They are in effect becoming ‘corporate sovereigns’ with transnational power that dwarfs the power of progressive cities and declining nation-states. Surely, the authoritarian solutions of the emerging national-populists are not the right response to this, and similarly, we believe that left-populist attempts that merely want to revive a more welfare-oriented nation-state are not the right response, especially in the context of global environmental crisis.

In some paradoxical sense, we believe there is a silver lining to this because these practises shed new light on an old debate between the emancipatory traditions of the left, namely the discussion on the ‘withering away’ of the state.

In the 19th century already, anarchists claimed that the state should be abolished forthwith, to be replaced by the ‘free association’ of collectives representing free producers. But the marxists argued, in my view correctly, that in any unequal society, abolishing the systemic role of the state in maintaining equilibrium, is simply a recipe for replacing public power with the raw power of a privately militarized ruling class (paramilitary militias, etc.. ). While anarchists imagined that the homeless would squat empty housing without police opposition, the reality is more likely to be that they would be murdered by paramilitaries in employ of the owner class.

Hence the idea of the withering away of the state. In this scenario, the working class movements would either gradually (the social-democratic version) or more forcefully and directly, take over state power, but with the clear aim of gradually replacing state functions (this was expressed by Marx in his two-stage theory, whereby socialism is still marked by both the logic of exchange and the role of the state, and only the second stage is characterized by a complete disappearance of a separate state function).

Ironically, the paradox today is that this more radical scenario is now echoed in the tactics of the corporate sovereigns AND the libertarian inspired token economy! Through the superior efficiency of their model of ‘privatized mutualization’ ( i.e. private platforms that efficiently bring together supply and demand), their control over user data and capacity to nudge human behavior, as well as their ability to directly syphon ‘surplus value’ through these platforms, they are performing formerly public functions (think about ridesharing competing with public transport or deregulated house-sharing replacing regulated hotels, etc..). The whole world is becoming a shopping mall, with free speech and other rights eroded through the absolute rights of private property.

A “withering of the State” is no longer the sole province of utopian scenarios. In fact, the invasive and deregulatory practises of netarchical platforms show what a dystopian dismantling of the State looks like. In contrast, at the P2P Foundation we contend that there is a way to hack this process toward better futures, futures where emancipatory forces can increasingly take over bureaucratised state functions while solving environmental and equity issues in the process. Indeed, civic initiatives, concerned about the social and environmental equilibrium of urban life, are also showing functional governance at work! Precisely because cooperative forms of governance and ownership can retain the surplus for their own development and to create livelihoods for their contributors, they show promise to outcooperate netarchical platforms, especially if they can form cooperative eco-systems.

We outlined such a scenario in our recent report, Changing Societies through Urban Commons Transitions.

As we discovered in our mapping and study of 500 urban commons in the Flemish city of Ghent, nearly all provisioning systems (mobility, housing, etc.) are now covered by still marginal, but growing emerging commons-centric alternatives. In Ghent and the Flanders, as in other cities and regions of Europe, there is a tenfold increase of commons-based initiatives in the last ten years. However, unlike the private platforms, they are undercapitalized, and often fragmented.

How can this fragmentation be solved ?

Here is our proposal:

• Imagine that for every provisioning system, there exists open source software depositories needed to organize such provisioning, a kind of github for MuniRide and FairBnB type solutions
• In order to finance and scale these solutions, we propose alliances of cities, cooperatives, and even unions, to create the material conditions for global scaling of peer to peer and commons-based solutions
• Locally, say at the city or bioregional levels, the local versions of these coalitions create multi-stakeholder owned and governed platform cooperatives. These platform coops use the global software depositories but adapt and change them to the local contexts and necessities, but also contribute on making the common codebase better and better, adding more and more functionalities over time. Note that all the platform surplus can now be re-invested, not as dividends for remote owners, but in the common development of the infrastructure and in better livelihoods for all contributors.
• The fourth level then, is not just exchange, but actual production. Indeed, at this stage urban commons are distributing differently but not producing the goods themselves. However, we envisage a cosmo-local production system, in which the global commons described above, are matched with local and redistributed production through microfactories, which are also open cooperatives, i.e coops that do not just capture value from their own members, but are committed to create commons that benefit the wider community.

I have no doubt that in these endeavours, we can learn a lot from the development of the private platform and extractive token economies, as we can redesign the tokens for contributory justice, while also being conscious of reducing the human footprint on nature. The good news is that cooperative mutualization can achieve that. Mutualization of physical infrastructures is the golden way to reducing the human footprint, and it can be combined with more just distribution of rewards, while also guaranteeing the full sharing of knowledge.

The key to success, in our opinion, is to think trans-locally and transnationally!

To summarize the spatial or geographic logic of our approach:

• Local, urban, bioregional initiatives produce and exchange for social need close to their user base
• But they use trans-local and trans-national knowledge bases
• Participants produce locally, but can organize trans-national and equitable knowledge-guilds and global transnational entredonneurial coalitions

The role of progressive majorities at the nation-state level is to strengthen these local and trans-national infrastructures, and to create enduring socially just and environmentally balanced provisioning systems that, through their functional — but in this case also democratic — ‘commons governance, can outperform private, extractive, transnational power structures. In order to do this, the state has to be transformed into a partner state, that insures the meta-governance at the territorial level. A ‘partner state’ is not a transition which requires a magical transformation of the current state apparatus from one day to the next. It could take the form of a progressive coalition’s growing commitment to endorse and facilitate functional governance arrangements that are participatory, democratic and managed through public-commons governance arrangements. The Partner State also applies to any interstitial area of governmental structure, at every level, where sympathetic functionaries and politicians can be found to support commons-oriented alternatives; think of Partner towns, cities, bioregions or larger transnational structures To the degree that cooperative and public-commons forms of provisioning are initiated and grow, we will succeed in a withering away of bureaucratic and authoritarian state functions, by more democratic forms rooted in civil society participation.

But note that we stress the role and function of new trans-national structures beyond the nation-state in this process of transformation.

Indeed,

1. classical industrial capitalism can be considered to be a three-in-one integrated structure of capital-state-nation, to which the double-movement logic uncovered by Karl Polanyi applied:
2. Meaning that, whenever the market function ‘freed’ itself from state and civic regulation, it destabilized society, leading to popular mobilizations to re-embed the market into society
3. However, with trans-nationalized capital, nation-state regulation is now enfeebled, and both right-wing national populism and left-wing social populism have failed to show a way forward
4. Then it follows that to substantively re-balance our societies, we need counter-hegemonic power at the trans-national, trans-local level

The good news is that these powers are emerging:

• Global open source communities and other global productive communities based on peer to peer dynamic and the commons are on the rise;
• Global entrepreneurial coalitions have formed around these open source knowledge bases, and a growing fraction of these are consciously generative coalitions, seeking to generate support for the commons and the livelihoods of the commoners
• Global coalitions of cities (and coops, unions, ethical capital) can perform the common good function at this trans-national level, creating global trusts that underwrite these new commons-based global infrastructures

This is Functional Governance 3.0, a withering of the state that is democratically accountable beyond the nation-state level.

Photo by Nathan Laurell

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Peer production is on the rise as a new pathway of value creation, where peer-to-peer infrastructures allow people to communicate, self-organise and co-create digital commons of knowledge, software and design. Think of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia, the myriad of free and open-source projects such as Linux, or open design and hardware communities such as Wikihouse, L’Atelier Paysan, Sensorica or Farmhack.

The commons ecosystem

At the core of this new value model are the ‘productive communities’, which include both paid and unpaid labour. Around these commons, an economy of products and services that are based on the commons pools, but also adding to them, is formed. This is done by enterprises that create ‘entrepreneurial coalitions’ around the commons ecosystem and the productive communities.

These contributions to the digital commons are enabled by collaborative infrastructures of production, and supportive legal and institutional infrastructures, empowered by ‘for-benefit’ (as opposed to for-profit) associations. These foundations may create digital commons depositories, protect against infringements of open and sharing licenses, organise fundraising drives for infrastructure, and assist knowledge-sharing through local, national and international conferences.

Typically, the non-profit foundations of free and open-source communities, such as the Mozilla Foundation, manage and enable the infrastructure of co-operation. They defend the use of open licenses, sometimes provide training or certification, but overall their task is to enable and empower co-operation. These institutions generally function with formal democratic procedures, such as elections.

From communities to societies

These foundations operate as the ‘polis’, i.e. mini-states of the commons-based peer production ecosystems. Moving from what we can see of the existing practice at the micro-level, to the vision of a full social form, we can see that there is also a need for a ‘state form’.

In our vision, a commons-centric society would ideally have:

• a productive civil society that would contribute to the commons,
• a generative market that would create added value around the commons,
• a partner state, which is emerging prefiguratively in some urban practices, such as the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons or some policies of the Barcelona En Comú citizen platform.

In this vision, the partner state would be the guarantor of civic rights, but also of the equal contributory potential of all citizens. Without this function, communities could have unequal access to resources and capabilities, perpetuating inequality. In our vision, the state form would gradually lose its separateness from civil society, by implementing radically democratic procedures and practices.

Public-good institutions like these are necessary in the face of rising individualistic political philosophies, such as anarcho-capitalism or libertarianism, that only see individuals making contracts with each other. Society needs its specific forms of expression. The state is one of them. And the state imaginary we argue for, synchronised with the special characteristics of digital technologies, could be that of the partner state. Watch this space.

Michel Bauwens is the founder of the P2P Foundation. Vasilis Kostakis is a senior researcher at Tallinn University of Technology and a research affiliate at Harvard University.

Lead image: Wikihouse is an open-source library of house-building plans. Photo: Wikihouse Foundation

Originally published in Red Pepper.

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A tentative agenda of the event can be found here.

Thematic concept of the module

“Commons is a concept which was launched into mainstream science and policy by American political scientist Elinor Claire Ostrom who for this received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009. From the early 1970s with her colleagues she studied hundreds of local communities which successfully governed natural common-pool resources like forests, fisheries and pastures without the interference of both state and market. She showed how instead of government regulation on one side or privatisation of property on the other, number of communities independently succeeded to design their own rules/institutions to self-govern these resources in order not to overuse them. For Ostrom crucial condition that individuals as members of these communities achieve this personal and collective benefit is ability to communicate and sufficient level of trust.

Commons are defined in many ways by various authors but most of them consider it a distinct social practice in governing of resource by community of its users through different institutional arrangements. Three key elements here are: resource, governance regime and community. Even though the concept was used in beginning only for natural resources which refer to traditional land commons from Middle Ages in Europe to contemporary ecological common-pool resources analysed by Ostrom, the concept of commons is now also used for social and non-material resources like knowledge which refer to modern commons, for example digital commons. Element of governance regime points to various rules which are designed by users and which are different from one commons to another but Ostrom believed that all successful commons share some universal principles for design of these rules. Community is another important element as there is no commons without active role of commoners or people who co-produce, re-produce and take care of commons. To what extent are commoners a part of community and what binds them together is still a matter of theoretical and empirical debate.

Commons is first of all a scientific and analytical concept used for empirical research of existing practices, but it is also a policy concept for those who aim to create or enhance commons through institutional design which was also goal of Ostrom. However, commons are lately becoming widely used as political concept by various actors of the Green and Left spectrum who oppose on one side the neoliberal policies of privatisation of various natural and social resources and on the other side criticise etatisation of resources for the benefits of corrupted elites within neoliberal state. This is rather normative use of the commons concept as progressive but then some normative criteria related to resource are often added like fair access, collective control and sustainable use which means that commons is inherently contested concept. Nevertheless, because of its radical democratic appeal that resources should be governed by its users and unifying nature of the concept as it transcends differences between social and environmental struggles, the commons became common ground for various progressive social movements fighting against market fundamentalism and state paternalism.

However, pure commons are difficult to find within modern societies as there is always some degree of influence by the market and the state. One set of questions arises on what is the relationship between commons and markets but in this module we want to explore on what is the relationship between commons and “the state” on theoretical level and “states” on empirical level. Even if commons sphere is to be enhanced, the state seems here to stay in near future and will not “wither away” so soon. This begs the question of what to do with the state and if it can be used for support towards commons or at least prevented to hinder the commons. There is a large number of examples where states actively destroyed or enclosed commons but also a growing number of examples where states developed enhancing frameworks for commons to prosper. Also the border between the state and commons is becoming in practice blurrier as there are new experiments with hybrid forms of commons and public governance through state-community partnerships.

Theories of the state differ and there is even debate if there could be a general theory of the state. One has to have a clear understanding of what state is and where the state begins and ends before exploring relationship with the commons. There are also important debates about the nature and role of the state with liberal and Marxist answers to that questions. Critical theory does not see state as a neutral entity but rather as instrument of the upper class although there is a disagreement if there is some autonomy of the state apparatus in serving this class interests. If there are contradictions within capitalist state perhaps there are cracks to be used for transformation of the state. State which would be supportive towards commons or even to transform the state through concept of commons to diffuse its power relations through participation of users in different public services and various mechanisms of social control of the state apparatus by local communities. There is a long history of attempts and failures to do so but perhaps some conclusions can be made to progress forward if any agency is possible. This also invokes the old debate on the Left if one should transform society from “outside of the state” or state power should be first captured to make deep social transformation.

Many on the Green and Left remain sceptical towards the state for achieving systemic changes towards ecological and social justice and would rather decrease its scope or even dismantle it. Looking at the issues like climate change which will further more increase global and local, environmental and social injustice because of unequal distribution of hazards between and within societies, it is difficult to imagine coordination and redistribution needed to address these problems without some role of states. This however cannot be existing states as it is not only markets that failed to solve issues like climate change but it is also states which failed. Commons probably can’t replace states but can perhaps provide ideas on how to transform them to replace both old paternalistic state and new public management state so citizens are not clients nor customers but participants.

Exploring the relationship between commons and state(s) should be informative for participants of Green Academy who seek through research, activism or other social engagement to transform both the state and commons towards progressive ends. Objective of the module is also geographical contextualisation in order to see how theories of the commons and theories of the state apply to context of Balkans and wider European semi-periphery including Southern Europe and Central Eastern Europe. To be able to achieve this, participants are invited to steer lecturers towards regional context and participate in debate about applicability of these concepts for their local work. Finally, participants are invited to contribute to empirical part by giving local successful and unsuccessful examples related to relationship between commons and states.”

Sample abstracts of lectures

Michel Bauwens: Concept of the Partner State

McKenzie Wark calls Kojin Karatani’s The Structure of World History (Duke University Press, 2014) “an astonishing work of synthetic historical theory”. It’s premise is that humans allocate resources using different modalities that have always co-existed, but in different configurations. This allows us to look at social change not as a change in mode of productions that then overdetermine the superstructures, but as reconfigurations between the four modalities of pooling (mutualization, the commons), gift-based reciprocity, the market (capitalist or not), and the state (‘rule and protect’, ‘plunder and redistribute’). The re-emergence of commoning as a central feature of both capitalist extractivism and commons-based collaborative economies, invites to reconsider social change strategies based on reconfiguring the mutual relations of the different modalities. This has been the core practice of the commons transition strategies developed by grassroots economic coalitions and their ‘transvestment’ strategies (i.e. striving for ‘value sovereignty’ by disciplining value originating from the other modalities to the needs and demands of the commoners), which aim to subsume the state and market functions to the logic of the commons, through partner state practices and generative market forms. In this presentation, we will move from the micro-economic experience of p2p phyles (economic eco-systems at the service of the commons) to the potential for a full macro-societal strategy for social change.

Tomislav Tomaševi?: Commonising the State

In the current crisis of both states and markets the concept of commons is becoming more and more popular among progressives of various political colors. Commons are often defined as “outside the realm of state and market” but this could be criticized as no contemporary social practice is completely outside state rule(s) and isolated from the influence of markets. For example, all social practices have some material base and footprint which is linked with territory while rule over territories of the whole planet is shared between states. Commons are also usually defined as governance of resource(s) by the community of users so comprising of three elements: resource, governance regime and community of users. One might notice how this is not very different from the classical definitions of the state which define it as political community under single government ruling over defined territory so comprising also of three elements: territory, government and people in political community. There are many competing theories of the state but if we take that state is not neutral entity separated from society and economy but part of the capitalist system there is an old political dilemma on the Left if it should attempt to capture state power to change socio-economic relations or this attempt is doomed to fail. Within the New Left this debate is between autonomists who focus on building socio-economic alternatives “outside” of the state and new parties-movements who focus on taking state power through representative democracy in order to create new socio-economic alternatives from “inside” the state. One option leaves the state power in hands of neoliberals and far Right while the other option in examples of left-wing governments in Latin America shows that it is not absolved from corruption and isolation of state elites from society. Perhaps the way out of this dichotomy can be the concept of commons.

If concept of commons is to be understood normatively and politically as a force of democratization, I believe it can be also used for democratization of the state. Even if the state is instrument of upper class and has its internal logic of power relations and institutional self-preservation, if one insists on some agency then the commons experiences can be instrumental in changing state institutions to include more of real participatory and direct democracy. This would make the border between commons counter-power and state power blurrier. There is a whole spectrum of cases between pure public and pure commons governance of resources like co-management, civic-public partnerships, democratic governance of public enterprises, civic non-profit concessions etc. Progressive commons practices with fair access, collective control and sustainable use of resources can be perhaps a way forward in transforming state institutions both from the “outside” and from the “inside”.

Daniel Chavez: The state, New Politics, and the commons

The presentation will be focused on a discussion of the meanings, possibilities and limitations of the interaction between the commons and the state. The key questions to be explored will be the following: Is it realistic to think about ‘commonising’ the state’? What would that mean in practice, in the context of the current international political economy? Could the state be perceived as a tool to promote the expansion of the commons? Can the state be democratised and reclaimed by ordinary citizens and local communities? Are there real-life examples of ‘alternative’ state forms evolving today around the world? What are the implications of scale?

The presentation will also refer to highly polarised academic and political debates in Europe and in other regions of the South (particularly in Latin America). On the one hand, there are activists and thinkers who still perceive the state as a social relation and a set of institutions that could be transformed to create or expand commons, while on the other hand there are many who argue that the left (or the emancipatory forces, more in general) should stop worrying about the state and focus all the efforts in building local, socially controlled and fully autonomous initiatives for social, economic and political change. Are there possibilities for dialogue and cross-fertilisation between these two seemingly opposite approaches? The presenter will refer to the New Politics project, a recently international initiative recently (re)launched by TNI that aims to promote further conversation and eventual joint work, linking activists and thinkers from different regions and theoretical and ideological traditions.

Finally, the presentation will offer a quick review of a few processes presently evolving in different parts of the world. In Latin America and some European countries, the left has entered state institutions and have experimented with local and national governance. In the case of Ecuador, for instance, part of the national government supported the design of a commons-driven transition plan, focused on the notion of the ‘partner state’. More recently, in Barcelona and other Spanish cities, progressive social and political organisations have advanced innovative proposals for the democratisation of the state, including concrete moves towards water justice and energy democracy. The presentation will analyse the prospects and constraints of these processes in terms of ‘commonising’ the state.

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My colleagues and I at the Commons Strategies Group puzzled over such questions last year and decided we needed to convene some serious minds to help shed light on them.  With the support of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, we convened a Deep Dive workshop on February 28 through March 2, 2016, called “State Power and Commoning:  Transcending a Problematic Relationship.”

Now a report that synthesizes and distills our conversations is available. The executive summary of the report is published below (and also here).  The full 50-page report can be downloaded as a pdf file here.

Participants in the workshop addressed such questions as: Can commons and the state fruitfully co-exist – and if so, how? Can commoners re-imagine “the state” from a commons perspective so that its powers could be used to affirmatively support commoning and a post-capitalist, post-growth means of provisioning and governance? Can “seeing like a state,” as famously described by political scientist James C. Scott, be combined with “seeing like a commoner” and its ways of knowing, living and being? What might such a hybrid look like?

These issues are becoming more important as neoliberalism attempts to reassert the ideological supremacy of “free market” dogma.  As a feasible, eco-friendly alternative, commoning is often seen as posing a symbolic or even a political and social threat.  It is our hope that the report will help inaugurate a broader discussion of these issues.

Silke Helfrich and Heike Loeschmann deserve much credit for helping to organize the event, with assistance from Michel Bauwens. I wrote the report, and Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel have produced a beautiful publication and webpages.  Thanks, too, to the workshop participants who shared their astute insights.

STATE POWER AND COMMONING: Executive Summary

Transcending a problematic relationship

By David Bollier. A Report on a Deep Dive Workshop convened by the Commons Strategies Group in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation. Kloster Lehnin, near Potsdam, February 28 – March 2, 2016

“State Power and Commoning: Transcending a Problematic Relationship” Download the full 50 page report here (PDF). Consult and comment on the full report in the Commons Transition Wiki

Executive Summary

Commoning is often seen as a way to challenge an oppressive, extractive neoliberal order by developing more humane and ecological ways of meeting needs. It offers many promising, practical solutions to the problems of our time – economic growth, inequality, precarious work, migration, climate change, the failures of representative democracy, bureaucracy. However, as various commons grow and become more consequential, their problematic status with respect to the state is becoming a serious issue. Stated baldly, the very idea of the nation-state seems to conflict with the concept of the commons. Commons-based solutions are often criminalized or marginalized because they implicitly challenge the prevailing terms of national sovereignty and western legal norms, not to mention neoliberal capitalism as a system of power.

To address these and other related questions, the Commons Strategies Group in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation convened a diverse group of twenty commons-oriented activists, academics, policy experts and project leaders for three days in Lehnin, Germany, outside of Berlin, from February 28 to March 1, 2016. The goal was to host an open, exploratory discussion about re-imagining the state in a commons-centric world – and, if possible, to come up with creative action initiatives to advance a new vision.

Participants addressed such questions as: Can commons and the state fruitfully co-exist – and if so, how? Can commoners re-imagine “the state” from a commons perspective so that its powers could be used to affirmatively support commoning and a post-capitalist, post-growth means of provisioning and governance? Can “seeing like a state,” as famously described by political scientist James C. Scott, be combined with “seeing like a commoner” and its ways of knowing, living and being? What might such a hybrid look like?

1: UNDERSTANDING STATE POWER

Silke Helfrich prepared a framing paper synthesizing some of the relevant scholarship that theorizes the state. Her paper introduced key issues that arise when we begin to talk about “the state.” One of the first insights is that “a theoretically valid general definition of the state” is not really possible. “The state appears as a complex institutional system that solidifies power relationships in society, and potentially has the capacity to shift them,” writes Helfrich. “Thus it is not ‘the state’ as such that acts, but in each case specific groups with concrete interests and positions of power act.” These groups and interests will, of course, vary immensely from one instance to another.

Despite this variability of “the state,” there are four basic aspects of statehood that seem to apply in every case: Political control of territory; functional power in setting and enforcing rules; institutional capacities such as bureaucracy and organized power; and social control in subjecting people to state authority. These criteria of states and “statehood” were formulated by Professor Bob Jessop in his 2013 book, The State: Past, Present and Future. Based on this understanding, Helfrich notes, “the state” consists of “territorialized political power over a society that is exercised on the basis of rules and norms, but also by procedures and practices and accustomed ways of thinking about things whose socially constructed functions are accepted as binding by the people governed.”

State power introduces distinct principles of order that shape how we experience and understand the world, said Helfrich. In modern states, human society tends to be separated between the private and public spheres, with the state asserting control over the latter. State power also separates the worlds of production and reproduction and tends to give them a binary gender association (males involved in production/work, women with reproduction/family). Finally, state power separates public life into “the economy” and politics, casting the “free market” as natural and normative and politics as the realm for subjective disagreement and (presumptively illegitimate) social intervention.

No state rules and institutions are permanent or a priori; they are always the result of societal struggle and debate. So a state is less a subject or entity in itself than an ongoing expression of political power (state power) that expresses a culturally determined web of changing social relationships, writes Helfrich. In this sense, one might say that “The State” does not really exist as a thing because state and statehood must constantly be re/produced. For this reason, Professor Bob Jessop, a workshop participant and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Lancaster in the UK, suggested that it is more useful to talk about state power than “the state,” and about commoning than “the commons.” This shift in vocabulary helps underscore the fact that “the state” is constituted by dynamic social and power relationships, and helps us avoid reifying “the state” and “commons” as fixed, concrete entities.

Why State Theory Should Matter to Commoners

In an opening presentation on state theory, Professor Jessop outlined his “strategic-relational” approach to understanding the state, which rejects the idea of a unitary, fixed state and focuses on the power and social relationships among elites in a given nation. He writes that “states are not neutral terrains on which political forces struggle with equal chances to pursue their interests and objectives and with equal changes of realizing their goals whatever they might be. Instead the organization of state apparatuses, state capacities and state resources [….] favor some forces, some interests, some identities, some spatio-temporal horizons of action, some projects, more than others.”

Jessop noted that the very juridical language of the state creates distinctions that establish structural antagonisms even before getting to classic ‘others’ such as class, race or gender. Take the commons, for example: “Is the commons to be defined within a state or does it transcend the state itself?” asked Jessop. Answering this question is extremely complicated, he said, “because there is no general theory of the state and commons.” The two tend to have little or no formal juridical relationship. Because “state power and commoning” is such a complex relation, Jessop believes it is inappropriate to rely on only one analytic approach in assessing it: “The topic invites multiple entry points for different purposes. In adopting one, you will not be able to see others. Multiple perspectives provide a more rounded view of the subject.”

It is clear that the state is an instrument of social and power relation and that state power is a jealous, self-perpetuating force. It is an enabling mechanism for certain factions, especially capital and business, to further their interests. What does this mean for commoners who seek to use commoning to develop a better world, one of greater ecological responsibility, social and gender justice, and personal security? How might commoners use the state to advance their interests and freedom?

Variations in State Power

It bears emphasizing that the recurring patterns of state power play out in different ways around the world. State power among the agrarian states of Africa, for example, expresses itself in very different ways than in it does in Latin America, Europe or the United States. This stems largely from basic geographical and resource differences among nations, but also from the diverse policies, cultures and social norms for blending state power and markets. The most salient variations in state power include: Authoritarian and neoliberal state power in Latin America; the agrarian states of Africa; fiscal austerity, enclosures and the crisis of the European Union; and the United States and its aggressive role in promoting the neoliberal state.

2: COMMONING AS A COUNTERFORCE TO STATE POWER

A recurring subject of the Deep Dive was how commoning might serve as a counterforce to check state power and possibly reconfigure it. “What are we going to do with the state?” asked Pablo Solón, former Ambassador of the Plurinational State of Bolivia to the United Nations. Clearly one of the first goals in modifying state power would be to decriminalize and legalize acts of commoning; this would at least open up new spaces for alternatives to neoliberalism to emerge. A longer term goal would be to use state power to creatively support commoning and the value(s) that it generates.

This entire terrain is treacherous and tricky for the reasons illustrated by the left’s takeover of the Bolivian state: power tends to change those who begin to wield it, and states tend to be more responsive to other nation-states than to their own people. In the end, there is also a question about whether the state and conventional law have the capacity to assist commoning. Can large, impersonally administered systems of the nation-state actually foster commons-based governance and human-scale commoning? Is it possible to alter conventional bureaucracies to recognize and support commoning?

Tomislav Tomašsevi? of the Institute for Political Ecology in Croatia noted that “the state is a playing field for different types of actors,” with commoners one among many others. So it is logical for commons movements and players to try to re-appropriate and redefine the state, to change the power relationships. This task then needs to go transnational, he said: “Once you manage to redefine the state, how can this be done in other states? How to scale up commons-based society to other countries? How to go global, and not just local? What notions of universality are needed to govern the commons through the state? The commons movement cannot ignore this challenge,” said Tomašsevi?, if only because the ‘crisis’ of the state is going to persist unless we re-imagine the state and statehood.

The group identified three basic questions of state power and commoning that must be addressed in transforming state power: What is preventing commoning within the context of the state? What do we want to change to enable commoning to exist and expand? How are states and governments standing in the way of commoning today?

Commoners must develop a compelling vision that incorporates a structural analysis, strategy and tactics into one integrated package – but with political questions as our point of entry. Commoners must also clarify their relationships with those on the political left; clarify their notion of citizenship and thus how commoners should relate to the state; and reinvent law to decriminalize and support commoning. All of this should be based on the idea of the commons as “an important form of transpersonal rationality and coordination,” said Silke Helfrich of the Commons Strategies Group. “The commons must be understood as a new category that describes the individual-in-relation-with-others.”

3: RECONCEPTUALIZING STATE POWER TO SUPPORT COMMONING

The preceding discussions – about the nature of state power, its variations among different nation-states, and the nature of commons and commoning – lead us to the central question of this Deep Dive: How can state power be re-imagined and altered in ways that support commoning? What are the strategies for the “commonification” of the state? How might a commons-based state work?

Silke Helfrich offered a starting point for answering this question: “It may be true that ‘there is no commons without commoning,’ but there can be contributions to a commons without commoning. This is where the state comes in. The state can contribute to commons without necessarily participating in commoning. It should also secure the rights of all citizens, not just the rights of commoners and support constructive relations among commons,” said Helfrich.

One must immediately distinguish between how a political progressive might imagine the state aiding commons, and how a commoner would. A commoner sees commoning as a way to provide nearly every type of good or service, from hospitals to water systems to social services, said Helfrich. In principle, it provides new ways to empower people and tap into new generative capacities. A liberal, by contrast, may see commoning as a threat to progressive values and the welfare state because commoning could encourage the state to shirk its responsibilities and expenditures.

Bob Jessop, the political theorist, said: “If we’re interested in commoning, the question is not how we bring the state apparatus in to aid commons – as if the state were somehow outside of our activities – but to identify which strategies might transform state power by altering the balance of forces inside and outside the state system. We need to talk about ‘revisiting state power and commoning: mutual learning for strategic action.’ ” Or as Pablo Solón put it: “The issue is about power and counterpower. How can commoning build counterpower? We can’t transform state power otherwise.”

It is an open question whether representative democracy is still the operational framework for pursuing political change, said Stacco Troncoso, the P2P Foundation’s strategic director and cofounder of Guerrilla Translation – or whether the strategies for aggregating political power must take place outside of “the system.” Former SYRIZA member Andreas Karitzis recently made the persuasive argument that “popular power, once inscribed in various democratic institutions, is exhausted. We do not have enough power to make elites accept and tolerate our participation in crucial decisions. More of the same won’t do it. If the ground of the battle has shifted, undermining our strategy, then it’s not enough to be more competent on the shaky battleground; we need to reshape the ground. And to do that we have to expand the solution space by shifting priorities from political representation to setting up an autonomous network of production of economic and social power.”

Public Services and Commons

An unresolved issue is how the commons shall relate to the concepts of public services, public goods and the public domain. “The state oversees these functions,” said French economist Benjamin Coriat, and “it has the right to determine access rights or pass on ownership to private companies. But the idea of a common asset introduces the idea that the state cannot privatize the resource or service. It introduces new protections for the commoners because the state is a privatization machine today.” The larger question is how we might “commonify” our understanding of public services and goods. He stressed that the idea of common goods is not simply about “re-municipalization” of assets and services, but about the transformation of public goods into common goods” – a new conceptual category. This creates new rights of protection for commoners.

Imagining a Paradigm Shift in Governance and Law

Can we imagine a paradigm shift in state power with respect to commoning? Such a paradigm shift would require new and different circuits of power, new types of governance, and in a larger sense, a widely recognized idea of the commons that could serve as a counterpoint to the idea of the state — Staatsidee — mentioned earlier by Bob Jessop. Developing different circuits of power require that we clarify how the internal governance of commons can work and how state/commons relations could be structured. For starters, a commons must become effective and legitimate as a form of governance, and this generally requires:

• Development of an inclusive ethic and shared goals (while retaining certain rights of exclusion and even expulsion of troublemakers);
• Systems for accountability;
• The ability of commoners to initiate and participate in rule-making;
• Benefits that accrue to the group in mutually satisfactory, respectful ways; and
• The right of all members to challenge the assumptions of current rules and practices.

CONCLUSION

Clearly state power and its complicated relations with commons will only grow more important in the future as the advocates of neoliberal policies seek to prevail over resistance and as commoning itself becomes more widespread and stronger. Progress on this topic will necessarily take time and further deliberation among commoners. In the near time, it will be quite instructive to learn how different nations attempt to carve out legally sanctioned commons within their borders, whether it is a “Plan C” in Greece, concrete policies to promote buen vivir in Latin America, court rulings protecting natural resource commons in India, or expansions everywhere of the commons as a parallel, post-capitalist economy.

Taking stock of such developments will require region-specific “deeper dives” and new conversations with the traditional left and labor to find some sort of working rapprochement on issues of livelihoods, basic income, public services and economic policy. Can the commons be integrated politically and legally with traditional liberalism and state authority? It may be too early to know what specific steps should be taken, but it seems clear that the crises of our time will not be resolved without serious changes in the topography of state power.

Download the full report here
All images by Stacco Troncoso

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“Markets are generally conceived as the bulwark of capitalism, greasing the wheels of capital accumulation and mobilisation and creating the class relations characteristic of modern capitalism. It creates winners and losers, and displaces workers and firm owners through the mechanisms of creative destruction and competition. This re-circulates ownership into increasingly fewer hands, placing the winners at the top as the owners of the means of production and capital and the losers as wage labourers or the lumpenproletariat, open to exploitation and domination.

This picture ignores the potential of markets. Markets need not be structures of organisation bound in capitalism or statism, but rather systems that can be shaped and determined by those within them, voluntarily controlled and distributed. In other words, bound in the collectivities and heterogeneities of an anarchist social order. By anarchism, I mean ‘a definite trend in the historic development of mankind, which, in contrast with the intellectual guardianship of all clerical and governmental institutions, strives for the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life’.

From this, I see markets as simply one example of an anarchist setting, allowing for free, equal actors to determine outcomes and achieve goals and values. But this definition inherently removes markets from the bounds of the state and capitalism. Both prompt their understandings as relative to that of the governmental and clerical respectively. The institution of the state encompasses the realm of law and order, the monopoly on violence, from which the institution of private property and the power relations of capitalism are maintained. Capitalism, as that of the clerical, creates consciences, pathologies and ideologies that allow for the maintenance of capitalist organisation. The two together comprise the modern socio-economic structure.

These clerical and governmental forces that wield vast amounts of power are a recent phenomenon. From my analysis, I hope to see some of the pathways which can change this system, moving from exploitation toward a system of voluntary collaboration and an economy embedded in the realm of the social. One that is heterogeneous and decentralised. As Paul Mason states, ‘It is entirely possible to build the elements of the new system molecularly within the old. In the cooperatives, the credit unions, the peer-networks, the unmanaged enterprises and the parallel, subcultural economies, these elements already exist’.”

The full study is available here.

The post Essay of the Day: Rethinking Markets – Anarchism, Capitalism, and the State appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Some time ago Arthur Chu said on Twitter — entirely correctly — that “capitalism” didn’t make the iPhone, or anything else. Labor is what has produced things under every ism in history. The isms just determine who gets paid.

On Facebook, Doug Henwood — author of Wall Street and editor of the Left Business Observer — recently pointed to the U.S. Arpa-E agency’s development of an advanced storage battery as an example of the “public sector” outperforming the “private sector” (March 3 at 10:48AM).  “While VC is funding the world’s first stabilized action camera,” he wrote, “the public sector did this.” The achievement in question was a “holy grail” breakthrough in battery technology that could make solar power and electric cars more viable, as well as transforming the electrical grid (Suzanne Goldenberg, “US agency reaches ‘holy grail’ of battery storage sought by Elon Musk and Gates,” The Guardian, March ). The takeaway is that “Arpa-E has come out ahead of Gates and Musk in the multi-billion-dollar race to build the next generation battery for power companies and home storage.”

Some time ago Arthur Chu said on Twitter — entirely correctly — that “capitalism” didn’t make the iPhone, or anything else. Labor is what has produced things under every ism in history. The isms just determine who gets paid. It was intended as a response to the right-wingers who mocked the protestors tweeting #ResistCapitalism on their iPhones. In fact Apple didn’t create the iPhone. The distributed knowledge and cooperative social relationships of its workers did. Apple just used “intellectual property” in its hardware and software to enclose that knowledge and those relationships within a corporate framework. Apple’s main function was to set itself up as a toll-gate between the knowledge workers and designers inside its own corporate walls, and the workers in the independent job shops in China that produced the hardware, and exact tribute both ways.

But if “capitalism” or “corporations” don’t create anything, neither do government agencies. Henwood’s celebration of the “public sector” is an exact mirror-image of the right-wingers cheering on Apple. And it’s just as meaningless.

I don’t think “public sector” or “private sector” really means much in these situations. In either case, the work is done by actual human beings through what anthropologist David Graeber, in Debt, calls “everyday communism” — by cooperating and sharing information. All achievements attributed to institutional hierarchies, whether corporations or government agencies, are really the work of the peer groups of cooperating human beings inside them, keeping them going despite authoritarian interference and irrationality from the managers at the top of the hierarchy. The question of what kind of parasitic hierarchy least impedes this process matters less than abolishing the hierarchies altogether.

If government and corporate institutional hierarchies were ever needed, it was when they could be justified in terms either of the scale of capital outlay and plant and equipment that had to be administered, or of the transaction costs of coordinating large-scale operations of many thousands of people. Both these justifications are obsolete, or rapidly approaching it. On the design side, absent Apple’s “intellectual property” everything currently done inside its corporate walls could be done on a peer-to-peer basis by open-source software and hardware communities. On the production side, Apple doesn’t do anything except contract out the manufacturing of its workers’ designs to independent manufacturers overseas.

Through its ownership of “intellectual property,” Apple is able to preempt the horizontal relationships between designers and producers and skim off the top. It is able to use its legal monopoly on disposal of the product to sell computers and smart phones made entirely by somebody else at a markup far, far above cost of production.

Apple — the corporation — is parasitic. All its functions could be carried out by peer producers freely distributing hardware and software designs to anyone who wanted to use them, with independent worker-managed shops building the hardware anywhere in the world there was a demand for them.

Similarly, some misguided folks like to praise the development of the Internet backbone under ARPA as a triumph of “socialism,” implying that any form of government-owned and -directed activity should be celebrated as an example of “socialism.” It was socialism, all right — but not the kind they mean. The actual human beings who developed Arpanet and the Internet shared an internal culture — cooperative and p2p in character — fundamentally at odds with the mindset of the Pentagon bureaucrats they were theoretically working for. It was their own horizontal human relationships — their “everyday communism” — that actually built the Internet, and laid the groundwork for the subsequent ethos of the World Wide Web.

So the right-wing mockers of the #ResistCapitalism hashtag, and enthusiasts for the “public sector” like Henwood, are equally wrong — and in very much the same way. It’s time to recognize the central role of human freedom, and human agency, in building a better world, and throw the corporate-state nexus and all its allied extractive institutions off our backs.

The post People Make Things — Not Corporations, Not Government appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Hannah Arendt (image from Wikipedia)

States that have attempted to centralise power, whether from the ‘left’ or ‘right’ of the political spectrum (these distinctions become essentially meaningless in many cases once the totalitarian state is fully formed), have inevitably, and usually unwittingly, created an unaccountable bureaucratic minion class which unthinkingly carries out state violence either directly, or by remaining passive and unwilling to take responsibility.

Maria Popova from brainpickings.org highlights the work of the political theorist Hannah Arendt, particularly her seminal book ‘On Violence’:

In her indispensable 1970 book On Violence, the celebrated German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) considers the evolving role of warfare in the context of the twentieth century. Writing a generation after the Atomic Age and at time when the threat of biological weapons was just beginning to penetrate our collective conscience, her meditation is all the more poignant and timely half a century later, in the age of drones and WMDs and all the political negotiations that surround them.

This quote particularly struck a chord and I am sure will resonate with anyone who has had to deal with state bureaucracy, however minor the encounter:

The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

Read the rest of the article here.

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