Over the next year a group of us will be publishing a draft Res Communes manifesto for post-growth, post-capitalist change. We will be open-sourcing this for anyone who wants to help us produce our final vision and manifesto for change. Watch this space and get involved………

Excerpted from the Flourishing Enterprise blog, by ‘Jules’, from a longer article on what is wrong and how fair markets can be achieved:

“Work in progressive circles such as the Transition Towns movement and the New Economics Foundation (nef) is starting to take shape around a new vision of progress and a new form of Sustainable Wellbeing Economics which champions a shift from privatisation to propertisation of the global commons.

This economics takes inspiration from the work of Nobel laureates such as Ostrom, Stiglitz, Sen and Kahneman, updating our understanding of socio-economic relations, co-operation, reciprocity and wellbeing.

Taking inspiration partly from ancient Rome’s legal system, and moving us on from the tired, left-right dialectic of state-versus-market, this new economics puts the citizen centre stage with an emphasis on a predominant Res Communes commons sector run for, by and of the people.

This economics will be based on a socio-economic transition to a mutualised, co-operative, communitarian, localised, participatory democracy and a radical shrinking away of the private, Res Privita and state, Res Publica sectors.

Such a system may have a role for markets but this role will be as servant not master to the overarching goal of delivering ‘good lives which do not cost the earth’.

This will have wide ranging implications including for social relations; for changing cultural values from extrinsic to intrinsic wellbeing satisfying values, for new visions and narratives of ‘prosperity’, for commercial, national and international accounting, for the balance between use and exchange values, for a new era beyond ‘worker’ and ‘boss’, for a radically different and smaller finance sector and changes to many other aspects of our current system.

But already there are many new and old forms of alternatives to shareholder owned enterprises which are showing the way forward. Take the countless mutual, employee, community and cooperatively owned enterprises.

One of many examples is Spain’s £4.3bn Mondragon Co-operatives Group, employing 53,000 stakeholder-owners. The World Bank has said that consistently, for over twenty years, Mondragon group co-ops have been “more efficient than many private enterprises…. there can be no doubt that the co-operatives have been more profitable than capitalist enterprises.”

These sort of successes are showing that the idea that shareholder-owned capitalist enterprises are far from the only alternative. Maybe some day soon we will all work for, own and buy from similar enterprises.

The good news is that an end to growth need not stop us delivering high employment, high wellbeing and fiscal balance. This is shown by the emerging macro-economic modelling work of Nef and Professors Peter Victor and Tim Jackson. We in the rich world can well afford to find a reverse gear so that, within global stasis, the poor world can continue to develop.

There is reason to be optimistic. Growth long since has failed to deliver increases in life satisfaction. We need not fear the end of growth and a new post-capitalist economics. Its an exciting time to be alive – truly revolutionary things are afoot.”