Assemblies of the Commons are local or
affinity-based association of citizens and commoners, bringing
together all those who contribute and maintain common goods,
material or immaterial. It is based on a social charter
outlining the shared values and practices. An Assembly of the
Commons can formulate policy proposals that enhance civic
infrastructures for the commons, address and influence
authorities or self-organize toward meaningful actions. These
can range from town and village, to bioregional, national or
continental levels, and are closely connected to the Chambers of
the Commons.
In analogy with the well-known Chambers of Commerce which defend
the interests of for-profit enterprise, the
Chamber of the Commons complements the citizen
politics-oriented Assemblies of the Commons by coordinating the
needs of the emergent coalitions of generative, commons-friendly
ethical enterprises within a territory. They can identify the
convergent needs of Open Coops and commons enterprises and
interface with territorial powers to express and obtain their
infrastructural, policy and legal needs.
Vital solidarity mechanisms once embedded in the welfare state
models are being dismantled. To close the gap left in their
absence, people are reconstructing distributed solidarity
mechanisms. Commonfare, or “welfare of the
commons”, is a participatory form of welfare provision based on
collaboration which enfranchises all of society, even those not
tied to the labour market. Commonfare addresses the
exclusionary, hierarchic and bureaucratic shortcomings of the
welfare model by creating open-source, democratic, and
multi-constituent social provision networks and practices.
Labour Mutuals, freelancer coops and prefigurative solidarity
networks are in the vanguard, but Commonfare mechanisms would
ideally be financed by a Partner State.
In commons-based peer production, contributors
create shared value through open contributory systems, govern
their common work through participatory practices, and create
shared resources that can, in turn, be used in new iterations.
This cycle of open input, participatory process and
commons-oriented output is a cycle of accumulation of the
commons, in contrast to a capital accumulation.
Commons Based Reciprocity Licenses (or
“CopyFair” licenses) provide for the free use and unimpeded
commercialization of licensed material within the Commons while
resisting its non-reciprocal appropriation by for-profit driven
entities, unless those entities contribute to the Commons by way
of licensing fees or other means.
Copyleft licenses allow anyone to re-use the knowledge commons
they require, on the condition that changes and improvements are
added back to that commons. This is a great advance, but should
not be abstracted from the need for fairness. Physical
production involves finding resources or raw materials and
making payments to contributors. Extractive models benefit from
the unfettered commercial exploitation of these commons.
Therefore, while knowledge sharing should always be maintained,
we should also demand reciprocity for the commercial
exploitation of the commons. This would create a level playing
field for the ethical economic entities that presently
internalize social and environmental costs. The use of CopyFair
licenses, which allow knowledge sharing while requesting
reciprocity in exchange for the right of commercialization,
would facilitate achieving this balance.
A first working example of a CopyFair license is the Peer
Production License, in effect a fork of a Creative Commons
Non-Commercial License which permits worker-owned cooperatives
and other non-exploitative organizations to capitalise the
licensed content, while denying this possibility to extractive
corporations.
From 1776 to 1825, the English Parliament passed more than 4,000
Acts that served to appropriate common lands from commoners,
chiefly to the benefit of politically connected landowners.
These enclosures of the commons seized about 25 percent of all
cultivated acreage in England, according to historian Raymond
Williams, and concentrated ownership in a small minority of the
population. These “lawful” enclosures also dispossessed millions
of citizens, eradicated traditional ways of life, and forcibly
introduced the new economy of industrialization, featuring
occupational specialties and large-scale production. Nowadays we
use the term “enclosure” to denounce heinous acts such as the
ongoing privatization of intellectual property, the
expropriation and massive land grabs occurring in Africa and
other continents, the imposition of digital rights management,
the patenting of seeds and the human genome, and more. This
modern tendency towards enclosures and turning relationships
into services and commons into commodities, has been described
by Commons scholar David Bollier as “The great invisible tragedy
of our time”.
Extractive entrepreneurs seek to maximize profits, usually
without sufficient re-investment in the maintenance of the
productive communities. An example is Facebook, which does not
share any profits with the co-creating communities they depend
on for their value creation and realization. Plus, extractive
enterprises may free-ride on a great many social or public
infrastructures (e.g. roads as in the case of Uber). Uber and
AirBnB tax exchanges, but do not directly contribute to the
creation of transportation or hospitality infrastructure. These
entities do develop services that take advantage of unused
resources, but they operate in an extractive way, and create
competitive, rather than sharing, mentalities. For example, it’s
not uncommon for participants in this system to construct new
buildings for rent, in an effort to maximize profits.
On the other hand, generative entrepreneurs create added value
around these communities and commons that they co-produce and
upon which they are co-dependent. In the best of cases, the
community of entrepreneurs are actually the same group of people
as the productive community. The contributors build their own
vehicles to create livelihoods while producing the commons, and
re-invest surplus in their own well-being and the overall
commons system they co-produce.
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From community-oriented business to business-enhanced
communities, meta economic networks are
affinity-based networks combining new forms of labor with
supportive and commons-generating solidarity structures. Imagine
a confederated system combining mutual credit systems, childcare
coops, a community bank, fresh produce distribution centers,
education and legal advice, and more. Some notable examples of
people working together on socially oriented projects include
the Catalonian Integral Cooperative or CIC (Catalonia, Spain),
The Mutual Aid Network, (Madison, Wisconsin USA, now expanding
transnationally) and Enspiral (New Zealand, now being replicated
elsewhere).
What decision-making is for planning, and pricing is for the
market, mutual coordination is for the commons. In a circular
economy, the output of one production process is used as an
input for another. Closed value chains won’t help us achieve a
sustainable circular economy; neither will non-transparent
negotiations for any form of cooperation. But through open
supply chains, entrepreneurial coalitions that are
interdependent with a collaborative commons can create
ecosystems of collaboration. Here, production processes become
transparent, and every participant can adapt his or her
behaviour based on the knowledge openly available in the
network.
In short, we must distinguish between commons-centric models
that work for rival resources and those that work for
non-rivalrous resources, and create hybrid combinations for each
particular case.
