From TINA (there is no alternative) to TAPAS (there are plenty of alternatives!). Commons, and commoning, just keeps on bubbling up
Pine Street Market, Portland. Photo by Sarah Ardin on Unsplash
We’re increasingly convinced that commoning and the commons - the first as social activity and culture, the second the shared and mutual assets that activity creates - are going to become ever-more viable economic and social models, providing a quite different option to either market or state (while staying in touch with both of them).
It’s enriched by the idea of (say) the NHS as a “public commons”, a resource we all agree to have free access to, and even “defend” and “celebrate” (as we do at our windows in the UK at 8pm, every Thursdays). And we’ve seen more grass-roots commons of care - defined as “mutual aid networks” - arise out of the depths of the Coronacrisis.
The economic calamity to come as a result of the virus - the contraction of the conventional economy - will only add to the growing sense (already building from the challenges of automation and general climate crisis) that our ways of making and using will have to radically change.
What is specifically interesting about the commons movement - and certainly from our perspective, where w celebrate smaller units of networked, relationship-focussed self-government - is the way commoners love to advocate from concrete and practical examples (indeed, they glory in them).
Take these two substantial pieces from some of the most prominent advocates of commoning - David Bollier, and then Michel Bauwens (co-writing with Jose Ramos). They are very big picture, Bauwens and Ramos particularly so. But each piece is replete with specific initiatives, which quickly put bones on the grand talk of system shift.
Bollier first, whose May presentation (link to full piece here, and here’s the video) is full of rich post-Covid realisations like this: “The Enlightenment conceit that we can separate humanity from nature, that the individual is utterly separate from the collective, and that the mind and body can be separated, is empirically wrong. It is, frankly, ridiculous. So it’s a bit misleading to say that the coronavirus is destroying the capitalist global economy. It’s more accurate to say that it’s destroying the epistemological edifice upon which the economy stands.”
But he closes with a rich list (some familiar to regular readers) of “institutional innovations” that the commons-approach can suggest. David riffs later on the old Thatcherite slogan, TINA - there is no alternative (to market capitalism) - and suggests instead TAPAS (there are plenty of alternatives).
Here’s plenty:
Relocalization is vital to a resilient economy. Prime vehicles for relocalization include community-supported agriculture (CSA), community land trusts, local import-replacement of goods, and local currencies. The basic goal is to decommodify assets and recirculate value.
CSAs are a time-proven finance technique for upfront sharing of the risk between users and producers. We know this as an agricultural finance tool, but in fact it can be used in many other contexts. In my region, many jazz fans subscribe to a series of jazz performances by paying upfront fees, CSA-style. This relieves the financial risks on concert producers and lets performers follow their creativity and not just hype their most well-known, marketable songs.
Community land trusts [see Pat Kane’s presentation a few weeks ago] are also a great way to decommodify land, take land off speculative markets permanently, and mutualize control and benefits of real estate. CLTs help keep land under local control and allow it to be used for socially necessary purposes (e.g., organic local food) rather than for marketable purposes favoured by outside investors and markets.
One adaptation of the CLT model developed by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics is “Community Supported Industry,” which applies the CLT model of collective ownership of assets – not just land, but buildings, manufacturing, and retail space – as a way to foster “import replacement.” The idea is to substitute local production for the importing of products through global or national markets.
Another way to foster relocalization is through what I call “Convert-to-Commons Strategies.” This refers to financial or policy mechanisms for converting private, profit-making assets into ones for collective use (preferably nonmarket uses rather than market exchange). Converting business assets into commons helps anchor them in a particular ecological place rather than making them mere commodities subject to the whims of external investors or markets.
A still-emerging Convert-to-Commons approach is finding ways to convert private businesses into collectively owned and managed projects. Activist/scholar Nathan Schneider called these “Exit-to-Community” strategies. These are ways for entrepreneurs to allow communities to acquire their enterprises, avoiding the only two other options generally available to them — selling out to large companies or “going public” (i.e., selling to private investors) through Initial Public Offerings.
In Great Britain, there is a wonderful Assets of Community Value Law, which gives local communities a legal entitlement to be the first to bid on private business that is being sold or in danger of liquidation. This has been a way to convert privately owned pubs, buildings, and civic spaces into community assets.
Relocalization of food production and distribution systems. An important subset of the relocalization question is regionally based agriculture and food distribution systems. The pandemic has shown the precariousness of global and national supply chains, not to mention the atmosphere-destroying carbon emissions that such chains require. We need to develop food supply chains that are more place-based, cheaper in their holistic operations, respectful of ecosystems, and resilient when disruptions do occur.
The activist/academic Jose Luis Vivero Pol has done a great deal of thinking about treating food as a commons and what this would entail. By this, he means that food should not be regarded just as a market commodity that should fetch the highest price, but something that is affordable to everyone, nutritious and not just profitable, and rooted in local economies. This will require that we re-imagine food systems that favor local agriculture, agroecological practices, and more equitable value-chains than we currently have.
An example is the Fresno Commons in California, a community-owned food system in the San Joaquin Valley. Among other mechanisms, the Fresno Commons uses a stakeholder trust to assure that locally grown produce is accessible and affordable. What would otherwise be siphoned away as “profit” is instead mutualized among farmers and field workers, consumers, community businesses, restaurants, and other participants in the food value-chain.
An “Ooooby” box (“Out of our own backyards”) from the Fresno Food Collective. Photo by Sarah Ardin on Unsplash
The relocalization of food should also look to innovative data analytics so that farmers themselves can start to build new sorts of cooperative supply systems. If they don’t, the big players who can own and manipulate agricultural data – Monsanto, etc., — will come to control local agriculture. Along the same lines, farmers need to look to open-source designs for agricultural equipment to assure that they can modify and update the software on their tractors, prevent price-gouging and copyright control of data and software, and take charge of their own futures.
This brings me to the idea of cosmo-local production [Ed.- we love cosmo-localism]. This is a system in which global design communities freely share and expand “light” knowledge, open-source style, while encouraging people to build the “heavy” stuff — physical manufacturing – locally.
There are already a number of exciting examples of cosmo-local production arising for motor vehicles, furniture, houses, agricultural equipment, electronics, and much else. In agriculture, there are the Farm Hack and Open Source Ecology projects. For housing, there is the WikiHouse model. For furniture, Open Desk. For electronics, Arduino. To help deal with environmental problems, by providing monitoring kits, for example, Public Lab is a citizen-science project that provides open source hardware and software tools.
Like local food chains, the point here is the importance of developing more resilient local production that can be customized to meet local needs. Innovation need not be constrained by the business models that Google and Amazon or other tech giants depend on; the small players can actually make a go of it! Production costs can be cheaper using nonproprietary, non-patented design that rely on open-source communities of innovators. And transport and carbon costs can be minimized.
Imagine what could happen if this approach were applied to the development of a Covid-19 vaccine! Once a new vaccine is presented to the world, we are poised to see a major fight among proprietary drug developers, rich and poor nations, and various international bodies. Some people won’t be able to afford to vaccine, and others will make a fortune off of the pandemic – without actually vaccinating everyone, as needed. That’s why we need to look to organizations like the Drugs for Neglected Disease Initiative, which organizes international partnerships to develop high-quality, low-cost medicines for everyone.
There are two serious problems that will need to be addressed about cosmo-local production, however: finance and law. If there is no intellectual property for cosmo-locally produced products – and thus no property to serve as collateral — lenders will be less inclined to finance new drugs or cosmo-local products. So these problems will need to be solved to help cosmo-local production scale.
Platform cooperatives are another institutional model of commoning. They use Internet platforms as vehicles for cooperative benefit – to empower workers and consumers, to spur creativity, to reduce prices, to assure quality of life. The point of a platform coop is to empower the people who own and run them – workers, consumer, municipalities – rather than investors who extract money from a community in the style of Uber and Airbnb. Platform coops mutualize market surpluses for the benefit of participant-owners.
There are now platform coops for taxi drivers in Austin, Texas (ATX Coop Taxi), for food delivery workers in Berlin (Kolyma-2), for delivery and messaging workers in Barcelona (Mensakas), and for freelance workers in Brussels (SMart), among many others. Recently a new platform for independent bookstores in the US — Bookshop.org – has made some headway against Amazon. While not a coop but rather a B-Corporation, it shares 75% of its profits with bookstores.
One variant of platform cooperatives is known as DIsCO, the Distributed Cooperative Organization [ed.- again, we love DIsCO] which is a digital platform, sometimes using distributed ledger/blockchain technologies, to build working communities that prioritize mutual support, cooperativism, and care work, while avoiding the exclusionary, techno-determinism of typical networked platforms.
DIsCOs and other network platforms need not be market-driven. They can be mutual aid platforms of the sort we’ve seen in response to the pandemic…..or timebanking platforms that enable people to share services through a credit-barter system…or freecycle platforms for giving away and sharing things.
It’s important to build commons-based infrastructure so that any individual commoner doesn’t have to be heroically creative and persistent. Infrastructure – physical, legal, administrative – provides a structure that makes it easier for individual commoners to cooperate and share more readily. It’s a standing, shared resource.
Some examples: Guifi.net, a WiFi system in Catalonia, Spain, has more than 30,000 nodes that functions as a commons. It provides high-quality, affordable service that avoids the loathsome prices and business practices of corporate broadband and WiFi systems.
Another interesting infrastructure project is the Omni Commons in Oakland, a collective property for artisans, hackers, social entrepreneurs, and activists. The project consists of nine member collectives who make decisions together, and provides meeting spaces, programming, community-outreach, and more.
Creative Commons licenses are a form of legal infrastructure that enables legal sharing and copying of information and cultural works. Again, this would be far too difficult for any individual to do, but as a collective enterprise, these free public licenses have opened up countless new, cheap and free opportunities to share information, creativity and culture.
Land is an important infrastructure – for regenerative agriculture, affordable housing, and community-based businesses. There is a whole frontier in making land a form of community-owned infrastructure, rather than a mere market or speculative commodity.
Stakeholder trusts like the Alaska Permanent Fund are another rich vehicle for treating public assets as infrastructures for sharing benefits. In his book Capitalism 3.0, Peter Barnes sets forth many examples for using stakeholder trusts to monetize and share the benefits of publicly owned land, forests, water, minerals, and more. The basic idea is to use trusts to manage these assets, which in turn can generate annual dividends for the ordinary citizen.
This is already a long post, so we’ll only point to the part of Bauwens and Ramos’s extraordinary synoptic essay, “Awakening to an Ecology of the Commons” (blog and PDF download), where we stop short in Boller’s piece… We ask the question: is there any kind of larger structure, or form of coordination, that could give these amazing and diverse initiatives any common voice? One that might shift the conventional, frozen thinking of governments and corporates?
Bauwens and Ramos address this directly, and call for the construction of a “protocol commons”, as one of three scenarios (this one the most optimistic), heading into the mid 2030’s.
At the end of a period of burgeoning success for commons-like enterprise, they imagine that the commoners are in a position to strike a deal with city or state governments. This deal might agree between them a “commons protocol” - which is strictly defined (not helpfully) as “the metalanguages for the commons, architecture and citizen-network-institutional synergies that generate value”.
We get a slightly better idea from the following:
The protocol commons helps in the reinvention of the nation-state as a community—indeed it saves it. State-created commons are still seen as fundamentally critical in providing basic support across populations.
However they are not seen as completely exclusionary, as nations have to see themselves as part of a community with other nations to support the development and protection of our global commons (for example, atmosphere and security).
Kierland Commons, Phoenix, AZ, USA. Photo by June Dalton on Unsplash
The role of the state transforms. Now it is seen as the partner state or a partner city charged with supporting citizens as innovators, protectors, and maintainers of a variety of commons.
The protocol commons allows the state, and the various institutions embedded within the state, to understand the language that describes how the state sits within a broader ecology of societal transition, as well as the architecture that governs this system.
This transformation is driven by new institutions that are in charge of public-commons cooperation at all scales, converging with the players responsible for regenerative market forms. [Ed.- Are the seed forms of these “new institutions” the Citizen Action Networks we are developing?]
While it was just an experimental form in the early part of the twenty-first century, by mid- century, the partner state becomes a nuanced and powerful approach to creating synergies - between a diversity of citizen-initiated projects, and the enabling structures that allow this diversity to thrive and to create value.
Institutions are reimagined as structures that exist to enhance the agency and creative potential of the variety of actors within civil society. This hyper-diverse and complex composition of structures, groups, individuals, and technology creates mutant synergies of the commons unimaginable years earlier.
The ecologies of the commons are ever more diverse, complex, resilient, and generative—they cannot be pigeonholed into one category or another.
This vision stands for the human as citizen-commoner (or inhabitants-commoner, if we want to avoid the exclusionary character of national citizenship). Indeed, in this vision, citizens become productive commoners who contribute to the common good.
We envisage a society where the core are productive civil societies, where citizens belong and co-produce all kinds of commons; where they are members of economic entities which create livelihoods in an ethical market; and where the infrastructural organizations that support digital and urban commons are reflected in a new vision of the state as enabling a “partner state.”
More here. Some of this might seem like slightly science-fictional language. Yet as we point to “constitutional matters” at the height of events like Brexit or the Scottish independence referendum, why can’t we concieve of a similarly abstract language around “protocol commons”?
We always aim to be the website that says, “you read it here first…”