cornelius Castoriadis and Murray Bookchin. The proposals developed by the two thinkers offer indispensible glimpses of how society can directly manage itself without and against external managerial mechanisms.

As we saw in the cases presented above, the commons require coordination between the commoners so that eventual “tragedies of the commons” could be avoided. But many, including Knight and Merriam, argue that this could possibly only work in small scale cases. This have led many leftists to support different forms of state bureaucracy instead, to manage the commons in the name of society, as the lesser, but possible, evil.

In his writings Castoriadis repeatedly repudiated this hypothesis, claiming instead that large scale collective decision-making is possible with a suitable set of tools and procedures. Rejecting the idea of the one “correct” model, his ideas were heavily influenced by the experience of Ancient Athens. Drawing upon the Athenian polis, he claimed that direct citizen participation was possible in communities up to 40.000 people.[10] At this level, communities can decide on matters that directly affect them in face-to-face meetings (general assemblies). At higher levels, that affect other communities as well, revocable, short term, delegates are being elected by the local assemblies, to join regional councils. Through such horizontal flow of collective power common agreements and legal frameworks could be drawn to regulate and control the usage of commons.

Similar is the proposal made by Murray Bookchin. Also influenced by the ancient Athenian experience, he proposes the establishment of municipal face-to-face assemblies, connected together in democratic confederations, making the state apparatus obsolete. According to Bookchin, in such case “the control of the economy is not in the hands of the state, but under the custudy of “confederal councils”, and thus, neither collectivized nor privatized, it is common.”[11]

Such a “nestedness” does not necessarily translate into hierarchy, as suggested by Elinor Ostrom and David Harvey.[12] At least if certain requirements are being met. This is the case in many of the practical examples of direct democracy around the world, in which the role of the delegates is of vital importance, though often neglected. Their subordination to the assemblies (as main source of power) has to be asserted through various mechanisms, such as: short term mandates, rotation, and choosing by lot. All of these mechanisms have been tested in different times and contexts and have proven to be effective antidote to oligarchization of the political system.

Through such networking and self-instituting, the establishment and direct control of commons can be done by the many communities that depend on them. Another element that could supplement the proposals described above, is the so called “solidarity economy”. Different collective entities in various forms are rapidly spreading across Europe and other crisis-striken areas (like South America), that are allowing communities to directly manage their economic activities in their favour.

A merging of the commons and the solidarity economy will allow society to collectively draw the set of rules by which to regulate the usage of commons, while solidarity economic entities, such as cooperatives and collectives, will deal with commons’s direct management. These entities are being managed direct democratically by the people working in them, who will be rewarded in a dignified manner for their services by the attended communities. On the other hand, the public deliberative institutions should have mechanisms for supervision and control over the solidarity economic entities, responsible for the management of commons, in order to prevent them from enclosing them.

An example of such a merging has occured in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz, where the water management is organized in the form of consumer cooperatives. It has been functioning for more than 20 years, and continues to enjoy the reputation as one of the best-managed utilities in Latin America. The water system is being governed by a General Delegate Assembly, elected by the users. The assembly appoints senior management, over whom the users have veto rights, thus perpetuating stability. This model has drastically reduced corruption, making the water system working for the consumers.

The emergence of such a merger between the commons and the co-operative production of value, as Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis suggests, integrate externalities, practice economic democracy, produce commons for the common good, and socialize its knowledge. The circulation of the commons would be combined with the process of co-operative accumulation, on behalf of the commons and its contributors. In such a model the logic of free contribution and universal use for everyone would co-exist with a direct-democratic networking and co-operative mode of physical production, based on reciprocity.

Conclusion

The need for recreating the commons is an urgent one. With global instability still on the horizon and deepening, the question of how we will share our common world is the thin line separating, on the one side, the dichotomous world of market barbarity and bureaucratic heteronomy, and on the other, a possible world, based on collective and individual autonomy. As Hannah Arendt suggests:

“The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely un­related to each other by anything tangible.”[13]

The paradigm of the commons, as part of the wider project of direct democracy, could play the role of the trick that manages to vanish the table, separating us, but simultaneously creating strong human relationships, based on solidarity and participation. And for this to happen, social movements and communities have to reclaim, through the establishment of networks and the strengthening of already existing ones, the public space and the commons,thus constituting coherent counterpower and creating real possibilities of instituting in practice new forms of social organization beyond state and markets.

Notes

1. Deirdre N. McCloskey.The Bourgeois Virtues, The University of Chicago Press, 2006. p. 465
2. Malthusianism originates from Thomas Malthus, a nineteenth-century clergyman, for whom the poor would always tend to use up their resources and remain in misery because of their fertility. (Derek Wall.Economics After Capitalism, Pluto Press, 2015. p.125)
3. The concept was based upon an essay written in 1833 by Lloyd, the Victorian economist, on the effects of unregulated grazing oncommon land and made widely-known by an article written by Hardin in 1968.
4. As Theodoros Karyotis demonstrates in his articleChronicles of a Defeat Foretold, published in ROAR magazine, Issue #0 (2015), pp 32-63
5. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth, The Bleknap Press of Harvard University press, 2011. p. ix
6. David Bollier and Silke Helfrich.The Wealth of the Commons, The Commons Strategy Group, 2012. In Introduction: The Commons as a Transformative Vision
7. Ivan Illich. Silence is a Commons, first published in CoEvolution Quarterly, 1983
8. Cornelius Castoriadis (1983): “The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy”in The Castoriadis Reader (1997), Ed. David A. Curtis. p. 280
9. Elinor Ostrom in Nobel Prize lectureBeyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems (2009)
10. Cornelius Castoriadis in “Democracy and Relativism”, 2013. p. 41
11. Cengiz Gunes and Welat Zeydanlioglu.The Kurdish Question in Turkey, Routledge. 2014, p. 191
12. For example Elinor Ostrom.Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic System s2009 and David Harvey (2012) in Rebel Cities. p.69
13. Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition, The University of Chicago, second edition, 1998, p.53.

Photo by r2hox

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Credit: Paradis Sauvage / Stephanie Bothor

“There’s a genius in every one of us. Wake it up!” Following an interview about #dScholarship, with which the architect, always in a good mood, would like to have “the crowd” finance a whole year of his work, a journalist said, “In a way, the campaign is looking for patrons in a world in which counts and feudal lords no longer exist and people are not under the patronage of others. The Protestant, democratic version of indulgent permanent financial support. Or in Van Bo’s words: a first step toward an unconditional basic income.”⁴

And the exciting thing is: this basic income does not depend on the state or the anonymity of contributors, but on the recipient’s relationship to them. A commons-based basic income, as it were – one that decouples the goods and services rendered from those received in return. One that grants freedom and enables Van Bo Le-Mentzel to do “basic work.” What makes a young man with an infant in a baby sling place half his life in the hands of a community, after coming up with Open Design, a fair-trade shoe project (Kharma Chacks), and after many other stages of his work? Is that courageous or crazy?

Helfrich: Van Bo – a designer of designer furniture or “things that serve their purpose”?

Le-Mentzel: Designer furniture.

Helfrich: Sounds ambitious…and expensive. But you are an architect, and you have designed “Hartz IV Möbel.” Could you tell me more?

Le-Mentzel: They’re instructions for building furniture that is usually very expensive. I looked to the Bauhaus for inspiration, guided by the idea: every human being should be able to afford a “Bauhaus chair.”

Helfrich: How did you develop this idea?

Le-Mentzel: I often wonder what kind of furniture – or other things – would be created if one weren’t always asking the question about how they can be sold. I think that many goods would be different. They would be less harmful to the environment and to the workers producing them. And they wouldn’t make so many false promises to consumers. Good goods, as it were. (laughs)

Helfrich: Like “Hartz IV Möbel.”

Le-Mentzel: Exactly.

Helfrich: What is the role of the open design idea here? You point out that people are explicitly encouraged to imitate Hartz IV Möbel and the Karma Chakhs as well as the do-it-yourself house projects. Other creative professionals have a different perspective.

Le-Mentzel: I believe in open source and support the open design idea, but I have invented other terms for it – terms that presuppose openness without using the word.

Helfrich: For example?

Van Bo Le-Mentzel on his Kreuzberg 36 Chair

Le-Mentzel: Beta business. What I mean is quickly establishing something new using open source tools, or starting a business together with the crowd, without any aspirations for success: blogs, free platforms like strikingly⁵ or etherpads,⁶ or the campaign platform avaaz⁷ can help here.

Helfrich: That doesn’t necessarily mean that it benefits everybody.

Le-Mentzel: That’s right, but it presupposes openness, and that changes everything. It simply doesn’t make sense any more to have fixed structures, a logo, a business plan, corporate goals, patents, or mechanisms for monitoring success if you’re constantly in the beta phase. I’m not interested in being an alpha male in a beta business, either, because it’s about moving the idea forward, not about anyone’s sensitivities.

Helfrich: Is that merely theory or also practice?

Le-Mentzel: Betahaus – probably Germany’s best-known coworking space in Berlin – is very practical. The same is true of bookcrossing⁸ or Wikipedia, but also of Hartz IV Möbel. That’s more than just theory. The interesting thing, though, is: no competitors, no squabbling, no strict hierarchy, and – very importantly – no bureaucracy or administration. It’s completely open-ended. People who work like this have an entirely different attitude about things….

Helfrich:…and they have to do without being able to plan. That means insecurity, but also more space for coincidence.

Le-Mentzel: That’s another term I like to use: random design. Intentionally designing for coincidence, with the subtext that failure is desired, too. It isn’t about getting from A to B in the most direct way possible. Business plans are A-to-B systems, schools and universities are A-to-B systems. It isn’t even about B any more, but about C. About whatever emerges and that can’t be planned. Vespucci and Columbus finding the ocean route to America were A-to-C processes. The same is true of many inventions, for example, 3M’s sticky notes or Google Maps. They came into being more or less by chance during people’s free time. Industry doesn’t like random, because random can’t be scaled up and can’t grow. For instance, you can’t invent sticky notes twice. In particular, you can’t assign someone the task of inventing them. In a sense, it invents itself. That’s exactly why I love randomness!

Helfrich: Who owns Hartz IV Möbel and the Unreal Estate House? Or more generally: who owns what comes out of the open design process?

Le-Mentzel: In any case, it isn’t mine. I’m not convinced of the idea of “intellectual property.” Knowledge must be free: ideas, compositions, texts, tattoos, designs, colors, words, sculptures, jokes, blueprints, YouTube videos. Incidentally, my favorites are the TEDTalks by Sir Ken Robinson and Hans Rosling and videos that teach you how to build rocket stoves. When knowledge is free, the best for all emerges. Parallel to that, we have to create systems in which inventors, movers and shakers, musicians, and other knowledge creators – and not just superstars like Damien Hirst –  can live in dignity.

Helfrich: Many creative professionals and designers use precisely the same argument – namely, being able to live a life of dignity – to defend the idea of intellectual property and copyright (which is based on it). They are supposed to protect creators from imitation.

Le-Mentzel: Yes, that’s an important point, at least in the current system that is oriented entirely toward competition and exploitation of ideas and knowledge. But who says that it has to be like that forever? What I fundamentally call into question is this: Let’s take Damien Hirst as an example, one of the most successful (and richest) contemporary artists. He makes millions by transforming a real shark into a work of art. I doubt he would have had the same effect with a duck or a Golden Retriever. I think that neither journalists nor poets nor composers could write or produce without being inspired by what they see out in the world, and without the support of others.

What do they pay those who inspire them? Or the sources that nourish them and on which their work is based? Do journalists pay the people they interview? Do photographers pay the objects they shoot – landscapes, skylines, buildings or people – by which they earn money? The bridges of Venice have inspired so many poets and composers. These bridges really need (financial) support. I don’t know any creative artists who would donate a part of their profits to repairing bridges.

In addition, the problem with the current systems [of intellectual property] is that they are all performance-oriented. They benefit some – usually well-known artists – but not others.

Helfrich: You’re raising the question of fairness.

Le-Mentzel: Yes, of course. The two of us are now conducting an interview for your book.

Helfrich: For our book. After all, a lot of people are involved in it.

Le-Mentzel: Which is almost always the case. Now one could ask: Who is actually working for whom? Who owns what is said here? Who has to bill whom? Do I bill you? Or do you bill me? Of course, one can try to deal with this in a contract. That would make the lawyers happy. But one can also try to promote the idea, in this case, the book’s success. And when it’s about that, I’m not concerned with the question about who owns this interview. It will be published under a Creative Commons license, which guarantees that others can use our ideas and develop them further. I think that’s a good idea, and that’s why I’m happy to make a contribution. Who knows what our readers will make out of it.

Erich Fromm [the German social psychologist and philosopher] even wrote that some mindful readers actually understand a book better than the author himself. From that perspective, preserving vested rights is extremely backward. Incidentally, I took that as encouragement to republish his classic book To Have or To Be with references to current affairs.

Helfrich: You also published Ayşe Langstrumpf, a Berlin-Kreuzberg version of Pippi Longstocking [in German: Pippi Langstrumpf], right in time for the seventieth birthday of the world’s most famous brat. In your version, Bloom and Thunder-Karlsson are gay, and the monkey Mr. Nilsson is called Mr. Nguyen. So that’s what emerges if you’re not interested in selling something – Ayşe Langstrumpf is not for sale. You simply publish instructions on the Internet how everyone can print their own version of Pippi, based on the original text.

Le-Mentzel: That’s exactly how I would publish the book by Erich Fromm. A summary of his life’s work. I’ll leave out copyrighted parts of the text and add links to the missing passages on the Internet. The book is completed only through interaction with the readers. To me, that has something symbolic. Economic activity begins with people working together. And that’s why it’s easy to outwit systems that are based solely on money and the notion of individual property. You only have to remove their foundation, and then they’re not worth anything at all.

Helfrich: Simple? That’s certainly arguable!

Le-Mentzel: You just have to take the price tag off of capitalism – copyright is one of its catalysts – and then trademark protection, copyright and commercial principles are irrelevant. Neither the Hartz IV Möbel nor the Karma Chakhs have price tags. You can’t buy them. If you want to have them, you have to make them yourself or manufacture them in a community. Another word for this is “prosumption.” Vitra, IKEA, Converse, or publishers’ classic strategies are powerless in countering prosumption.

Helfrich: And now you want to get rid of your own price tag?

The One-Square-Meter-House. Photo © by Daniela Gellner.

Le-Mentzel: Yes. That’s why I started my own #dScholarship campaign to secure my livelihood for a year. The basic idea is to decouple services from pay. Then I’m not forced to work for money, but can do meaningful things instead. I call that karma work.

I used to work freelance and charged 250 euros per day for illustrations. I have an exclusive contract with a design agency, and it charges its clients four to five times that amount. Everything in the world, not just goods, but also raw materials, people, time, even stellar constellations have been given a price tag. That drives us crazy. Of course, I have already thought about how it can be that other colleagues get twice as much or more for a service that I perform at least as well. The CEOs of Volkswagen and the Techniker Krankenkasse⁹ earn a lot more money than Chancellor Angela Merkel. Do these people achieve and work so much more?

Helfrich: Your pitch was for people you don’t know to practically give you 375 euros per week, or 1,500 euros per month. Why?

Le-Mentzel: Because that’s roughly what I need to live. To be honest, that’s the amount, roughly speaking, that my wife and I agreed on. Right now, my steady job pays a lot more than 1,500 euros. I promised her that I would do the #dScholarship project only if amounts to at least 1,500 euros a month. She already got a fright when I told her that I’d like to give up the privileges of having a steady job with permanent contract. Next year, I won’t be billing anyone. I will simply work, without money and without thinking about profit. I call it unconditional basic work.¹⁰

Helfrich: If everyone simply does what they feel like doing, who will do the dirty work?

Le-Mentzel: Hm, good question. Who’s doing the dirty work today? People who need money to survive are paid a small amount, and then they’ll do anything: cleaning toilets, digging for ore in mines, picking cotton, doing sex work. Women in India have recently begun working as surrogate mothers for Western career women. To me, that isn’t an alternative because these people aren’t doing these things voluntarily.

I’m curious to see whether I’ll perform unpleasant work next year voluntarily. It’s all a question of attitude. When we packed shoes for Karma Chakhs, I declared this tedious work an event: a packaging party with music and a buffet. In Seoul, people voluntarily cleaned the streets when the soccer World Cup public viewing events were over. It was a huge happening. Cultural work is fun. Forced labor isn’t. So we should think carefully about how unpleasant work can be made into something cultural. And for the rest, we should develop machines. Open source ones, of course.

Helfrich: And what do the people who support you get in return?

Le-Mentzel: That’s the crazy and revolutionary thing. My givers give me the money unconditionally. They get nothing in return. They’re all giver types. They know what their benefit is. They know the universal secret of giver networking.

Helfrich: Okay…I’m all ears.

Le-Mentzel: Whoever gives unconditionally will also receive in return. And twice or three times the amount. Givers benefit from giving. It sounds paradoxical, but it’s true. My Startnext profile lists precisely how much money I have already given to other crowdfunding campaigns: precisely 6,000 euros. Now I’ll get 18,000 euros back. That’s exactly three times what I’ve given. You don’t necessarily get it back from the people you helped yourself. That’s why it’s a universal secret.

Helfrich: What would you do if someone tried to co-opt you?

Le-Mentzel: A foundation offered me 1,000 euros, a businesswoman even offered me 12,000 euros. It’s clear that those were calculated proposals. At first, I was delighted, but then I turned them down. The businesswoman can give at most one-quarter of the entire #dScholarship, or 4,500 euros, just like everyone else. And I don’t accept money from businesses, only from private individuals. After all, it’s about “waking up the genius in me” and not about making me dependent on just a few givers. The genius comes out when there’s no pressure. There’s a genius in every one of us. In most people, however, the last time it’s sighted is when they start first grade. That’s why I’m also trying to transfer this #dScholarship to others.

Helfrich: You say of yourself, “I’m a giver.” And that the #dScholarship is also supposed to help you contact other givers. Does that mean that we can succeed in putting this other form of economic activity into practice if we all become givers?

Le-Mentzel: I think that we are born as givers. That is because life itself, conception, birth, education works only if someone (parents and many others) give unconditionally. That leaves its mark on us. And we are all team players by nature. Birth is always a team effort. It’s only school, grades, competition, pressure, sitting still, obedience, curricula that transform us into beings thinking in terms of economics.

Helfrich: You love controversy…

Le-Mentzel: At least I provoke it. There are two camps. Some people say I’m an egoistic oddball. The others think I’m a selfless, courageous pioneer. Somehow, there isn’t anything in between.

Helfrich: So, what are you?

Le-Mentzel: A human being.

Photo by BMW Guggenheim Lab

The post Patterns of Commoning: On Openness, Commons & Unconditional Basic Work appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A big thanks to Remix the Commons and Commons Spaces – two groups in Montreal, and to Alain Ambrosi, Frédéric Sultan and Stépanie Lessard-Bérubé — for pulling together this wonderful snapshot of the commons world.  The overview video is no introduction to the commons, but a wonderfully insightful set of advanced commentaries about the political and strategic promise of the commons paradigm today.

The overview video (“Les communs dans l’espace politique,” with English subtitles as needed) is striking in its focus on frontier developments: the emerging political alliances of commoners with conventional movements, ideas about how commons should interact with state power, and ways in which commons thinking is entering policy debate and the general culture.

The video features commentary by people like Frédéric Sultan, Gaelle Krikorian, Alain Ambrosi, Ianik Marcil, Matthew Rhéaume, Silke Helfrich, Chantal Delmas, Pablo Solon, Christian Iaione, and Jason Nardi, among others.

The individual interviews with each of these people are quite absorbing. (See the full listing of videos here.) Six of these interviews are in English, nine are in French, and three are in Spanish.  They range in length from ten minutes to twenty-seven minutes.

To give you a sense of the interviews, here is a sampling:

Christian Iaione, an Italian law scholar and commoner, heads the Laboratory for the Governance of the Commons in Italy. The project, established five years ago, is attempting to change the governance of commons in Italian cities such as Rome, Bologna, Milan and Messina. More recently, it began a collaboration with Fordham University headed by Professor Sheila Foster, and  experiments in Amsterdam and New York City.

In his interview, “Urban Commons Charters in Italy,” Iaione warns that the Bologna Charter for the Care and Regeneration of Urban commons is not a cut-and-paste tool for bringing about commons; it requires diverse and localized experimentation. “There must be a project architecture working to change city governance and commons-enabling institutions,” said Iaione. “Regulation can’t be simply copied in south of Italy, such as Naples, because they don’t have the same civic institutions and public ethics as other parts of Italy….. You need different tools,” which must be co-designed by people in those cities, he said.

Jason Nardi, in his interview, “The Rise of the Commons in Italy” (27 minutes), credits the commons paradigm with providing “a renewed paradigm useful to unite and aggregate many different movements emerging today,” such as degrowth, cooperatives, the solidarity economy, ecologists, NGOs, development movements, and various rights movements. He credited the World Social Forum for helping to unite diverse factions to fight the privatization of everything by the big financial powers.

Charles Lenchner of Democrats.com spoke about “The Commons in the USA” (11 minutes), citing the important movement in NYC to converted community gardens into urban commons.  He also cited the rise of participatory budgeting movement in New York City today, in which a majority of city council districts use that process.  The City of New York is also encouraging greater investment in co-operatives, in part as a way to deal with precarity and income disparities.

Silke Helfrich, a German commons activist, discussed “Commons as a new political subject” (27 minutes).  She said that “it’s impossible today to know what’s going on about the commons because so many things are popping up or converging that it’s hard to keep up with them all.”  She said that there are three distinct ways of approaching the commons:  the commons as pools of shared resources to be managed collectively; the commons as social processes that bring commoning into being; and the commons as an attitude and way of thinking about a broader paradigm shift going on.

Kevin Flanagan gave an interview, “Transition according to P2P” (19 minutes), in which he speaks of the “growing political maturity within the commons world, particularly within digital commons, peer production and collaborative economy.”  Flanagan said that there has always been a politics to the commons, but that politics is moving from being a cultural politics towards a broader politics that is engaging hacker culture, maker spaces, and open design and hardware movements.   Commoners are also beginning to work with more traditional political movements such as the cooperative and the Social and Solidarity Economy movements.

Lots of nutritious food for thought in this well-produced collection of videos!

The post New Videos Explore the Political Potential of the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

David Bollier: What is “value” and how shall we protect it?  It’s a simple question for which we don’t have a satisfactory answer.

For conventional economists and politicians, the answer is simple: value is essentially the same as price. Value results when private property and “free markets” condense countless individual preferences and purchases into a single, neutral representation of value:  price.  That is seen as the equivalent of “wealth.”

This theory of value has always been flawed, both theoretically and empirically, because it obviously ignores many types of “value” that cannot be given a price. No matter, it “works,” and so this theory of value generally prevails in political and policy debates. Economic growth (measured as Gross Domestic Product) and value are seen as the same.

Meanwhile, the actual value generated outside of market capitalism – the “care economy,” social labor, eco-stewardship, digital communities and commons – are mostly ignored or considered merely personal (“values”).  These types of “value” are seen as extraneous to “the economy.”

My colleagues and I wondered if it would be possible to develop a post-capitalist, commons-friendly theory of value that could begin to represent and defend these other types of value.  Could we develop a theory that might have the same resonance that the labor theory of value had in Marx’s time?

Marx’s labor theory of value has long criticized capitalism for failing to recognize the full range of value-creation that make market exchange possible in the first place.  Without the “free,” unpriced services of child-rearing, social cooperation, ethical norms, education and natural systems, markets simply could not exist.  Yet because these nonmarket value-regimes have no pricetags associated with them, they are taken for granted and fiercely exploited as “free resources” by markets.

So we were wondering:  If modern political/economic conceptions of value are deficient, then what alternative theories of value might we propose? In cooperation with the Heinrich Boell Foundation and anthropologist David Graeber, who has a keen interest in these themes, we brought together about 20 key thinkers and activists for a Deep Dive workshop in September 2016 to explore this very question.  So much seems to hinge upon how we define value.

I am pleased to say that an account of those workshop deliberations is now available as a report, Re-imagining Value:  Insights from the Care Economy, Commons, Cyberspace and Nature (pdf download). The 49-page report (plus appendices) explains that how we define value says a lot about what we care about and how we make sense of things – and therefore what kind of political agendas we pursue.

Here is the Contents page from the report:

Introduction

I.  THE VALUE QUESTION 

A.  Why “Value” Lies at the Heart of Politics

B.  Should We Even Use the Word “Value”?

II.  TOWARDS A RELATIONAL THEORY OF VALUE

III.  KEY CHALLENGES IN DEVELOPING A NEW THEORY OF VALUE 

A.  Can Abstract Metrics Help Build a New Value Regime?

B.  How Shall We Value “Nature”?

C.  Should We De-Monetize Everyday Life?

IV.  COMMONS-BASED PEER PRODUCTION: A FUNDAMENTAL SHIFT IN UNDERSTANDING VALUE?                       

A.  Practical Strategies for Building New Systems of Value

B.  The Dangers of Co-optation and Wishful Thinking

C.  But Peer Production Still Relies Upon (Unpaid) Care Work and Nature!

V.  NOTES TOWARD A COMMONS THEORY OF VALUE 

CONCLUSION 

Appendix A:  Participants

Appendix B:  A Commons Theory of Value

Appendix C:  Readings for Value Deep Dive

Excerpts

Below, some excerpts from the report:

The absence of a credible theory of value is one reason that we have a legitimacy crisis today.  There is no shared moral justification for the power of markets and civil institutions in our lives.  Especially since the 2008 financial crisis, the idea of “rational” free markets as a fair system for allocating material wealth has become something of a joke in some quarters.  Similarly, the idea of government serving as an honest broker dedicated to meeting people’s basic needs, assuring fairness, providing ecological stewardship and advancing the public interest, is also in tatters.

“We cannot do without a value regime,” said Michel Bauwens, founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation and cofounder of the Commons Strategies Group.  “Today, we have a dictatorship of one kind of value as delivered by the market system, which determines for everyone how they can live.”  Consider how the labor of a nurse is regarded under different value regimes, he said:  A nurse working as a paid employee is considered value-creating – a contributor to Gross Domestic Product.  But the same nurse doing the same duties as a government employee is seen as “an expense, not a value-creator,” said Bauwens.  The same nurse working as a volunteer “produces no value at all” by the logic of the market system.

Bauwens said that his work in fostering peer production communities is an exploratory project in creating a new type of “value sovereignty” based on mutualism and caring.  An important aspect of this work is protecting the respective community’s value sovereignty through defensive accommodations with the market system.  “The peer production system lives a dichotomy,” explained Bauwens.  “It is based on contributions for which we don’t get paid.  We therefore have to interact with the market so that we can earn a living and get paid for what we have to do.”  Maintaining a peer community within a hostile capitalist order requires that the community “create membranes to capture value from the dominant system, but then to filter it and use it in different ways” – i.e., through collective decisionmaking and social solidarity, not through the market logic of money-based, individual exchange.

…. One participant, Ina Praetorius, a postpatriarchal thinker, author and theologian based in Switzerland, asked a provocative question:  “Do we need to use the word ‘value’ at all?”  She explained that as an ethicist she does not find the word useful.  “Value is not part of my vocabulary since writing my 2005 book, Acting Out of Abundance [in German, Handeln aus der Fülle].  It’s perfectly possible to talk about the ‘good life’ without the notion of value.”  Praetorius believes the word “value” is useful to merchants and economists in talking about money and markets.  But it has little relevance when talking about ethical living or the human condition.

Praetorius is also suspicious of “value” as a word associated with the German philosophical tradition of idealism, which she regards as “an unreliable authority because of its strange methodological origins” – “Western bourgeois men of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, who created an invisible sphere of abstract concepts meant to denote certain qualities, as a means to forget their own belonging to nature and their own basic needs, especially towards women.”

But ecophilosopher Aetzel Griffioen, based in The Netherlands, regards the word “value” as “a necessary abstraction that can be used in some places and not in others.”  In his dealing with a labor union of domestic workers, for example, Griffioen considers the word too philosophical and abstract to use.  However, “for commoners trying to tackle what so-called economists call ‘value-creation,’ it is a practical necessity to use the word in trying to create commons based on their own values.”

Again, the value/values dichotomy cropped up.  Economics claims the word “value” for itself while everyone else, in their private and social lives, may have their own personal “values.”  This rift in thinking and vocabulary is precisely what this workshop sought to overcome.  Economists are eager to protect their ideas about “value” as money-based and make them normative. Commoners and others, by contrast, want to broaden the meaning of the term to apply to all of human experience.  This conflict prompted Ina Praetorius to conclude, “Language is politics.”  For herself, she has no desire to contest with economists over control of the term.  Others, however, are determined to continue that very struggle.

Towards a Relational Theory of Value

The conventional economic definition of “value” has a significant rhetorical advantage over other notions of value/s.  It can be encapsulated in numbers, manipulated mathematically and ascribed to individuals, giving it a tidy precision.  Value defined as price also has an operational simplicity even though it flattens the messy realities of actual human life and ecosystems.  It purports to precisely quantify and calculate “value” into a single plane of commensurable, tradeable units, as mediated by price.

Through discussion, workshop participants set forth a rough alternative theory of value based on a radically different ontology.  This theory sees value arising from relationships.  Value does not inhere in objects; it emerges through a process as living entities – whether human beings or the flora and fauna of ecosystems – interact with each other.  In this sense, value is not fixed and static, but something that emerges naturally as living entities interact.

“In a commons, value is an event,” said Silke Helfrich of the Commons Strategies Group.  “It is something that needs to be enacted again and again.”  The difference between the standard economic theory of value and a commons-based one is that the latter is a relational theory of value, said Helfrich.

According to Nick Dyer-Witheford, this idea aligns with Marx’s thinking.  While some observers say that a Marxist theory of value ascribes value to things, Dyer-Witheford disagreed, noting that “Marx condemned the idea of value inhering in objects as commodity fetishism.  He believed in a relational theory of value – the relations between workers and owners – even if Marx may not have considered the full range of social relationships involved in the production of commodities.”….

Everyone agreed that a relational theory of value has great appeal and far-reaching implications.  It means that the “labor” of nonhumans – the Earth, other creatures, plants – can be regarded as a source of value, and not definitionally excluded, said Neera Singh, the geographer.  Indeed, this is a point made in a John Holloway essay on Marx’s ideas about “wealth”:  the nonhuman world produces such an excess of wealth that it overflows what capitalism can capture in the commodity form, said Sian Sullivan, a co-investigator with the Leverhulme Centre for the Study of Value in the UK and Professor of Environment and Culture at Bath Spa University.  “This of course leads to the paradox of capitalism trying to use commodity form, an engine of accumulation, to solve ecological crises that the commodity form created in the first place.  It does not know how to protect intrinsic value.”

The report deals with a wide variety of other issues related to the “value question”:  Can abstract metrics help build a new value regime?  How shall we value “nature”?  Should we attempt to de-monetize everyday life?  The report also includes a major discussion of commons-based peer production as a fundamental shift in understanding value.  This point is illustrated by open value accounting systems such as those used by Sensorica, and by organizational experiments in finance, ownership and governance.

While workshop participants did not come up with a new grand theory of value, they did develop many promising lines of inquiry for doing so.  Each prepared a short statement that attempted to identify essential elements for a commons theory of value.  (See Appendix B in the report.)  We hope that the record of the workshop’s discussions will help stimulate further discussion on the question of value – and perhaps bring forth some compelling new theories.

Event photography by Pedro Jardim

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