So if we are to address the problems of our time—the problems of climate change, inequality, and social insecurity, among others—our first challenge is to expand our very definition of what “the economy” is. Is the market the only serious vehicle for wealth-creation and value, as investors and economists claim? Or are there other forms of value that need to be systematically and rigorously recognized?  

I argue that this is precisely the problem: economics cannot recognize other forms of value and state power has largely adopted neoliberal economic priorities. No wonder our sense of possibility are so constricted! 

As an antidote, I believe that we need to learn how the commons can help us re-imagine our mind-map of the economy. The point is not merely to add a few neglected values into the standard economic framework. It is to challenge some core premises of “the economy” as conventionally understood, by naming the many forms of nonmarket value that are essential to life.  

That’s what the commons does. It is a robust sector of nonmarket stewardship that honors different types of value – ecological, social, ethical, spiritual. More: it is a way to nourish and protect important forms of meaning and cultural identity, as seen in the collective stewardship of forests, fisheries, farmland, and water in many permutations around the world. The commons is at work in agroecology, permaculture, community land trusts, community supported agriculture, and relocalized food systems. The commons is seen in countless open source software projects, platform cooperatives, mutual aid networks, arts and culture projects, and alternative currencies.

The problem is that many actual commons are not seen as commons and therefore as wealth-creating. They exist outside of the market worldview, and so they aren’t considered so valuable or consequential. Mainstream economics, politics, law, and culture mostly ignores them, or worse, considers them a failed management regime, the “tragedy of the commons.”

The great challenge, then, is to learn how to see, name, and reclaim the commons as significant forces in life – a powerful social phenomenon that is not just at play in the Global South, but everywhere. Some of the most significant systems of commons-based value include:

• the care work performed by families, especially women;
• the eco-stewardship of Indigenous peoples, traditional communities, community land trusts, and CSA farms;
• socially committed cooperatives; 
• artistic and academic gift economies;
• alternative local and regional currencies; and
• online communities that revolves around shared software, wikis, scholarly research, scientific knowledge, datasets, and much else. 

What most distinguishes these general classes of commons from capitalist businesses and markets, is the social mutualism that animates them and the sharing of their wealth. Commons are living, relational systems for meeting personal needs and collective well-being that mostly function outside of markets and state power. The interpersonal, social dynamics of these commons are the forces that generate value: the care work within families, the affective commitments of forest-stewards, the sharing ethic of digital commoners, the social commitment of water protectors.

Standard economics tends to ignore these genres of wealth-creation because the value generated is not easily monetized or traded in markets. The value is created without money necessarily changing hands. The value is socially embedded and localized. It arises through the pooling of commitments.

As I describe in my book Think Like a Commoner, just released in a significantly revised Second Edition, commons arise as ordinary people decide for themselves how to identify and meet shared needs. It’s a way to manage common wealth in fair and inclusive ways. This is the process of commoning — the process by which people negotiate, devise, and enact situation-specific systems of provisioning and peer governance. Commoning is not just an economic process; it’s a process that summons forth our deeper, larger humanity, our intersubjective selves in an unfolding field of cooperation.

It helps to see commons as complex life-forms—living processes.  They aren’t like impersonal markets driven by money, rationality and material desire. They are social systems through which people come together to create effective ways of meeting needs and peer-governing themselves. If the neoclassical, capitalist mindset declares that provisioning (“the economy”) must be separate from governance (the state), commons blend these two. The social practices of provisioning, governance, rules-enforcement, and culture are all integrated into one system. 

The general aim of any commons is to mutualize the benefits of shared wealth. People often decide to become commoners because they realize that conventional business requires extractivist strategies: the exploitation workers and consumers, ecological destruction, unfair practices, social disruptions. Commoners realize that the notional Invisible Hand of the market won’t serve the common good. Nor will nation-states, thanks to their deep political alliances with investors and corporations. 

That’s where the commons steps in. Commoners are pioneering new social logics for provisioning and governance at the cellular level of society. They’re meeting their own needs while enhancing the social bonds and shared purpose that the common good requires.

A key virtue of this process is that we can choose and make themselves ourselves, right now. We don’t need to rely on legislatures or courts. The state may offer support to commons, and businesses may engage in limited forms of exchange with them. But outsider control or interference is resisted because commoners prize their social and political autonomy. They want the individual freedom to enter into community agreements, to assume responsibilities, and to reap the benefit of their hard work and cooperation.  

At a time when the market/state system claims dominion over so much of the earth and everyday, imposing its own ideas of social order and value, the commons offers a refreshing alternative. They offer a space in which people can assert significant autonomy and self-determination. They need not rely on formal, legalistic terms dictated by bureaucracies or large corporations. People can innovate by their own lights, to meet their needs in their particular circumstances. They need not submit to the conventional capitalist modes of “development” and “progress,” which so often prove to be unfair, unsustainable, and anti-democratic.

A British money designer and commoner, Dil Green, once made an astute observation about the special role that commons play. He said: “Commons are ‘meso-scope’ social institutions. Not micro/individual or macro/collective, but meso. Right libertarians prioritize agency at the micro level. Statist lefties at the macro. But it’s in the middle where life takes place, where we all live. The missing middle is key. Build commons!”

This insight helps explain both why commons are so vital. They can build a new type of economy through new types of meso institutions. They help us get beyond the private / public binary (corporate/state order) that otherwise controls our sense of the possible. Commons open up new zones for action and creativity.

So let’s modify our mental maps about “the economy”!  We need to shed many of the roles ordained by capitalist economics – consumer, worker, business owner, investor – by creating spaces that let people develop their own solutions based on their own situated needs, knowledge, and wisdom. That’s what the commons does. It steps outside market/state orthodoxy to declare new terms of aspiration. It offers fresh, forward-looking archetypes for meeting people’s needs. It lets us develop new type of social practices for meeting needs, new forms of more democratic governance, and effective strategies for protecting shared wealth.

We can begin by making existing commons more culturally legible and known, and then work to consolidate and expand these commons. Going forward, we must develop new infrastructures to make commoning easier and more normal, and types of finance, legal hacks, and partnerships with the state. While this may seem an ambitious agenda, a robust Commonsverse already exists, poised to liberate us from a market/state system that otherwise limits the scope of possible change.

David Bollier is Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. He is the author of more than a dozen books on various aspects of the commons, including the just-published Second Edition of Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. He blogs at www.Bollier.org and hosts the monthly podcast Frontiers of Commoning. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

The post The Liberating Power of the Commonsverse appeared first on Shareable.

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 post New Videos Explore the Political Potential of the Commons appeared first on Shareable.

On a visit to Barcelona last week, I learned a great deal about the city’s pioneering role in developing "the city as a commons." I also learned that crystallizing a new commons paradigm — even in a city committed to cooperatives and open digital networks — comes with many gnarly complexities.

The Barcelona city government is led by former housing activist Ada Colau, who was elected mayor in May 2015. She is a leader of the movement that became the political party Barcelona En Comú (“Barcelona in Common”). Once in office, Colau halted the expansion of new hotels, a brave effort to prevent “economic development” (i.e., tourism) from hollowing out the city’s lively, diverse neighborhoods. As a world city, Barcelona is plagued by a crush of investors and speculators buying up real estate, making the city unaffordable for ordinary people.

Barcelona En Comú may have won the mayor’s office, but it controls only 11 of the 44 city council seats. As a result, any progress on the party’s ambitious agenda requires the familiar maneuvering and arm-twisting of conventional city politics. Its mission also became complicated because as a governing (minority) party, Barcelona En Comú is not just a movement, it must operationally assist the varied needs of a large urban economy and provide all sorts of public services: a huge, complicated job.

What happens when activist movements come face-to-face with such administrative realities and the messy pressures of representative politics? This is precisely why the unfolding drama of Barcelona En Comú is instructive for commoners. Will activists transform conventional politics and government systems into new forms of governance — or will they themselves be transformed and abandon many of their original goals?

The new administration clearly aspires to shake things up in positive, transformative ways. Besides fostering greater participation in governance, Barcelona En Comú hopes to fortify and expand what it calls the “commons collaborative economy” — the cooperatives, commons, and neighborhood projects that comprise a remarkable 10 percent of the city economy through 1,300 ventures.

For example, there is the impressive Guifi.net, a broadband telecommunications network that is managed as a commons for the benefit of ordinary Internet users and small businesses. The system provides welcome competition to the giant Telefónica by providing affordable Internet access through more than 32,000 active wifi nodes.

The city is also home to Som Energia Co-op, the first renewable energy co-op in Catalunya. It both resells energy bought from the market and is developing its own renewable energy projects — wind turbines, solar panels, biogas plants — to produce energy for its members.

Barcelona En Comú realizes that boosting that commons collaborative economy is an act of co-creation with commoners, not a government project alone. So the city has established new systems to open and expand new dialogues. There is a group council called BarCola, for example, which convenes leading players in the collaborative economy and commons-based peer production to assess the progress of this sector and recommend helpful policies. There is also an open meetup called Procommuns.net, and Decim.Barcelona (Decide Barcelona), a web platform for public deliberation and decisionmaking.

It remains to be seen how these bodies will evolve, but their clear purpose is to strengthen the commons collaborative economy as a self-aware, active sector of the city’s life. The administration is exploring such ideas as how existing co-ops might migrate to open platforms, and what types of businesses might be good allies or supporters of the commons collaborative economy.

Some sympathetic allies worry that Barcelona En Comú is superimposing the commons ethic and language onto a conventional left politics — that it amounts to a re-branding of reform and a diluting of transformational ambitions. Critics wonder whether the commons is in danger of being captured by The System. They ask whether “participative governance” in existing political structures is a laudable advance or a troubling type of co-optation.

While such questions may be inevitable, I think the answers cannot necessarily be known in advance, or even while pursuing them. When the commons start to go mainstream, there are so many unknown contingencies. Inventing an unprecedented new system within the matrix of the old one entails many unknown developmental factors. There will always be gaps, uncertainties and complexities that are encountered for the first time, which can only be addressed on-the-fly with creative improvisations.

Many of these improvisations will invariably be seen as politically motivated even if they are unintentional. Progress will involve two steps forward and one step back. Some smaller co-ops in Barcelona complain that they are not able to participate in city procurement projects. Others are worried that the re-municipalization of the city’s water system will ultimately fail and result in it becoming privatized once again.

Photo credit: ::: M @ X ::: via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

Francesca Bria, Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer for the City of Barcelona, works at the epicenter of many of these forces. At a public panel that I shared with her last week, she noted that many “small but irreversible changes” have already been made in the city. She also conceded that transformational change is difficult because “the public sector was not designed to serve the people.”

Sadly, this is absolutely true. City governments are usually designed to cater to wealthy developers, investors and corporations. A charmed circle of dominant players tend to get the most lucrative city contracts, the most valuable tax breaks and subsidies, and the special legal privileges. Transforming city systems to make them commons-friendly is a daunting structural challenge fraught with many administrative, legal and political complexities.

At a more subtle level, we are captives of a very language that can inhibit change. Consider the word “smart city,” which was the name of the event that I was invited to speak at — the Smart City Expo World Congress. This is an annual event in Barcelona that is physically adjacent to two massive trade shows — for vendors of “smart city” information technologies and municipal water technologies.

The term “smart city” is a technocratic/marketing term that the IT industries love because it highlights their sales pitch. Their products purport to make city systems more flexible and efficient for energy, water, traffic management, governance, etc. The term implies a private black box of proprietary technology that can be purchased, but is off-limits to ordinary mortals. Not quite a vision of the commons. Systems, not people, lie at its heart.

As the host for the Smart City Expo, the city government wanted to broaden the discourse of “smart cities” at this event, and so it invited the likes of me and David Harvey, among others. Harvey is the celebrated Marxist scholar who has written so brilliantly about global capitalism and the “right to the city” movement. His talk, which occurred before I arrived, surely must have struck many participants as provocative and curious. I can only imagine how Harvey regarded the buzzing, shiny corporate trade show 100 yards away.

My keynote presentation, on the “city as a commons,” introduced the commons paradigm and described many enclosures of the city. I also focused on a variety of commons-based urban initiatives such as the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons, participatory budgeting, data commons and platform cooperatives. (I will post a link to the video when it is available.)

For the corporate vendors, it must have been a bit of jolt to consider whether real citizens can be integrated into the “smart city” and given some genuine sovereignty. Tech people don’t generally consider the politics of enclosure or the idea of commoning. Within a few minutes of finishing my talk, however, I was surprised to receive an email from a Dutch banker who had been in the audience. “Don’t you think cities have grown too big to become a commons? Haven’t people become too opportunistic to create and share fairly?” (I replied: “Institutional structures and social norms can achieve a lot despite humanity’s less attractive side.”)

But the deeper point remains: How to integrate commons-based systems with the complex realities of city governments and markets as they exist today? Or must commons occupy a different sphere entirely?

I confess that I do not have a fully satisfying answer to these questions. For a workshop held the next day, however, I did come up with a rough typology of hybrid commons that attempt to “make nice” with city government and markets. I’d love for commons to open up new lines of interaction with the logic of government and market, but it is paramount that in doing so commons affirmatively protect their sovereignty and integrity of vision.

I am reminded of the grim conclusion of Lewis Hyde, the gift economy scholar. In his book Trickster Makes the World, based on his study of mythological tricksters as change-agents, Hyde argues that the inevitable fate of any subversive with dangerous powers is either to be cannibalized or exiled. Powerful institutions must “either expel or ingest their troublemakers.” A third, more precarious option is to “stay on the threshold, neither in nor out.” But is that sustainable?

As urban commons in Barcelona and elsewhere mature, commoners are facing some difficult and novel challenges!

The post Barcelona’s Brave Struggle to Advance the Commons appeared first on Shareable.

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 Tomašsević 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 Tomašsević, 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.

The post State Power and Commoning: Transcending a Problematic Relationship appeared first on Shareable.

Michel Bauwens recently spoke at the Harvard Berkman Center to give his big-picture analysis of the economic and social transition now underway. The hour-long video of his talk provides a clear explanation for why peer production is flourishing and out-competing conventional business models and markets. It’s all part of an epochal shift in how value is created, argues Bauwens.

Citing major transitions of the past—from nomadic communities to clans; from clans to class-based, pre-capitalist societies; from pre-capitalism to capitalism—Bauwens said, “We’re in a period of history in which a marginal system of value is moving to the center of value-creation.” 

For those who don't have an hour to watch the video, a review of Michel's key points:

Unlike traditional leftist visions of revolution, which require a social movement to seize state power and then install another system, the emerging world of peer production is based on another vision: build an alternative economy outside the circuits of capitalism, or at least insulated from its exploitation, and then develop its own functionalities and moral authority.

The point is not so much to displace or smash capitalism, he said, as to make the commons the new, more compelling “attractor” for activities that create value. Rather than try to use private labor to produce value, which is then captured by privately owned corporations and sold in markets based on artificially created scarcity, the peer production economy proposes a new model: abundance based on an ethic of sufficiency.

Instead of allocating surplus value through the market or hierarchical systems, the peer production economy creates value through open, voluntary contributions, and “massive mutual coordination,” said Bauwens. The goal is to create commons through social systems and the sharing of resources.

The credibility and power of this paradigm is confirmed by the massive shift of capital toward social sharing—a system that Bauwens calls “netarchical capitalism.” It’s an open question is whether this new realm will be made subordinate to traditional capital (think Facebook, Google, and Uber), or whether it will be able to emancipate itself and assert a new value proposition, independence, and cultural logic (think Wikipedia, Loomio, Enspiral).

A lot will depend on whether new types of “transvestment” can occur—the shifting of investment capital from one mode of value-creation to the new modes of social collaboration, along with adequate legal means of protecting the commons from private appropriation.

While companies like Airbnb and Uber may be convenient, they are ultimately predatory on social relationships. They extract value from our social interactions (e.g., personal data) and do not reinvest in the trust and cooperation of social communities. This often results in massive social precarity as companies obtain benefits—educated workers, attractive communities, or free software code (open source software)—for which they do not necessarily pay anything. Bauwens calls this a kind of “hyper-neoliberalism. You don’t even have to pay people any more!”

By contrast, generative commons are emerging that conduct economic transactions in socially mindful, ethical ways. Bauwens cited Enspiral, the New Zealand “open value network” that built the open source decisionmaking platform Loomio and Co-Budgeting, a platform that lets a virtual community allocate the surplus value that it generates.

As these new circuits of social support and livelihood emerge, said Bauwens, they are giving rise to new sorts of “neo-nomadic work” among young people acting as designers, programmers and entrepreneurs. They are shunning the extractive, exploitative economy and embracing new systems for mutualizing finance and social support.

Of course, for the mainstream press focused on the traditional economic indices—market capitalization and tech billionaires—such experiments in platform co-operativism are decidedly less sexy. But consider how, after the City of Austin rejected Uber’s demands for minimal public accountability, it created its own nonprofit mobile app for ride-hailing.

The key challenge ahead, said Bauwens, is finding ways for commoners to make a living from supporting the commons, rather than just volunteering their time. The model for commons-based peer production has been proven in such open source innovations as the Wikispeed car and the Wikihouse design plans. But people still need to earn a living and “capital for the commons” still needs to be raised to finance collaborative production. This is the next frontier.

Bauwens believes that new schemes for sharing equity may help provide answers. “Fair shares associations,” for example, could give a one-fourth share of equity to four different groups—the founders of new enterprises, the funders, workers, and users.

Or “double-licensing” schemes could be used that let anyone use and share the knowledge and designs made by a community unless a given user wishes to commercialize that knowledge. In such cases, they would have to pay a licensing fee or become members of the association.

Another model is the for-benefit association to manage the infrastructure of cooperation, said Bauwens. It may look like a conventional nonprofit, but it doesn’t think in terms of scarcity and its own institutional boundaries; it thinks in terms of abundance and more readily shares what it has.

The ultimate vision for a new society, said Bauwens, is one of “stable commons allied to a social economy.” This would enable civil society to become productive in its own right (and not simply an adjunct to the market and state). The economy itself can become ethical and generative because it genuinely seeks to support ecosystems and social life (and not simply feed the demands of capital and settle for a tolerable “sustainability.”)

In such a vision, the state becomes “an enabler of personal autonomy,” and not simply a bureaucratic control system or a service-provider, as today’s market/state functions.

To be sure, peer production does not solve many existing inequalities and social unfairness in the system, especially involving race and gender. But it does institute a new system of value-creation that transcends the pinched and exploitative logic of conventional capitalism. That is likely to open up new spaces for a more gender- and race-friendly society than our current system, which is invested in pitting insurgent social movements against each other.

The post Michel Bauwens Explains the Great Value-Shift of Our Time appeared first on Shareable.

One of the more complicated, mostly unresolved issues facing most commons is how to assure the independence of commons when the dominant systems of finance, banking and money are so hostile to commoning. How can commoners meet their needs without replicating (perhaps in only modestly less harmful ways) the structural problems of the dominant money system?

Fortunately, there are a number of fascinating, creative initiatives around the world that can help illuminate answers to this question – from co-operative finance and crowdequity schemes to alternative currencies and the blockchain ledger used in Bitcoin, to reclaiming public control over money-creation to enable “quantitative easing for people” (and not just banks).

To help start a new conversation on these issues, the Commons Strategies Group, working in cooperation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, co-organized a Deep Dive strategy workshop in Berlin, Germany, last September. We brought together 24 activists and experts on such topics as public money, complementary currencies, community development finance institutions, public banks, social and ethical lending, commons-based virtual banking, and new organizational forms to enable “co-operative accumulation” (the ability of collectives to secure equity ownership and control over assets that matter to them).

I’m happy to report that a report synthesizing the key themes and cross-currents of dialogue at that workshop is now available. The report is called “Democratic Money and Capital for the Commons: Strategies for Transforming Neoliberal Finance Through Commons-Based Alternatives,” (pdf file) by David Bollier and Pat Conaty.

You could consider the 54-page report an opening gambit for commoners to discuss how money, banking and finance could better serve their interests as commoners. There are no quick and easy answers if only because so much of the existing money system is oriented towards servicing the conventional capitalist economy. Even basic financial terms often have an embedded logic that skews toward promoting relentless economic growth, the extractivist economy and its pathologies, and the notion that money itself IS wealth.

That said, commoners have many important reasons for engaging with this topic. As we put it in the Introduction to the report, “The logic of neoliberal capitalism is responsible for at least three interrelated, systemic problems that urgently need to be addressed – the destruction of ecosystems, market enclosures of commons, and assaults on equality, social justice and the capacity of society to provide social care to its citizens. None of these problems is likely to be overcome unless we can find ways to develop innovative co-operative finance and money systems that can address all three problems in integrated ways.”

To continue with the Introduction:

A key driver of these pathologies is debt-driven growth and deregulated finance, which are central elements of the neoliberal economics introduced by Thatcher and Reagan in the early 1980s as the successor to the Keynesian paradigm. This shift was marked by the abolition or relaxation of legal interest rate caps in most countries, which has resulted in usurious rates for many conventional loans and rates as high as 5,000% for payday loans. While such predation was once mostly directed at the poor, precarious workers and the global South, it spread under other forms to middle-class Europeans and Americans in the 1990s and in the 2000s. Over-indebtedness has become a ubiquitous condition that has, deepened since the 2008 crisis, strangling economies all over the world and inflicting great social injustice. Yet business-as-usual continues and mainstream politics has no interest in fundamental reforms.

Fortunately, new opportunities to pursue systemic change are arising. As the internal contradictions of capitalist finance become more evident and more damaging, insurgent critiques of the money system are gaining ground as is the development of practical alternatives. Near-forgotten historical models of cooperative finance are being rediscovered as new technologies enable novel DIY credit systems, alternative currencies and cooperative organizational models. One might say that a post-capitalist vision for finance and money is fitfully emerging.

But can the eclectic jumble of piecemeal solutions – alternative banks, currencies, lending systems, cooperative digital platforms, policy proposals, and more – be synthesized into a coherent new vision? Can the various projects and players in this sprawling realm find each other, initiate deeper collaborations, and attract wider support?

This was the goal of the Deep Dive. You can download a pdf version of the 54-page report here – and here is a seven-page Executive Summary.

My co-author Pat Conaty and I wish to thank the participants of the Deep Dive for sharing their deep wisdom on so many important topics, and for helping us refine the text of the final report.

Photo credit: zcopley via Foter.com / CC BY-SA.

To give you a better idea of the material covered, here is the remainder of the Executive Summary:

I. Why A Transformation of Money, Banking and Finance Is Essential

Neoliberal capitalism, especially in the aftermath of the 2008 meltdown, is demonstrably unable to meet basic human needs in socially fair, ecologically responsible ways. Its obsession with economic growth and private wealth accumulation has become predatory and socially parasitic, and the overall system is wired to produce recurrent, catastrophic booms and busts. But it is not widely appreciated that money and the money system are social creations that act as invisible instruments of social engineering and order. To many, they seem a kind of natural economic order. But it is entirely possible to recapture public (government) control of the ability to create money from the private sector so that money can be used to serve public, democratically determined needs rather than the narrow profit-making goals of private banks and financial institutions.

The general public is not aware that money is created by private banks through the creation of new debt, repayable by governments and households with interest. However, instead of seeing money as something that government must borrow from banks, we might also see it as a common good – a public supply of currency that could prioritize socially necessary expenditures, including investments in the private economy, without first raising revenues through taxes. There need be no “deficit” resulting from public borrowing from banks. Money would simply represent a public source of new currency, a function that private banks already perform by generating money as debt. The difference would be that public currencies would be interest-free and support democratically determined needs; they would not need to meet the commercial, profit-driven priorities of private lenders. Money for the common good could be democratically created as a public service and allocated for the public interest.

II. How Can We Finance Commons and Commoning?

The conventional financial system is dedicated to an economy of exploitation and extraction. It amounts to a pyramid scheme with a built-in growth imperative because in order to repay interest – an add-on to the initial sum of money created by banks – the general population must take on ever more debt, and at a faster rate than the economy grows. This debt treadmill driven – by compound interest – invariably leads to speculation and boom-and-bust economic crises. Unlike 1929, which led to Keynesian reforms and a New Deal in the US and the emergence of the modern welfare state, the global banking and money system since 2008 has been shored up without any fundamental reform. Our money and banking system is now based on rent extraction that uses privatization, the division of labor, and the enclosure of common resources to create a surplus.

This process is supported by a diversity of financial instruments that create a variety of constraints and claims on the privatized resources and labor. These financial realities prohibit the generation of new capital for public and common uses and frustrate the capacity of commoners to create their own value and capital for common purposes. Instead the existing production and financial system is designed to siphon all value creation into private pockets. Thus, the only hope for commoners and those committed to finance as a tool for promoting the public good lies in dismantling the existing rentier system and reintegrating the realms of nature and social value into a reconceptualized whole in which capital serves the collective aims of societies.

In short, we need to reimagine and reconstruct the role of money and credit if we are to create a commons-based society that is both democratic and equitable. This means using finance to enable people to engage in commoning and the promotion of economic and social co-operation through a process of envisioning, articulating, and creating shared resources as common goods. This is a very different mentality than the feverish buying and creating of private assets which is the primary aim of conventional lending. It’s about funding a process for mutualization. This requires a wholly different set of institutions, legal regimes and social practices for managing (and mutualizing) money, credit and risk.

III. Nine Innovative Institutional Forms to Transform Finance

But we need not start from zero. The good news is that credit and risk can be reconceptualized to serve the commons. It has been done before in various limited ways. There are a wide variety of historically proven and promising examples that have already emerged to address these issues. The Deep Dive explored nine innovative models of finance.

1. Social and Ethical Lending.

Ethical social banks such as Fiare in Spain and Banca Etica in Italy are actively concerned with the social and environmental impact of their loans. They therefore focus on borrowers associated with the fair trade movement, corporate social responsibility, local businesses generating local good work, and other co-operative and social concerns. With its linkage to over 400 local government administrations, Banca Etica has a strong public sector and community component. The co-operative bank’s equity, currently 52 million euros, is owned by over 35,000 shareholders and 90 local groups, which actively help develop the bank’s products and services and hold it accountable to its social mandate.

2. Community Development Finance Institutions.

CDFIs are a species of cooperative and mutual lending institutions that have proliferated in the U.S. as a way to democratize access to credit, especially in the face of racial discrimination. Thanks to strong support from Presidents Clinton and Obama, there are now more than 1,000 mission-driven organizations officially recognized as CDFIs, and another two or three times as many institutions doing similar work but without official certification. Their collective assets amount to tens of billions of US dollars. CDFIs have also been developed in the UK and are growing in similar ways.

Photo credit: liewcf via Foter.com / CC BY-SA.

3. Public Banks.

An attractive alternative to the boom-and-bust economy spurred by the commercial banking system is public banks. Public banks can immediately lower public borrowing costs; provide capital to address social needs in ways that are not extractive; and lower the cost of infrastructure investments by half by reducing the interests costs of such projects. One example is the Bank of North Dakota which provides low-interest loans for small businesses, students, and farmers while generating over $300 million in dividends over ten years for North Dakota’s 600,000 residents. Between 1938 and 1974 the Bank of Canada operated in this way through a public banking arm and on a national scale. Some of Canada’s largest infrastructure projects – like the St. Lawrence Seaway – were financed in this way. There are many good examples of public banking internationally, including municipal banks.

4. Transition-Oriented Credit.

One key problem with traditional banks is that they struggle in circumstances of non-growth, or when the market rate of interest is low. Some ecologically minded communities are therefore trying to devise a credit or finance model that can work well in circumstances of no growth that can still support a resilient local economy. The Sambruket community in Sweden has concluded that it needs to establish both a natural resource commons and a complementary financial commons to work sustainably. As a co-operative, it is experimenting with a crowd-equity nonprofit mechanism as a way to support local sustainable development.

5. The Blockchain Ledger as a Community Infrastructure.

Despite controversy about its role in speculation, Bitcoin is a significant financial advance because of its innovative “distributed ledger” or “blockchain” technology. This breakthrough system allows people on open networks to validate the authenticity of an individual bitcoin (or digital certificate or document) without the need for a third-party guarantor such as a bank or government body. This has far-reaching ramifications because blockchain technology can be used reliably to manage social relationships on network platforms, such as the establishment of “distributed collaborative organizations” based on digital networks, or frameworks for collective governance of a group. If users can avoid the usual need to verify the reliability or trustworthiness of other users, it allows an indefinitely large number of participants to engage in exchange relations on open network systems.

6. Complementary Currencies.

Community Forge – communityforge.net – is a social networking platform that lets communities create their own local currency, manage exchanges and member accounts, and advertise individual and collective needs. More than 400 communities use the Drupal-based platform to manage their complementary currencies. By the end of 2014, Community Forge supported 550 LETS projects in France, 113 in Belgium, 63 in Switzerland, and 150 timebanks. One interesting alternative currency is uCoin, a project in France that seeks to implement a basic income through the use of cryptocurrency.

7. Crowdfunding for the Commons.

One of the most innovative crowdfunding enterprises is Goteo, a Spain-based open-source platform dedicated to advancing commons projects and principles. Goteo differs from standard crowdfunding sites in that it invites public participation in improving projects and greater accountability to donors. To date, Goteo has funded more than 400 projects, with a 60-70% success rate in meeting fundraising goals. It has more than 50,000 users and has raised more than 2 million euros since its founding in 2011.

8. Enspiral and Commons-based Virtual Banking.

Enspiral is a New Zealand-based network of entrepreneurs, professionals and hackers who are “using the tools of business and technology to make positive social change.” The enterprise uses software platforms to create novel organizational structures for hosting new types of collective self-provisioning and financing. One such platform, my.enspiral, allows the members of the Enspiral Services freelancer and contractor collective to use an internal banking system within a walled garden of autonomy and flexibility. Enspiral also has a Cobudget platform that lets participants allocate money in the collective budget in proportion to how much they contributed to it.

9. New Organizational Forms for Cooperative Accumulation.

Some organizational forms are showing great promise in fostering new types of “cooperative accumulation” – i.e., the collective accumulation of financial resources for mutual benefit. One notable example is the “solidarity economy” and multi-stakeholder cooperative models, especially as developed in Italy, Quebec, Canada, and more recently in New York City (Solidarity NYC). The issuing of Co-operative Shares, developed in the 1990s by the Fair Trade movement in the UK, has been revived since 2008 to raise capital for a wide diversity of local and community needs, including the development of renewable energy, saving rural shops, the community buy-outs of pubs, land acquisition for local food production, and other purposes. The UK community shares movement, which has spread to Canada, highlights how co-operative forms of equity capital can be raised to help meet common needs.

London Permaculture via Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA.

IV. Strategies for Moving Forward

Participants identified five key strategies for moving forward:

1. Democratize Money. Commoners must re-capture the money-creation system for public purposes and replace debt–based money. The government of Iceland has produced a 2015 report showing how to do this.

2. Get Beyond Money (As We Know It). Since money tends to promote social relationships that require the exchange of equivalents (agreed upon prices for the purchase of goods) and behaviors that exclude those with no money, many commoners wish to move “beyond money” by honoring the indirect reciprocity of commons and to welcome different types of money in different contexts as ways to give communities greater self-determination.

3. Back to the Future: Blending the Old and the New. The historical experiences and wisdom of the older co-operative models associated with the labor movement and left politics should be blended with new models based on digital technologies that are being developed by a younger generation. Many time-tested models such as JAK fee-based banking, demurrage (negative interest) currency and the WIR currency developed during the Great Depression to stimulate local economies, are inspiring innovative forms of money.

4. Engineer Systems for Cooperative Accumulation. It is essential to devise new organizational forms (not just financial systems) that have the capacity to enable “cooperative accumulation” – i.e., to accumulate financial reserves or assets that can be mutualized, democratically managed, and mobilized to develop and sustain forms of capital that create commonwealth. Multi-stakeholder co-operatives like in Italy, Quebec and Japan can provide guidance on how to develop convivial legal structures for commoners, co-operators, and sustainable community development.

5. Macro-Map the New Monetary System as a Commons. We must differentiate between the “Real Economy” that meets people’s everyday needs and the “Unreal Economy” that is dominated by parasitic “rentier-finance.” A macro-mapping of a commons-based credit and finance system can help us visualize the relationships for structuring and operationalizing the new economy.

Next Steps

A number of specific action steps were identified for moving the above goals forward. They include: Theoretical and conceptual research; policy development and outreach; the development of a richer, broader discourse about finance and the commons; the creation of new venues for collaboration and activism; the intensification of experiments in new currencies; and funding for project development and commons institutions. One immediate proposal was to advise and support Syriza and the people of Greece as they struggle to develop effective responses to the social and economic crisis ravaging that country.

Conclusion

The Deep Dive discussions showed that a commons-based system of money and capital based on democratic and equitable principles is entirely feasible. Many existing and emerging models can overcome the prevailing system of debt and interest, and bring about the transformation that our societies need. The challenge is in achieving root-and-branch change and the creation of transition institutions within a system that has so many complicated and seemingly disconnected facets. It is therefore difficult, both practically and strategically, to transform the current system so that it can be made inclusive, democratically accountable, socially constructive, and ecologically benign.

However, it is also clear from the discussions that there are many options to pursue and that they should not be seen as either/or choices, but as both/and challenges. We can find inspiration and guidance from many historic and current examples of interest-free money, public sector money not based on debt, and forms of public, social and co-operative banking. Each of these innovations serve different needs and functions, but all are complementary and can be integrated in a convivial money system that can provide equitable capital and other ethical and useful financial services for commoners and their communities. The evident problem with developing the available options today is the disjointed and weakly organized character of existing reform initiatives. There is not yet a shared meta-narrative to galvanize and unite a monetary reform movement that is both democratic and devoted to sustainable and humane forms of development.

Commons principles and practices can help establish a dynamic and integrated agenda for change, and draw upon many robust tools and policy proposals. A unifying narrative is also essential for both resisting and offering concrete alternatives to the unaccountable private-sector power of banks to create debt-based money out of thin air. The state and the people need to strip bankers of this sovereign power. Co-operative and democratically accountable forms of organization can provide a feasible alternative social architecture that can protect, maintain, and steward these practices in service to the common good.

But immense popular pressure is necessary to achieve these changes. Money needs to be democratized. Debt bondage needs to be abolished. New systems of co-operative finance, banking, and publicly generated currency need to be established. Only in this way will the commons be protected, promoted, and placed at the service of all – not enclosed and expropriated for the benefit of the privileged few.

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An important new book offering a vision of commons-based law has just arrived! The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community argues that we need to reconceptualize law itself and formally recognize commoning, if we are going to address our many environmental problems.

The book is the work of two of the more venturesome minds in science and law — Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei, respectively. Capra is a physicist and systems thinker who first gained international attention in 1975 with his book The Tao of Physics, which drew linkages between modern physics and Eastern mysticism. Mattei is a well-known legal theorist of the commons, international law scholar and commons activist in Italy who teaches at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, and at the University of Turin. He is also deputy mayor of Ch­ieri in the northern region of Italy. 

The Law of Ecology is an ambitious, big-picture account of the history of law as an artifact of the scientific, mechanical worldview — a legacy that we must transcend if we are to overcome many contemporary problems, particularly ecological disaster. The book argues that modernity, as a template of thought, is a serious root problem in today’s world. Among other things, it privileges the individual as supreme agent despite the harm to the collective good and ecological stability. Modernity also sees the world as governed by simplistic, observable cause-and-effect, mechanical relationships, ignoring the more subtle dimensions of life such as subjectivity, caring and meaning.

As a corrective, Capra and Mattei propose a new body of commons-based institutions recognized by law (which itself will have a different character than conventional state law).

It’s quite a treat to watch two sophisticated dissenters outline their vision of a world based on commoning and protected by a new species of “ecolaw.” Capra and Mattei start their story by sketching important parallels between natural science and jurisprudence over the course of history. Both science and law, for example, reflect shared conceptualizations of humans and nature. We still live in the cosmological world articulated by John Locke, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Hugo Grotius, and Thomas Hobbes — all of whom saw the world as a rational, empirically knowable order governed by atomistic individuals and mechanical principles. This worldview continues to prevail in economics, social sciences, public policy, and law.

The audacity of The Ecology of Law is its claim to explain the pathologies of modernity as they affect life today: how this worldview prevents us from effectively addressing our many ecological catastrophes, and how jurisprudence as now conceived is a key element of this problem. Modernity is based on the sanctity of private property and state sovereignty, write Capra and Mattei, an order that presumes to be an “objective,” natural representation of reality. Distinctions such as “private” and “public,” and “individual” and “collective,” are also presumed to be self-evident descriptions of reality.

For those of us involved with the commons, of course, we know that this is a highly reductionist and misleading way of understanding the world. Commoning proposes more integrated categories for understanding how human beings function in the world. In actual experience, individuals are nested within collectives, and they develop and flourish as individuals only in cooperating with others. Similarly, subjective experience and objective fact are not isolated; they blur together. The either/or divisions of modernity are a kind of consensual social fiction.

Law in modern societies is one of the most important tools for affirming (misleading) categories of thought. For example, law presumes that, if there is no external limit imposed on an individual citizen, each is free to act as a “rational actor” to extract as much from nature as he/she wishes. This is presumed to improve upon nature, create value and advance human progress — a social DNA that has run amok and is destroying the planet. In the worldview of modernity, individuals are imagined as the primary agents of change, and as isolated agents without history, social commitments or context. This gives individuals permission to be as self-regarding and hedonistic as they wish, a dangerous capitalist-libertarian delusion that continues to hold deep sway.

Imagining a post-capitalist future, then, is not simply about passing a new law or instituting a new set of policies. It requires that we confront our deep assumptions about worldview. What we need, Capra and Mattei argue, is a major paradigm shift in the worldview of science and law that reflects a different understanding of nature and human beings. We need to shift from a paradigm that sees the world as a machine, to a systemic, ecological paradigm that sees the world as a network of interdependencies.

We need to see that law is not something that exists independently “out there” as an objective reality. It is a socially constructed order; a power that we must reclaim. “Law is always a process of commoning,” Capra and Mattei write, reminding us that law emerges from communities of commoners. This insight can help us build a new “ecolegal order” with three strategic objectives, they argue: to disconnect law from power and violence (the nation-state); to make communities sovereign; and to make ownership generative.

It’s impossible to summarize all of the rich threads flowing through The Ecology of Law, so let me settle here for sharing a flavor of the argument made by the authors:

The most important structural solution to the rush toward final disorder is to restore some harmony between human laws and the laws of nature by giving law back to networks of communities. If the people were to understand the nature of law as an evolv­ing common, reflecting local conditions and fundamental needs, they would care about it. People would understand that the law is too important to remain in the hands of organized corporate interests. We are the makers and users of the law.

An ecological understanding of law, the only revolution pos­sible through culture and genuine civic engagement, overcomes both hierarchy and competition as “correct” narratives of the le­gal order. It seeks to capture the complex relationships among the parts and the whole — between individual entitlements, duties, rights, power, and the law — by using the metaphor of the network and of the open community sharing a purpose.

Instead of being alienated from the law governing them, the participants in [commons] are their own law-givers and en­forcers; they stand outside of any power concentration and or any claim of monopoly over violence. They overcome the artificial dis­tinction between a private and a public sphere of their lives. Inter­pretation of law is here a nonprofessional exercise in the sharing of collective meaning. Law, when it is separated from depending on power and violence, is like language, culture, or the arts: it becomes a way through which a collectivity communicates and decides about itself.

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Seeing the Forest tells the story of the Siuslaw National Forest in Oregon — how it made a successful transition from timber extraction to ecosystem restoration. Once the epicenter of conflict, the Siuslaw today is an exemplar of cooperation and collaboration.

They harvest wood sustainably by thinning overly dense monoculture stands that are a legacy of the earlier days of unrestrained clearcutting. This not only improves the health of the forest by providing better habitat, but also creates local jobs and provides revenue to fund other restoration activities. These activities include stream and watershed restoration, installing large culverts for aquatic organism passage, road maintenance, and road closures. All of these activities create more local jobs, in a virtuous circle that benefits the people, the forest, and salmon.

This is the story of how one national forest evolved from seeing trees as its primary resource, to seeing the forest as a whole.

In the 1990s, many communities in central Oregon were torn asunder by the “War of the Woods.” Environmentalists had brought lawsuits against the U.S. Forest Service for violating its own governing statutes. For decades, timber companies had been allowed to clear-cut public forests, re-seed with tree monocultures, and build ecologically harmful roads on mountain landscapes.

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Here is an inspiring five-minute video about the quest for a new post-growth economic system. Better, Not More was produced by Kontent Films for the Edge Funders Alliance, and was released recently at a conference in Baltimore. The video is a beautiful set of statements from activists around the world describing what they aspire to achieve, especially by way of commons.

The vocabularies and focus for the idea of "better, not more," obviously differ among people in one country to another. Buen vivir is the term that is more familiar to the peoples of Latin America, for example. But as the growth economy continues its assault on the planetary ecosystem, cultivating an ethic of sufficiency — and developing the policies and politics to make that real — is an urgent challenge.

EDGE Plenary Film 2015 – Better, Not More from Kontent Films on Vimeo.

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The Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC, pronounced “seek”) is surely one of the more audacious commons-based innovations to have emerged in the past five years. It is notable for providing a legal and financial superstructure that is helping to support a wide variety of smaller self-organized commons. Some of us are calling this proto-form an “omni-commons,” inspired by the example of the Omni Commons in Oakland.

CIC is smart, resourceful, socially committed, and politically sophisticated. It has bravely criticized the Spanish government’s behavior in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which has included massive bank bailouts, foreclosures on millions of homes, draconian cutbacks in social services, a lack of transparency in policymaking. CIC regards all of this as evidence that the state is no longer willing to honor its social contract with citizens. Accordingly, it has called for civil disobedience to unjust laws and is doing everything it can to establish its own social order with a more humane logic and ethic.

Journalist Nathan Schneider provides a fascinating, well-reported profile of CIC in the April issue of Vice magazine. The piece focuses heavily on the role of the visionary activist Enric Duran, who in 2008 borrowed $500,000 from banks, and then he gave the money away to various activist projects. Despite being on the run from Spanish prosecutors, Duran went on to launch CIC in early 2010 with others.

His avowed goal is to build a new economy from the ground up. CIC is a fascinating model because it provides a legal and financial framework for supporting a diverse network of independent workers who trade with and support each other. This is allowing participants to develop some massive social and economic synergies among CIC's many enterprises, which include a restaurant, hostel, wellness center, Bitcoin ATM, library, among hundreds of others.

As Schneider writes:

At last count, the CIC consisted of 674 different projects spread across Catalonia, with 954 people working on them. The CIC provides these projects a legal umbrella, as far as taxes and incorporation are concerned, and their members trade with one another using their own social currency, called ecos. They share health workers, legal experts, software developers, scientists, and babysitters. They finance one another with the CIC's $438,000 annual budget, a crowdfunding platform, and an interest-free investment bank called Casx. (In Catalan, x makes an sh sound.) To be part of the CIC, projects need to be managed by consensus and to follow certain basic principles like transparency and sustainability. Once the assembly admits a new project, its income runs through the CIC accounting office, where a portion goes toward funding the shared infrastructure. Any participant can benefit from the services and help decide how the common pool is used.

CIC members can choose to live in CIC-associated apartments in Barcelona or at a farming commune called Lung Ta, or at Calafou, a “postcapitalist ecoindustrial colony” in the ruins of a century-old factory town that Duran and a few others bought. In a country where the unemployment rate is more than 20 percent for the general population and more than 50 percent for people under 25 years old, the CIC enterprise is not just some wild, half-baked scheme. It’s a system for surviving the vise of neoliberal politics and economic policy. CIC helps people build their own livelihoods in a socially supportive context — something that the state is notably incapable of doing.

In a play on the famous Gandhi line, Schneider summarizes CIC’s self-styled mission as aspiring to “Be the Bank that You Want to See in the World.” It is inventing radically new types of finance and exchange to emancipate its members from dependency upon a predatory capitalism and an unreliable state. For example, CIC is developing a global digital currency FairCoin that is adapting Bitcoin-style technology to serve more socially constructive types of exchange.

In a short blog post, it is hard to do justice to the daring ambition and innovation coming out of CIC, so read the full article. Let the following excerpt about CIC’s backoffice financial sophistication serve as a teaser. Schneider writes:

Accounting takes place both in euros and in ecos, the CIC's native currency. Ecos are not a high-tech cryptocurrency like Bitcoin but a simple mutual-credit network. While the idea for Bitcoin is to consign transactions entirely to software, bypassing the perceived risk of trusting central authorities and flawed human beings, ecos depend on a community of people who trust one another fully. Anybody with one of the more than 2,200 accounts can log in to the web interface of the Community Exchange System, see everyone else's balances, and transfer ecos from one account to another. The measure of wealth, too, is upside down. It's not frowned upon to have a low balance or to be a bit in debt; the trouble is when someone's balance ventures too far from zero in either direction and stays there. Because interest is nonexistent, having lots of ecos sitting around won't do any good. Creditworthiness in the system comes not from accumulating but from use and achieving a balance of contribution and consumption.

The idea was to help people out and radicalize them at the same time. The rich use tax loopholes to secure their dominance; now anticapitalists could do the same.

The CIC’s answer to the Federal Reserve is the Social Currency Monitoring Commission, whose job it is to contact members not making many transactions and to help them figure out how they can meet more of their needs within the system. If someone wants pants, say, and she can't buy any in ecos nearby, she can try to persuade a local tailor to accept them. But the tailor, in turn, will accept ecos only to the extent that he, too, can get something he needs with ecos. It’s a process of assembling an economy like a puzzle. The currency is not just a medium of exchange; it’s a measure of the CIC’s independence from capitalism.

The full Vice article can be read here.

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