5. Peer Governance Through Commoning

Commoning may be rooted in a variety of social outlooks and behaviors, as we saw in Chapter Four. But can it govern? Can it do so better than existing governments? Can it coordinate more effectively and better than the market? These are large questions that we will address at greater length in Part III. For now, we wish to examine how peer governance works within a commons. Property rights scholar Robert Ellickson has described how cattle ranchers in the Shasta Valley of California dealt with the problem of cattle escaping from their fields and trespassing on other people’s land. Ranchers on their own came up with informal rules and social norms — what Ellickson calls “order without law.”1 Neighboring ranchers, for example, often follow the tradition of splitting fifty/fifty the cost of building and maintaining a shared fence. Or they agree that one rancher will provide the materials and the other the labor for building it. Or if one rancher has a greater average density of livestock on one side of the fence, custom holds that there should be a rough norm of proportionality for allocating the costs of fencing. If a careless rancher violates the social norm of promptly retrieving stray cattle, the rancher community often intentionally uses gossip to sanction and shame them.

The dynamics of peer governance at the cellular level of everyday practices matter because they provide regularity and stability to a commons. They also help us learn how to devise larger structures such as federated commons, commons-friendly law and policy, infrastructures, and commons-public partnerships, as we will see in later chapters. Here, we explore ten dynamics of Peer Governance that tend to be present in effective commons. The first seven revolve around interpersonal and social relationships. The final three involve commons-based methods for dealing with property, money, and markets.

• Peer Governance
• Bring Diversity into Shared Purpose
• Create Semi-Permeable Membranes
• Honor Transparency in a Sphere of Trust
• Share Knowledge Generously
• Assure Consent in Decision Making
• Rely on Heterarchy
• Peer Monitor & Apply Graduated Sanctions

___________________

• Relationalize Property
• Keep Commons & Commerce Distinct
• Finance Commons Provisioning

A Few Words About Governance

In conventional parlance, governance generally means the rule of some over the many through government. Government exercises authority and control over people through laws passed by legislatures, rulings handed down by courts, and policies adopted by various officials and politicians. At the end of the day, most people regard government as something distant and often indifferent to their concerns. It is something that a group of people vested with power does to and for another group of people, perhaps with their participation and consent, perhaps not. But government and governance are different things. One could say, there is governance in the commons, but no government.

As we thought about how coordination works in a commons, we hesitated to use the term “governance” because it is so closely associated with the idea of collective interests overriding individual freedom. This perceived antagonism runs so deep that it is hard to imagine any serious resolution of the tension. But there is a resolution — to realize individual needs by addressing collective needs. The supposed dualism between the collective and individual is largely overcome by sharing authority among everyone directly affected by decisions. Authority, power, and responsibility for implementation are diffused among identifiable people, each of whom has opportunities to deliberate and make decisions with others.

That is why we like to refer to peer governance rather than just governance. It points to an ongoing process of dialogue, coordination, and self-organization. By recognizing individuals as active peers in a collective process rather than positioning them as adversaries competing to control a large, remote third party, government, a more trusted type of governance can emerge. Citizens in a nation-state may nominally be sovereign (“We the People …”), but that sovereignty is delegated with only crude oversight and accountability to representative legislatures and rigid, formalistic bureaucracies. No wonder the state is seen as alien or hostile! In a commons, governance is more likely to take account of on-the-ground needs and realities.

Peer Governance amounts to an artful political dialectic between culture and structure. The shared motivations and visions that commoners wish to enact must have sufficient structure in law, formal organization, and finance to be protected and nurtured. But there must also be sufficient open space for individual creativity, deliberation, and action to flourish, which in turn recursively improves the structures of law, organization, and finance that guide a commons forward. For a commons to be coherent and durable, it needs some clear organizational forms and regularities. For it to be resilient and alive, it requires welcoming space for free play, flexibility, and creative novelty. One might say that the informal and the creative must be stabilized through friendly structural support and constraints, without being controlled by them. Commoners must figure out a Goldilocks zone in which the interplay between structure and culture is “just right.”2

Getting the interplay right is the high art of commons governance. To illuminate it, we present in this chapter the generic patterns of Peer Governance that help a commons work well. How does self-organization occur in the first place and ripen into a stable, creative social organism? Is there a general developmental process that needs to occur? We don’t believe there is, but there are patterns we can become aware of that will help us understand how a commons can maintain itself. It would be a mistake to offer prescriptive formulas for Peer Governance because they won’t work in complex systems. You cannot fabricate a commons simply by assembling a certain number of people, adopting certain values, and applying certain operational rules and enforcement strategies. Following the eight design principles famously put forward by Elinor Ostrom is helpful,3 but ultimately not enough. The principles do not provide sufficient guidance for people to respond flexibly to feedback in dynamic systems. Our analysis of Peer Governance therefore moves beyond Ostrom’s landmark design principles in several ways. First, we look at all sorts of contemporary commons — social, digital, and urban, among others — not just at natural resource-based commons. We also attempt to go beyond resource management and allocation as primarily economic matters, and instead emphasize commoning as a social system. Any assessment of governance in commons must deal squarely with the systemic threats posed by markets and state power, so we look to Peer Governance as a form of moral and political sovereignty that works in counterpoint to the market/state.

Enacting Peer Governance needs to be a living, developmental process in itself. Therefore, instead of offering a full set of prescriptive formulas, our patterns amount to procedural guidelines that enable a stepwise, adaptable path for developing a commons. Enacting a commons through Peer Governance resembles the way in which DNA provides general guidance, but not strict instructions, for the autonomous development and differentiation of an embryo.

So, the bad news is that there is no blueprint, no panacea. Peer Governance is not a prescriptive, rule-driven program for fabricating commons or managing resources. But the good news is that Peer Governance is a generative process. It is a reliable means by which commoners can build authentic, living relationships among themselves, and in so doing, develop a coherent, stable commons.

This idea is consistent with Christopher Alexander’s ideas about how to create enlivening environments that last. Alexander has written that a process that generates life must itself be a living process. It is “the ONLY way, I believe — that it is possible to generate buildings or communities that have life. Living structure … cannot be created by brute force from designs. It can only come from a generative program — hence from a generative process existing in the production process of society — so that … its conception, plan, design, detailed layout, structural design, and material detail are all unfolded, step by step in TIME.”4 (emphasis in original)

Formal structures are obviously needed, but living processes, which have their own regularities, lie at the heart of a commons. Commoning is the exploratory process by which people identify their needs and devise situation-specific systems for provisioning and governance. People are empowered to draw upon their own knowledge in assessing their problems. They must live with ambiguities and uncertainties, and show the creative agency to develop solutions that seem fair and effective to them.

Peer Governance is open ended. Its properties and implementation cannot be fully known or specified in advance. This idea obviously flies in the face of modern sensibilities, which generally try to design comprehensive, advance blueprints for implementation. The primary goals in modern systems are uniformity and simplicity, for the sake of controllability and political credibility. James Scott, in his book Seeing Like a State, provides a brilliant analysis of how this plays out in the exercise of state power. As a precondition for efficient control, modern systems look to previously defined indices, development metrics, and expert knowledge. Formal categories of thought and official policies tend to take on a life of their own, becoming more real than on-the-ground realities.

An example is the European Union’s requirement that its member states keep their budget deficits below three percent of gross domestic product, ostensibly to assure that governments are prudently managing their economies. It turns out that this magical budget number had been invented by two French civil servants in 1981.5 French President François Mitterrand, looking for ways to keep his government’s budget deficits under control, had asked his budget department to come up with a simple but economically credible rule to help rein in government spending. Mitterand reportedly had asked the staffers to propose “a kind of rule, something simple [that exudes] competence in economics.” Two staffers came up with the idea of budget deficits at or below three percent of GDP as a rough metric of fiscal responsibility. One of the two explained, “At the time, we were headed to a 100-billion-franc deficit. That corresponded to about 2.6 percent of GDP. So we said to ourselves: 1 percent deficit would be too tough and would be unattainable. Two percent would have put too much pressure on the government. So we said three percent.”

In other words, the budget deficit criterion was purely circumstantial, with no basis in theory or substance. Indeed, former Bundesbank president Hans Tietmeyer has confirmed that the three percent benchmark is “not easy to justify … in economic terms.” However, after its success in reining in French deficits over a few years, the EU decided to adopt it as well. Despite having no theoretical basis, the three percent benchmark has ripened into a hard-and-fast symbol of fiscal rectitude over the past thirty years. The number was enshrined in the Treaty of Maastricht that formed the European Union in 1992, and is routinely cited by conservative politicians and economists in countless pronouncements. But only three member states have actually met this standard between 1999 and 2015,6 suggesting how easily official (and, in this case, fabricated) indicators can override people’s situated knowledge and capacity to respond.

Commons and Peer Governance must be grown over time and deal with countless uncertainties that cannot be fully predicted in advance. This requires time for a culture of trust and transparency to emerge and yield a network of relationships. Rituals must be invented, and habits must ripen into traditions. It is therefore critical for commoners to consciously decide how to craft their governance systems.

This process is neither random nor precise. And yet, it has certain regularities. It is more akin to the method for making an outdoor fire: there is no single, universally correct way of doing it, but certain developmental steps must be followed, and in a certain order. One must first collect flammable materials of various sizes — logs, kindling, tinder — and arrange them so that the easily ignited tinder is on the bottom, which in turn will help ignite the larger pieces. A spark must be produced through a match, flame, or other means. There must be a bounded container for the fire (a fireplace, a ring of rocks, a hibachi), and sufficient oxygen flow and venting. The specifics of building a fire vary in a northern forest, where wood is plentiful, compared to a desert, where flammable fuel is scarce. And of course, the results — a roaring bonfire, a fire suitable for cooking, slow-burning embers — will vary, too. The point is that despite the many ways in which fires can be made, and the different outcomes, the basic patterns remain the same.

So, too, with the process of establishing Peer Governance: there are some reliable general patterns, but many idiosyncratic ways of doing it. Commons usually start with motivations or aspirations shared by participants — the need of farmers to irrigate their crops, the desire of software programmers to have an easy-to-use, shareable mapping program, the need of fishers to ensure fair access to a fishery.

Whatever the specific problem, a would-be commons must offer a credible vision for addressing it among people who often have different perspectives. Even though there may be no actual strategies or solutions in hand, a commons in its early stage must provide a spark and updraft that feeds interest and motivation. If people feel that the process resonates with their needs and context, they will be eager to engage. However, there must be an attractor that pulls them to self-organize and align their intentions and actions.7 This could be the need to survive, the desire to reconnect with local ecosystems, an attractive alternative to extractive markets, the appeal of fair-minded cooperation, or any other number of factors.

Patterns of Peer Governance

In our analytical wanderings through the wealth of commons, we’ve identified ten patterns of Peer Governance. They not only help establish more trusted, transparent systems of deliberation and coordination. They explain the functional effectiveness of commons as governance systems, especially in contrast to the market and nation-state. When a commons works well, it is generally because people are able to diffuse authority and responsibility and prevent abusive concentrations of power. Peer Governance encourages open, frequent sharing of knowledge so that the best ideas and collective wisdom can surface. Defined systems of monitoring, sanctions, and enforcement are needed to protect the commons against free riders, vandals, and systematic enclosures.

Most importantly, commoners must find ways to prevent individual property rights and the quest for money from ruining group dynamics. That is why it is necessary for commoners to develop ways to relationalize property — a topic that we will explore in Chapter 8. A similar set of governance challenges arise in dealings with markets and capital. No commons can survive if commercial norms are allowed to colonize the commons, so Peer Governance strives to Keep Commons & Commerce Distinct.

Let’s explore each pattern more deeply.

Bring Diversity into Shared Purpose

A commons is not simply a group of like-minded people who somehow discover each other, or a cohort of well-intentioned people willing to be educated. It is a social system that can only be developed through many acts of relationship-building and deliberation over time. People almost always have all sorts of different ideas and motivations, if only because personalities and backgrounds vary. Peer Governance, artfully carried out, brings diverse viewpoints together. There is no substitute for this process because, without it, people may casually commit to some imagined, abstract idea about the future that may not reflect their actual feelings, needs, and feasible possibilities.

Bring Diversity into Shared Purpose

This is a core insight among the Indigenous and non-Indigenous organizations that established Unitierra — Universidad de la Tierra en Oaxaca — in Oaxaca, Mexico. It is a “de-institutionalized university” founded by commoners for commoners that rejects formal roles and hierarchy.8 Unitierra’s founders regard the idea of shared purpose and objectives as unhelpful; what matters is shared action. In a real commons, says Gustavo Esteva, intellectual father and elder of Uniterra, people often have shared reasons to act and to act together, but initially they may not have a shared purpose. At Unitierra, people avoid trying to “pull from the future”9 by declaring in advance an imagined idea of where they want to go. Instead they try to “push from the base and from the past,” by drawing upon everyone’s experiences and motivations.

Through commoning, a shared purpose eventually emerges. It is not necessarily self-evident or knowable in advance. An intentional community may have shared purpose and values from the very start, but in most cases a motley group of people find each other and teach themselves how to walk, run, and then dance. The process may be easier if people live in a shared space or depend upon the same river or forest. Sharing the same aspirations — to boost crop yields, to improve local exchange and mutualization, to keep information shareable — can also quicken a spirit of cooperation and solidarity. In any case shared purpose is not a given in a commons. But we believe that it must be identified and clarified if effective action is to follow.

Henry David Thoreau, the American essayist and poet, described this process nicely: “If you have built your castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” While this is often taken as fanciful idealism, it is actually an apt description of how a vision is set forth and then made real by the hard work of bringing different people into general agreement. The core task is to respect the individuality of diverse members while forging an ethic of solidarity. This insight is critical because a commons, like any ecosystem, needs a requisite variety for it to function well.

Create Semi-Permeable Membranes

Commons need protection, as we love to say. Scholars have confirmed from extensive field research the need for what they call boundaries. The first of Ostrom’s famous eight design principles for successful commons is “clearly defined boundaries,” which are needed to delineate the boundaries of the resource system and the membership of the commons. While agreeing with this general idea that boundaries are essential to stewardship, we believe that a better term is “semi-permeable membrane.” After all, the point is not to establish a hermetically closed system that can exclude everyone else and hoard resources for members only — the goal of property law and “club goods” (as economists would put it). The point is to exclude influences that undermine Ubuntu Rationality in a commons while remaining open to the flows of energy and life that create value in a commons and sustain it.

Create Semi-Permeable Membranes

So commoners must somehow learn to deal with a paradox — to protect against capitalist threats to enclose common wealth while at the same time taking nourishment from the rich diversity of life. Commoners achieve this deft trick by creating semi-permeable membranes around themselves, much as any living organisms does. Unlike strict boundaries, semi-permeable membranes selectively allow what may or may not enter a commons, much as we choose the food and relationships that nourish us. A commons must remain open to all the external nutrients that might deepen the whole.

This is central to the ability of commons to generate a new system of value that it can safeguard and grow. If capitalism is based upon accumulating and centralizing wealth, commons rely on their semi-permeable membranes to be able to interact safely with the larger world. They capture and store flows of energy in “catchment areas,” to use the language of permaculture. Joline Blais, a media scholar and permaculture designer, writes:

Catchment is a system for accumulating a critical mass of a needed resource, like water or soil or minerals, in order to trigger self-organizing systems, i.e., life forms, that then spread over the landscape. Some natural examples of catchment include the sun, plants, carbohydrates, bodies of water, geothermal energy, and plate tectonics.15

Life arises when there are sufficient flows of energy. That is what commons attempt to do — create catchment areas for the self-organization of life. So instead of conceiving of commons as closed systems of common property managed by a “club,” it is more productive to see them as social organisms who, thanks to their semi-permeable membranes, can interact with larger forces of life — communities, ecosystems, other commons.

This resembles the functioning of the blood-brain barrier as it separates the blood circulating in our bodies from brain fluid in the central nervous system. The blood-brain barrier allows the passage of water, some gases, and lipid-soluble molecules, and the selective transport of molecules such as glucose and amino acids that are crucial to neural function. But — and this is critical — it prevents the passage of potential neurotoxins into the brain.

Any commons requires a similarly effective membrane to allow the passage of beneficial substances while screening out “neurotoxins” that could harm its healthy functioning. The social impact of money in a community — who benefits from it, the purposes for which it is used, the distortion of relationships it may engender — is perhaps the most potentially troubling force in a commons. (See Keep Commons and Commerce Distinct, pp. 151–155.) Living in a capitalist society, it is often impossible to simply withdraw from the power of money and market relationships. A semi-permeable membrane can help a commons prevent markets from colonizing and destroying it. It helps commoners protect their living wealth (not commodified wealth) in efficient ways.

Honor Transparency in a Sphere of Trust

You might say that there are two kinds of transparency — the legal kind that liberal democracies require to ensure official accountability, and the real transparency that can happen only when people know and trust each other. Real transparency is not just about official accountability based on formal authority and protocols — “covering your ass” in a bureaucratic sense. It’s about personal disclosure and sharing one’s authentic feelings. When a difficult decision must be made in combat, for example, or if a top general gives an order that subordinates regard as problematic, whom should they obey — their official superior in the chain of command or their close colleagues whom they know and trust? In politics and bureaucracies, transparency is often more of a formal charade than a candid sharing of knowledge because anything disclosed can and will be used against you. Minimally acceptable disclosure is therefore the norm.

Honor Transparency in a Sphere of Trust

Real transparency is more meaningful precisely because it penetrates the veneer of formal roles and rules. And it is one of the reasons why commoning is not only challenging, but also transformative in a very deep, personal way. Stefan Brunnhuber, a prominent economist and clinical therapist, argues that cultural transformations cannot be properly understood or achieved through conventional rational-discursive approaches alone. Brunnhuber notes that “trying to reduce complexity through, say, more transparency [information disclosures alone] or the simplification of procedures, will be of little use.” What is required is “a different psychosocial practice.”16
Commoning is such a practice. It allows us to deal with the fact that transparency cannot just be organized, it has to be felt. It won’t suffice to rely on organizational forms or disclosures to address matters of the heart and culture. Or, as Brunnhuber puts it, “We have to deal with complexity emotionally.”17 This is also true for the complexity of commoning. This insight helps us see once again the ongoing dialogue that must occur between organizational structure and culture. In the end, we cannot depend upon structures to do the work of culture. Transparency is not just about legal arrangements and procedures, but about social practices that build trust.18

The Cecosesola network of cooperatives in Venezuela cultivates a culture of such deep trust that people are willing to express and receive sharp criticisms while showing great respect and affection for one another (see page 185–187). This sort of Transparency in a Sphere of Trust is essential. It is the only way that reliable information can be elicited —
some of it embarrassing — while sustaining solid personal relationships. A commons needs truly honest judgments and wisdom, not just formal professionalism.

Of course, in most groups and networks there is also misbehavior and social cliques that can make it difficult or impossible to create serious trust, let along be open and transparent. Also small group size by itself is not a guarantee of trust or transparency. But in combination with other patterns of Peer Governance — such as Share Knowledge Generously and Rely on Heterarchy — commoning can succeed more consistently. Commoning can be consistently success.

Share Knowledge Generously

The sharing of knowledge (or its objectified cousin, information) seen in all commons is not just a nice thing to do. It is a crucial instrument by which people generate a social order of their own. That’s how online communities, for example, develop free and open source software. Christopher Kelty, a cultural historian of this demimonde, argues that we must go beyond the simple-minded claim that “sharing is a natural condition of human life.” The story is far more interesting, he notes: “Sharing produces its own kind of moral and technical order, that is, ‘information makes people want freedom’ and how they want it is related to how that information is created and circulated.”19 (our emphasis)

Honor Transparency in a Sphere of Trust

Early projects to develop shared bodies of code — such as the UNIX operating system that eventually became Linux — show how sharing of knowledge is generative in its own right. Complex social systems gradually emerge as information is shared. Kelty writes: “The fact that geeks are wont to speak of ‘the UNIX philosophy’ means that UNIX is not just an operating system but a way of organizing the complex relations of life and work through technical means …”20 UNIX and Linux are artifacts of a generative relational economy.

The specific circuits by which knowledge is shared define the character of a commons. The diversity of contributors, their know-how and ways of knowing, the criteria for validating these, the methods by which people absorb and use explicit and tacit knowledge — these things matter. Different commons do it differently, of course. The most familiar form of knowledge sharing is surely the meeting, or in larger groups, the general assembly. We have seen how Cecosesola reinvented meetings as loosely structured get-togethers that are occasions for both social bonding and knowledge-sharing. However meetings are structured, the point is to share insights with the group easily and widely so that wise collective choices can be identified and adopted. This includes choices about how to stint resource use and allocate benefits.

In settings where people cannot know each other (group size matters) many commoners gather and share information through a process known as “stigmergy,” a kind of situated information sharing that provides “both the stimulus and instruction for further work.”21 The Greek roots of the word “stigmergy” mean “to incite to work”; the idea is a key concept used by complexity science to describe how simple rules in distributed systems can yield a formidable collective intelligence. Think of ants as they go searching for food. They mark their paths with pheromones — that is, they leave a trace, an informational signal — so that their fellow ants can follow the pheromone-marked paths to find food. Stigmergy provides a way for various discoveries to be shared widely and quickly, stimulating prompt follow-on responses and distributed self-organization, with no need for centralized direction. Termites use stigmergic learning and coordination to build their complex nests without any designer or supervisor. Coordination occurs horizontally, asynchronously, and irregularly as individual termites share information and immediately adapt their behaviors.

Stigmergy is a way to diffuse information, decisions, and responsibility to a larger, diverse pool of people, which then enhances effective sense making, learning, and action, even though everyone is spatially separated. For contributors to Wikipedia, the famous red links you find in many Wikipedia entries — the ones you click on only to find out that there is nothing yet written about the topic — signal that more information is needed. They are an invitation to supply it. A simple signal encourages stigmergic coordination on a massive scale, resulting in a complex body of writings — the Wikipedia pluriverse.

Or consider the peer coordination of volunteers for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. After a natural disaster strikes, such as the Haiti earthquake in 2014, tech volunteers scramble to create detailed online maps to help first responders locate sources of water, food, and medical care.22 One person’s nugget of information or clever map improvement is shared with others, which starts a cascade of follow-on enhancements. People of many different talents living in different spots around the world soon produce a digital map that is often more accurate and more rapidly produced than maps produced by teams of professionals.

The challenge for Peer Governance is to ensure that information and knowledge can flow widely and often — and with minimal resistance. This creates social circuits of communication and coordination that, over time, propel the emergence of a commons-based order.

Assure Consent in Decision Making

It is fundamental that commoners have a meaningful say in developing the rules by which they shall be governed. The ways people directly participate vary greatly, of course, but at the very least, commoners must be able to register their views about Peer Governance and consent to the decisions made. This pattern resembles Ostrom’s third design principle: “Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules.”23

Assure Consent in Decision Making

In small groups, discussion and conversation in a circle are the customary practices for making decisions. This approach is used in the panchayat, or village councils, of India, which manage community forests or farmland. Some commons may be largely directed by governing committees or coordinating staff, and thus have less direct participation. Examples include the boards of open-access scholarly journals such as the Public Library of Science, the management of timebanks, some community supported agriculture (CSA) farms, and the foundations directly associated with open source software projects. Yet even commons with some form of central management are generally mindful of the need to consult with those affected by decisions.

One way by which commoners assent to rules is by upholding traditions. Customary practices amount to a kind of “blanket consent.” This might not always be progressive, but it has the capacity to build the rules of Peer Governance into the very culture. Farmers who irrigate their fields in Bali, for example, have addressed the complexities of pest outbreaks and water shortages by observing religious rituals on specific dates. Under subak24 irrigation practices (subak means “irrigation community”), peasants coordinate their rice farming by observing certain rituals. They plant rice at different times to avert too much demand on water and thus shortages, but they harvest rice at the same time, minimizing pest proliferation. The syncing of social and religious practices with ecological timing functions as a kind of collective consent-and-coordination system.25 Priests at water temples oversee water management practices, interpreting the Tri Hita Karana philosophy that integrates the relationships among people, the Earth, and the divine. What strikes the Western mind as religious conservatism or odd cultural traditions produces an exquisitely coordinated solution to ecological problems. Interestingly, decisions are not really being “taken” — they are the result of a customary process.

But in many contexts, an explicit decision-taking process is needed. And in these contexts, what matters as much as the process are the criteria by which decisions are finally justified. While it is often assumed that consensus is the ideal way to go in the commons, or that everybody has to agree to everything, this type of harmony doesn’t necessarily exist. In fact, this notion of consensus is something of a caricature. Disagreement is a reality of human existence. And even when consensus can be achieved, it is not the same as unanimity. Small groups can strive for unanimity, or they can apply a “unanimity minus one” or “unanimity minus two” rule (meaning, a decision to act despite one or two dissents). But it bears noting that these procedures of decision making are not limited to small groups. In large commons, it can be complicated to make decisions about indivisible resources with sharply divided majority/minority factions. However, the Sociocracy methodology (see box on p. 140–141) has proven very useful in surfacing tacit objections and concerns, and moving discussion to a more substantive level in an orderly, fair way.

What enhances the chances of success in any commons, small or big, is to reject at the outset the winners and losers scheme — the big structural flaw of majority rule, otherwise known as democratic voting. Majority rule generally requires support from more than fifty percent of those eligible to vote. If 49.99 percent disagree, too bad; 50.01 percent is good enough to prevail. No wonder representative democracies based on this assumption have trouble healing deep divides or securing cooperation from the losing minority. No wonder ideologies arise to sharpen the differences among parties rather than find common ground. Relying on competitive voting framed by a win/lose choice cannot help but yield this outcome. Decisions by plurality, where the largest bloc in a group prevails even if it falls short of a majority, has the same basic deficiency.26

But how then to avoid the winners and losers scheme? How to make sure that all those who have a stake agree to go along with a certain course of action, without feeling coerced or manipulated? And more subtly, how to design decision making in such a way that it doesn’t end up creating, and then suppressing, frustrations — which are so often channeled into all sorts of secondary aggression?

As mentioned above, it is crucial that any decision-making process encourage open discussion and actively elicit people’s deeper, often unstated concerns. The process-designs can be diverse, but they must all allow for collaborative proposal building so that people can refine ideas and action proposals. A number of models have been developed along these lines, including the Quaker-based model and the hand signals famously used by Occupy protesters in their group negotiations.27 Now that the internet is everywhere and software has become quite sophisticated, it is possible, for the first time in history, for strangers on a global scale to enter into such collaborative decision making. Digital platforms offer a great deal of versatility in structuring how people can interact. They can have asynchronous communication and use tiered procedures for moderation, deliberation, voting, and so forth. One of the major infrastructures for facilitating such a process is Loomio.

The designers of Loomio, the Enspiral cooperative based in New Zealand, purposely avoided a hierarchical decision-making format. They wanted a process that allows people to deliberate and come to agreement, with decisions emerging from the bottom up. However, because collective processes are sometimes dominated by vocal factions who marginalize other people and perspectives, Loomio was designed to give people plenty of opportunities to express alternative and dissenting opinions. As Richard Bartlett put it:

The added value of Loomio is that the deliberation and the conclusion are displayed side by side [on the computer screen]. The disagreement is visualized through a pie chart, in a way that you must pay attention to it, so that the concerns can be resolved. This is the difference with polls and other voting mechanisms: you can change your mind as you discuss the proposal. So it becomes almost like a game, participants have to work through the concerns and get them to change.28

Loomio does not allow a group to entertain multiple proposals at once because the idea is to force the group, at a certain point of an ongoing discussion, to give its undivided attention to a single pending proposal and come to a final decision. This might be regarded as a design limitation because at a certain point the platform shuts off simultaneous consideration of other proposals. On the other hand, Loomio’s minimalist yet adaptable design lets a group make its own choices about how to deliberate and decide — including with majority rule — while documenting the arguments that people present.

It is certainly true that there is no single best way of decision making. What is critical is choosing the right process, criteria, and tools (or combinations of them) for each specific context. Two basic distinctions are important in shaping policies to Assure Consent in Decision Making. The first is the distinction between consensus and consent. The second is the distinction between common criteria and voting.

To give my consent to a proposal does not necessarily mean that the proposal is my first choice. I might simply wish to cooperate with the group and not stand in the way. I might not have a better proposal or I may hope that others won’t insist on their personal preferences next time as I didn’t this time. Sometimes commoners choose to use a relaxed threshold. They frame the vote with a question like this: “Is this proposal something you can live with?” Such an approach can help to achieve full consent, which again does not mean that everyone is in full agreement.

Consent — as opposed to agreement — is defined by the absence of reasonable objections. The basic assumption is that people tend to have good reasons for disagreeing with something and that there has to be a place and space for airing these reasons. In other words, “Consent deliberately seeks objections, which reveals wisdom that can be used to improve proposals and agreements.”29 Consent is reached by choosing the proposal with the least objections. The lowest level of objection — resistance — results in the highest acceptance. James Priest, cofounder of the Sociocracy 3.0 practice, writes: “Consensus is seeking to find the best decision for the purpose. Consent decision making is seeking to find a good enough decision that can then be tried out, tested, and improved over time.”30

One method that relies on “good enough” decisions is called Systemic Consensing, which could well be considered one of the backbones of Peer Governance. Systemic Consensing was created in 2005 by Austrian physician and mathematician Erich Visotschnig. The system invites participants to rate multiple proposals on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 (no resistance at all) meaning, “I have no objection, I support this proposal strongly,” and 10 (maximum resistance) meaning, “I have huge objections. I utterly reject this proposal.” The in-between values of 2 to 9 are chosen based on the subjective judgment of each individual. A context-specific “zero option” is usually included to signify “keep everything as it is” or “let’s decide next time.” This option can be considered as the “limit of reasonability.” No proposal can be accepted by the group if it is ranked lower than this zero option.

Whoever uses the Systemic Consensus Principle will appreciate that each proposal is not only taken into account, but stays in the game until the very end of the process. Anyone can express objections to any of the proposals throughout the entire process.33 Digital platforms such as Systemic Konsensing (Consensus) (http://konsensieren.eu/en) allow large numbers of people around the globe to systematically consent to proposals, without spending too much time discussing them face-to-face or feeling disconnected from the center of decision making, because such a center doesn’t exist.

Beyond the distinction between consensus and consent, a second helpful distinction for guiding decision making in the commons is that of common criteria versus voting. Common criteria are, for instance, general standards of ethics and practice that people can agree upon to guide their decision making. They are an attractive alternative to voting because people may prefer to spend their time getting the work done rather than debating complex proposals and voting on them.

In the federation of Cecosesola cooperatives (See pp. 185–187.), there is no representational system or voting to make decisions, but instead open get-togethers and circles that allow everyone’s voice to be heard and everyday needs to be discussed. Hundreds of operational decisions are taken every day, many of them requiring sound judgment, such as how to deal with the lack of medications in the hospital or whether to suspend normal procedures because producers arrived with big loads of vegetables six hours earlier than expected. And yet, they never vote because they don’t want to split into a majority and a minority. People’s decisions are guided by the common criteria that Cecosesola participants have developed for all sorts of everyday situations. “In the end, the decision itself can be made by one, two, or three people. One of the common criteria is that whoever makes a decision in the end is also responsible for the decision and for communicating it.”34 Noel Vale Valera explained: “We never expect to make decisions together in our assemblies. We just talk a lot about how a decision can come about and according to which criteria.” His colleague Lizeth adds: “It has been working for decades. Of course, it isn’t easy. After all, we’re a group of 1,300 people. But we don’t have to discuss everything together,” adding that members are confident that others will make appropriate choices reflecting group sentiment.

Agreeing to common criteria of decision making — instead of making common decisions through voting — requires, and brings about, a culture of trust and solidarity. Such trust-based, routine delegations of individual decision making based on common criteria open up flexible, reliable ways of assuring commoners’ consent while empowering individuals with the freedom to make their own judgments in a given situation. It is not a one hundred percent rational process, but rather one driven by people’s feelings and intuitive sense that group members can be trusted to do the right thing in most cases.

Rely on Heterarchy

Unlike centralized and hierarchical structures, commons tend to function as heterarchies. A hierarchy assigns people to clearly defined formal roles in a pyramid-shaped organizational chart and divides groups into progressively smaller categories and subcategories. It is a more rigid, rank-driven order,35 in which power is consolidated and formally structured.

Rely on Heterarchy

Heterarchy brings together top-down and bottom-up (both hierarchical), and peer-to-peer dynamics. One can think of it as reconciling distributed networks and hierarchies.36 It has the potential to bring into alignment responsible individual autonomy and the need for multilevel governance (hence some sort of hierarchy). A heterarchy allows people to make their own choices in how they will interact, making the system more flexible and adaptable than conventional hierarchies.37 It tends to have unranked horizontal relationships of power and authority among participants, which enables the role of individual agents within the system to be reconfigured in multiple ways. While there are hierarchical elements in a heterarchy (the two systems of organization are not polar opposites), a heterarchy allows the same group of elements to be conjoined or divided in any number of ways. A hierarchy is a pyramid of rigidly prescribed power relations; a heterarchy allows power to flow dynamically through multiple and changing nodes in a social network.

As we saw in Cecosesola, participants operating in a culture of trust and responsibility do not necessarily need formal, advance permission to do something. The open source software ethic encourages this attitude in countless fields: if you see a bug, if you have a great idea, if an urgent problem needs attention, you are authorized in advance to take action. There may be subsequent reviews and second-guessing, and even reversals of such decisions. But experience has shown that individual initiative, when linked up with larger swarms of such actions, is amazingly reliable and effective in achieving results. One need not rely on formal representation or delegation to tackle complex, sophisticated tasks. Transparency in a Sphere of Trust, knowledge sharing, and networked relationships are far more adaptive.

Mainstream observers usually regard governance in a heterarchy with astonished disbelief. When Occupy Wall Street protesters organized their community in Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote: “The protesters are dazzling in their Internet skills, and impressive in their organization. The square is divided into a reception area, a media zone, a medical clinic, a library, and a cafeteria. The protesters’ website includes links allowing supporters anywhere in the world to go online and order pizzas (vegan preferred) from a local pizzeria that delivers them to the square.”38 Yet there was no central executive directing this improvised social order. Drawing upon knowledge of previous forms of peer organization, it emerged on-the-fly as participants identified what needed to be done, and then coordinated their initiatives with others’.

We all recognize the desire to collaborate on shared endeavors and take them to larger, more versatile levels; that is arguably the history of the human species. We also know that spontaneous, peer-to-peer forms of organization often don’t endure. The challenge for our time — when the market/state has captured and controlled so many forms of cooperation — is to devise new structures that can protect and extend the cooperative impulse. We believe the patterns of the Triad of Commoning can assist and enact these structures within a protected commons. Peer Governance can not only achieve things quickly and effectively; it minimizes social castes, bureaucratic administration, and inequality. A rough equality is more achievable in a heterarchy because, as the Wikipedia entry on heterarchy notes, the structure enables “the flexibility of formal relationships inside an organization. Domination and subordination links can be reversed and privileges can be redistributed in each situation.” It continues:

[H]eterarchies divide and unite groups variously, according to multiple concerns that emerge or recede from view according to perspective. Crucially, no one way of dividing a heterarchical system can ever be a totalizing or all-encompassing view of the system; each division is clearly partial, and in many cases, a partial division leads us, as perceivers, to a feeling of contradiction that invites a new way of dividing things.39

What may seem counterintuitive to twentieth-century organizations is — in the age of ubiquitous digital networks and frequent bottom-up emergence — a perfectly functional structure of Peer Governance.

Peer Monitor & Apply Graduated Sanctions

No commons can survive long if it does not ensure that its members adhere to the rules that they have agreed to. In the jargon of social science, if anyone can simply free ride on a commons’ work or unilaterally defect from agreements, then the shared wealth will soon be depleted and the community will disintegrate. Sanctions are an important way of deterring such anti-social behaviors, and therefore must be part of any robust Peer Governance scheme.

Peer Monitor & Apply Graduated Sanctions

But what should the sanctions be, and how should they be applied? There is a vast literature exploring this topic, sometimes in the Ostrom school of scholarship, sometimes in the economic subdiscipline of prisoner’s dilemma experiments and game theory. Various experiments and theories have been put forward that attempt to explain how and why people defect from agreements, and what responses might induce greater cooperation.

Ostrom herself found out that long-enduring commons tend to have a series of graduated sanctions. “Graduated” refers to the fact that penalties start out small — a warning, a call to do better — and, if necessary, become more severe. Sanctions are needed to help persuade everyone else to stick to the rules because, as she points out, “enforcement increases the confidence of individuals that they are not suckers.”40 She calls this “quasi-voluntary compliance,” citing Margaret Levi, noting that cooperation is contingent on people seeing that others are also following the rules. Like paying one’s taxes, people are willing to do something they would prefer to avoid, but only when others comply as well. In most cases, some threat of coercion is essential to achieve cooperation. But it makes a huge difference if this threat of coercion comes from within and with consent — as in a Peer Governance process — or as an imperative from outside.

What is interesting is that the mere existence of possible sanctions is often effective in itself, even if actual penalties are rare. If there is already a great deal of solidarity in a commons, the social consequences of breaking the rules can be severe. Breaches are therefore quite rare. The mere existence of monitoring may not be as important as who is actually doing the monitoring — i.e., a friend or neighbor whom you do not wish to alienate. Sanctions generally play a less significant role in commons because, as Michael Cox et al. have noted in the case of a water management system in Zimbabwe, “people prefer to spend more time negotiating consensus than establishing and imposing sanctions.”41 In the English Lake District described by James Rebanks, it is considered a shocking breach of social honor if someone misleads another shepherd or sells a sheep for an inflated price. The zanjera irrigation communities of the Philippines reduce the burdens of enforcement by prescreening prospective members, and by suspending or even expelling anyone caught violating the rules.42 For socially cohesive commons, it seems, sanctions may be important tools but ones that are seldom used. For commons based on casual, informal relationships where full trust cannot be developed —
digital communities come to mind — sanctions may play a more necessary role.

—— Peer Governance and The Cash Nexus ——–

We cluster the next three patterns of Peer Governance together because they have a special focus — protecting the commons from the risks posed by money, property, finance, and market activity and the calculative rationality associated with them. These patterns attempt to safeguard the Nested-I, Ubuntu Rationality, and other dimensions of commoning while allowing necessary interactions with the cash nexus.

Relationalize Property

As they come and go from their houses every day, many Germans are reminded that their relationships with property are ambiguous. Craftsmen in the early Middle Ages often inscribed a bit of traditional wisdom on the facades of countless homes: “This is mine but is not mine. Nor does it belong to the one who had it before me. It’s not his, nor mine. He went out, I came in. And after me, it will be the same thing.” The conundrum of property is that all sorts of things may be “owned” as a matter of law, but what really matters are their possession and use — and both of those rights are grounded in social relations.

Relationalize Property

The Relationalize Property pattern is all about recognizing this reality. It means that the care-wealth of a commons does not belong exclusively to one person, nor even to a well-defined group. It has origins that precede us and will likely survive beyond our lives. But much as homo economicus is a caricature of what human beings really are, so property law has been designed to sanctify only certain types of human relationships with resources. Property is seen as an inert, separate thing with which we can do whatever we wish.

To Relationalize Property is to open up a new conception of property that recognizes the social relationships that are inextricably blended into any landscape, creative work, building, or sacred space. As French anthropologist of law Étienne Le Roy has rightly pointed out, what truly matters in a legal and political sense is the interpretation of the term “belong.” To whom does a piece of land or knowledge or earthly life belong, and why? And how should the law recognize and operationalize such relationships? These are questions that property law as it now stands mostly avoids, or, at least, regards as choices that individuals should make unilaterally, usually in selfish ways.43

But people can and do nonetheless Relationalize Property, which is truly what human beings have always done and will always do. They have shared relationships with public parks and monuments, artworks, gravesites, and places of worship. They have shared memories and experiences with certain buildings, bodies of water, mountains, and forests. In a commons, these relations are recognized and respected — a challenge that is often mischaracterized as a choice between individual rights and collective interests. But as our earlier discussion about the Nested-I suggests, it is entirely possible for the two to be blended into a new paradigm entirely, a kind of “Ubuntu property.”

Monasteries have done this for centuries. Monasteries are meant to be supportive environments for collective practices, and yet even here, care is taken in most religious orders to ensure that individuals have sufficient private space. Monks may live in simple personal cells or dwellings, but they are built around a cloister open to all. In the famous Florence Charterhouse, in Galluzzo, Italy, monks’ dwellings even include a courtyard for individuals and a small corridor that lets them be alone outside when rain falls. This Carthusian cloister is designed in such a way that individual spaces are generously protected and no one except the monk living there has access to it. The dwellings are organized so that the door of each cell comes off a large corridor used by all. It is no coincidence that medieval commons, too, assured individuals their private space, called curtilage, while managing shared fields as collective enterprises.44 Curtilage has survived into modern jurisprudence as the area around a person’s house that, in the words of the US Supreme Court, harbors the “intimate activity associated with the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of life.’”45

The land use practices of the Brazilian Landless Rural Worker Movement (Movimento Sem Terra, MST) revolve around this blending of individual and collective interests. Everyone together acts as stewards of occupied lands that no individual or collective can own absolutely. On MST lands, farmers can work on their own individual plots of land and use them for whatever purposes they want, but no one can excise their discrete piece of land from the land collectively occupied by the movement and sell it individually. Their use of the land is wrapped up with their belonging to the movement. In other words, the destiny of both individuals and the collective are deeply conjoined. Hundreds of thousands of Brazilian families46 live or have lived in MST’s land-occupation settlements in an effort to redistribute land to rural workers for small-scale farming. Much of MST’s approach and practice are inspired by Catholic social doctrine, which regards the dignity of the human being, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity as fundamental principles. Interestingly, similar philosophical strains can be seen in the Grundgesetz — the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany — which states that private property is not just for individual purposes, but must also serve a social function.47 This is why so many communities authorize people to use land so long as they cultivate it — a “use it or lose it” rule that honors need over absolute ownership.

The essence of relationalized property is the blending of individual and collective interests into a new paradigm. In Chapter Eight, we elaborate on this theme and explore it through five specific examples of “other ways of having.” In each case, the relationalized property helps commoners avoid the domineering or dependent social roles that conventional property rights generally entail. As explained in Chapter Eight, the Park Slope Food Coop uses unpaid, decommodified labor as a way to Pool & Share the benefits of a supermarket among its members. The Open Source Seed Initiative has pioneered ways to let farmers legally save, replant, and share seed, and breed new varieties. A large federation of German co-housing projects, Mietshäuser Syndikat, has taken a vast amount of housing off the market, enabled residents’ stewardship of the buildings, and prevented the sale or liquidation of the housing.
All of these vanguard projects embody the idea of existential co-possession and use over the idea of absolute dominion that property generally fosters. The purpose of Relationalized Property is to enable us to nourish relationships with each other, the nonhuman world, and past and future generations by design.

Keep Commons & Commerce Distinct

You might wonder why cooperatives are often cited as examples of the commons when in fact many of them seem to produce for and sustain themselves entirely from the market. Why do we have tens of thousands of cooperatives bringing together “over one billion people around the world” according to the International Co-operative Alliance, with sales of $2.2 trillion among the largest three hundred cooperatives worldwide48 — and yet the dominant economic model remains firmly in the saddle? The reason is that many cooperatives have not found cultural means to Keep Commons & Commerce Distinct. And the law doesn’t help. It almost always encourages, if not privileges, market-based activity over nonmarket, and commons-based options.

Keep Commons & Commerce Distinct

One of the top priorities of any commons, therefore, is to preserve its integrity in the face of an often-predatory market order. A commons must take special pains to protect itself from enclosure.

In a society where so much importance is placed on money, it is impossible to avoid the collision between commons and commerce. To protect commoning, affirmative steps to keep commerce at arm’s length are essential. This is a lesson illustrated by free software. Many programmers find “their development environment radically changed, sometimes for the worse, by the entrance of paid labor into their communities,” according to the free software programmer and academic Benjamin Mako Hill.49 Once money is introduced into a commons for free software development, he notes, “it brings with it a new style of working and a new type of inter-developer relationships.” Commoners lose their motivation to Contribute Freely (see p. 106–107), not because they can’t necessarily afford to, but because they feel unjustly treated if others are getting paid. When money is part of the picture, people often begin to reorient their aspirations and focus on the norms that markets regard as important. Slowly and subtly, the gravitational pull of money tends to undermine the integrity of commoning — its social relations, independent values, and long-term goals.

Hill cites empirical evidence that paid labor in socially driven endeavors tends to crowd out volunteers, who see their work as less indispensable and meaningful, inducing them to contribute less or even quit.50 Once money is introduced, it also creates a problem of how to spend it, and who makes those decisions. “It’s easier for a successful volunteer free software project to get money than it is to decide how to spend it,” Hill once pointed out. This is not an insuperable problem, of course, and many needs can only be fulfilled through markets. Yet if purchases of goods and services, or paid labor, substitute for what can be performed through commoning, it will begin to erode intrinsic motivations.

To be sure, commoners generally need money too, at least in some modest ways. In medieval times, commons were a way to meet everyday needs with only a minimal need for cash for occasional purchases. Commoning provided what we would now call a basic income — access to resources that ensure one’s basic survival. While contemporary commons can hardly avoid the use of money, they can (and must) strive for as much structural independence as possible. This is a gradual process that requires the ability to flip the script and ask the right questions. Instead of asking how I can earn more money, it is more appropriate to ask, how can I organize my life in such a way that I become less dependent on money? How do I decommodify daily life? Similar questions should be asked at the level of a project, initiative, infrastructure, or platform.

Those accustomed to buying services generally act as consumers, an ethic that tends to work at cross-purposes to commoning. In a way, whenever something is designed as a bidding process or requires a set of deliverables or presents itself as a buy and sell transaction, or warns that if you don’t participate, others will, a calculative rationality and money are being used to supersede Peer Governance. It is not just the promise or exchange of money that can override commoning, however. This can result from the presumption that “this is the only way to get things done.”

And yet, there are ways for a commons to interact with the market economy while preventing the logic of strict reciprocity (equivalent exchange) and highest bidders and cheapest rates to prevail. When a French city council offered to pay EnCommuns, a commons-based network of database programmers, to do some work, it suddenly introduced external performance pressures, trumping the project’s original goals and its self-determined work rhythms. As one participant reported, “A gap opened up between those who deliver a lot and get the money and those who [can only] deliver from time to time and do so without payment.” A subtle, almost imperceptible shift in the inner dynamics of the commoning resulted. Instead of contributing to the project for intrinsic reasons (fun, networking, learning from others, social impact), people became focused on “meeting the contract.” Soon the priorities of an outside contractor were seen as more important than the desires of other commoners. The logic of competition and efficiency surged to the fore, eclipsing the goal of voluntary cooperation. “Instead of helping people to change the behavioral patterns triggered by a flawed economic system,” the participant noted, “it reinforced these patterns.”

In response, EnCommuns created a semi-permeable membrane, an ingenious way to preserve the spirit of its commoning while engaging with commercial actors. First of all, EnCommuns demanded that any commercial enterprise pay for work produced by the commons.The point was to generate money to support the (nonmarket) activities of the commons. But rather than treating it as a conventional market transaction — payment for specific services — it required that any contracting company make a financial contribution to the commons for work that commoners would perform in any case. In other words, the business would not be “paying for a special service or product,” it would be making a donation. In addition, all contributions are publicly disclosed. EnCommuns’s goal is to make sure that it doesn’t come to depend mainly on revenue from selling something, whether its people’s labor or products. Why? Because a commons based on such a design will quickly prioritize market success over commoners’ needs, which is likely to begin to unravel its social fabric. By treating payments as donations, EnCommuns decouples acts of giving to and taking from the commons, remaining sovereign in how it makes use of money within its commons. EnCommuns explains, “Our idea is to help commercial organizations gain confidence in the commons approach while helping the commons to be funded when they are used for business purposes.”51 This same approach has been used by the P2P Foundation in its Peer Production License (p. 402 #16), which grants free use to anyone to use work from the commons except for commercial users, who must pay.

The transnational Guerrilla Media Collective — a socially minded group of translators, designers, and media workers — has developed a governance system that integrates commoning and paid work. Their Commons-Oriented Open Cooperative Governance and Economic Model, version 2.0, lets people pursue mission-oriented work and paid work while explicitly requiring people to care for the health of the collective and individual members.52 Group decision making and responsibilities are based on different levels of engagement — casual, unpaid involvement; a formal process of “dating” that is partly paid; and committed, paid membership with specified responsibilities. A credit system tracks people’s pro bono projects and paid work, while care work is explicitly visualized and weighed against productive work. The purpose is to keep commoning as the core priority.

To Keep Commons and Commerce Distinct, the stewards of many community forests allow the cutting of trees for personal use only, not for market sale. Fisheries commons often stipulate the amount of fish that any individual fisher may sell on the open market. University administrations tend to serve as intermediaries between funding sources and scientists so that researchers can have open, honest debates and share their findings without the taint of corporate influence.

Finance Commons Provisioning

In a world in which capitalist finance and money are ubiquitous and the default tools for getting things done, a question arises: how can provisioning in commons be financed without the harmful influences of money and debt? We have found that three general approaches can be effective in helping people escape dependency on capitalist finance while enhancing their security and freedom. These are money-lite commoning to reduce the need for money and markets; collaborative financing that lets commoners create and circulate money or credit for themselves, wholly from within their commons; and new public-commons circuits of finance, which allow taxpayer funds administered by government to be used to support commons.

Finance Commons Provisioning

Before exploring these three approaches, some general observations must be made. As we have seen, the health of any commons depends upon preventing money from dominating its social dynamics. If debt or capital compromise people’s independence or sow social divisions, a commons will likely fall apart. It is therefore helpful for commoners (or anybody) to become less dependent on money and markets. Peer-driven approaches enable commoners to recirculate the value that they create for mutual benefit, rather than letting creditors or outside equity holders siphon value away in the form of interest or dividend payments.

A basic question that must be addressed in a commons, French commons thinker Philippe Aigrain once said, is, “What type of relations do we want to exist between the monetary economy and the commons?” We must also ask, What type of money culture do commoners want to develop for themselves? These questions should be answered in such a way that, at a minimum, capital or money does not metastasize and convert cooperative activities into capitalism. The pursuit of money and market success, usually seen as a necessary path to community well-being, too often ends up subordinating it to outside markets and capital. Therefore, it is imperative to Keep Commons & Commerce Distinct (p. 151). Another way to minimize the harmful influence of money is to Practice Gentle Reciprocity (p. 108) so that the calculative rationality of market relationships does not become the cultural norm, crowding out solidarity and the generative creativity of commoning.

Tech entrepreneur Frank Karlitschek discovered this lesson the hard way. In 2010, he started an open source file hosting community, ownCloud, to compete with the likes of Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. These platforms allow web users to synchronize the use of data and documents among diverse digital devices and to store that information in the cloud on someone else’s servers. This software architecture enables multiple parties to reliably access and use large collections of files in authorized, secure ways.

To expand development of the ownCloud platform, Karlitschek in 2011 secured millions of dollars in venture capital financing to start a company, ownCloud, Inc., at which he became chief technology officer. But by 2016 he learned how profoundly outside money influences an organization’s strategies and practices. Even though hundreds of programmers were contributing to ownCloud as an open source project, company executives did not properly acknowledge the contributions of the community or share internal corporate deliberations with it, according to Karlitschek. Quite abruptly, he decided to resign, concerned that investors had “thrown the project under the bus.” In his resignation letter, Karlitschek wrote: “Without sharing too much, there are some moral questions popping up for me. Who owns the community? Who owns ownCloud itself? And what matters more, short-term money or long-term responsibility and growth? Is ownCloud just another company or do we also have to answer to the hundreds of volunteers who contribute and make it what it is today? These questions brought me to the very tough decisions: I have decided to leave my own company today.”53

Weeks later, Karlitschek announced that he would fork the code and reconstitute the community of contributors under a new project called NextCloud. It would not have external investors, but be driven by the talents and commitment of a large community of volunteer programmers, in a more authentic open source manner. In addition, NextCloud, with its modular structure, would offer a variety of new functionalities, such as an address book, photo galleries, music and video playback, task manager, feed reader, email program, word processing, mindmaps, administrative tools, and more. Within two years, the Nextcloud project had 1,800 unpaid programmers and millions of users around the globe, including many large corporations such as Siemens and ARD. It continues to build out its shared vision — without the artificial limitations imposed by investors. At the Bits & Bäume (Bits & Trees) conference in Berlin in 2018 — a first-ever gathering of environmentalists and free software hackers (the “critical technology movement”) — Karlitschek reflected that his ownCloud experience taught him to focus on ensuring independence when financing an endeavor. A critical lesson for commoners as well.

Commoners have a variety of strategies for minimizing the pernicious influences of money, which we will now explore, but whichever one is chosen, the tail must not wag the dog by allowing money to drive our aspirations and practices.

Money-lite commoning. Commoning means relying on sharing, divid­ing up, and mutualization to meet needs as much as possible, and on collaborative financing. This lets people minimize their reliance on money and markets. We call this “money-lite” — the ethic and social practice of reducing one’s need for money as much as possible through sharing, co-using, DIT (do-it-together), and other practices that minimize reliance on market exchange. This is fundamental to all commons. Commoners can improve their long-term independence by withdrawing as much as possible from dealings with the market/state system.

Money-lite commoning is how hackers helped neutralize Microsoft’s proprietary abuses of its monopolies over Windows and Office in the early 2000s (see pp. 128 and 167–168). They developed GNU/Linux, Open Office, and scores of other high-quality open source programs as practical, low-cost or no-cost alternatives to the standard programs offered by the market giants. Through shareable, peer-produced programs, people can create digital commons of their own and escape draconian licensing agreements and abusive technical designs. Users can rest easy that their code is compatible with other systems and legally modifiable. They can’t be extorted into paying for expensive, unnecessary upgrades.

In nondigital spaces, there are many proven systems for reducing one’s individual costs or eliminating the need for market activity. Community land trusts, by decommodifying the land under buildings, can reduce the cost of housing and small enterprises. Co-housing and peer-to-peer car-sharing and tool-sharing projects are forms of money-lite commoning. Cosmo-local production (see pp. 195–197) sheds the costs of proprietary design (based on patents, trademarks, etc.) and enables less expensive modular, local production.

The point of money-lite commoning is to help people focus on their real needs and escape the endless cycle of disempowerment that a consumerist culture generally promotes. The capitalist economy spends extraordinary energy and money trying to get people to individually consume even though much of this is wholly unnecessary. David Fleming calls the resulting infrastructures of dependency “regrettable necessities” — which then spawn a whole layer of products like cars and smart phones that are soon considered essential. Commoners can escape many of these “necessities” by developing their own systems, infrastructure, spaces, and resource-pools for sharing.

Collaborative financing consists of pooling money from individuals, the community, and the wider public to finance common wealth. This strategy not only strengthens a commons here and now, it gives structural support for commoning in the future. Historically, collaborative financing has included such models as mutual credit societies and insurance pools, cooperative finance, community-controlled microfinance, and local currencies. In recent times, crowdfunding has been taken these capacities to new levels in both small and very big projects. Goteo, a crowdfunding platform for the commons that started in Spain, is a preeminent force of collaborative finance. From its founding in 2012 through 2017, it has raised more than 7.3 million euros, funded more than 900 commons projects throughout Europe and Latin America, and provided online assistance to 2,500 additional projects.54 Goteo differs from conventional crowdfunding websites by requiring that projects actually advance the principles of commons.

At a larger scale, the Wikimedia movement in 2016-17 received 6.1 million donations totaling US$91 million, with an average gift of $14.79. This pooling of money, distributed among sixteen wiki projects, means that anyone can have noncommercial access to an online dictionary, quotation database, collections of digital books and learning materials, databases of plant and animal species, repositories of photographs and images, and travel guides. By shifting these materials out of the commercial market, where sellers are constantly trying to capture people’s personal data and advertise to them, the many wiki projects let people escape all that.

Terre de Liens, a French organization, pools money to buy land for aspiring contemporary “peasant-farmers.” The goal is to decommodify land in perpetuity — i.e., remove land from the market and hold it in trust forever, in the manner of a community land trust. One portion of funding is dedicated to “solidarity savings,” which is used exclusively to help acquire new farmland. In Germany, a federation of housing commons, Mietshäuser Syndikat, does something similar. It offers collaborative financing to help groups of residents buy co-housing projects, in effect decommodifying them. Then, to continue that process of what it calls “solidarity transfers,” it collects one-tenth of a euro per square meter of living space from every resident in its more than 160 co-housing projects. (For more on Mietshäuser Syndikat, see Chapter Eight.)

Artabana, a federation for community-based healthcare funding with thousands of affiliates in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, uses a similar strategy. Artabana is organized in small groups whose members provide social insurance to each other. There are no restrictions regarding people’s choices of physician, treatment option, drug, or remedy. The groups jointly determine, in a sphere of trust, the mutual assistance and the appropriation of solidarity fund resources each group contributes to at a group level. Additionally, a portion of the local pools of money goes into a so-called emergency fund run by Artabana International. Usually, a group can cover the healthcare expenses for its members simply through pooling and dividing up money. However, if someone in a local group faces unexpectedly high medical expenses — for instance, in case of chronic diseases or complicated operations — the federation’s emergency fund can provide additional support. It functions as a kind of reinsurance within the community-based insurance system.

When “Jane” in Australia found that she needed surgery for a severe heart condition, she and her husband planned to use their home mortgage to finance the anticipated cost of AUS $35,000. But it turned out that her local Artabana group had contacted Artabana Germany, and their emergency fund was able to pay for her surgery. “We were humbled and surprised that Artabana Germany’s emergency fund would support me without knowing me … Within a week the money was in our account at Artabana Hobart. It was initially hard to accept the gesture from strangers. We felt self-conscious about the generosity.” All of the Artabana projects function as federated pools of funding to cover larger magnitudes of risk and future needs.

A dynamic worldwide movement is attempting to minimize the pernicious influences of money by inventing their own community-
created and -controlled currencies. This often takes the form of a local currency to serve specific needs within a limited geographic area or among registered users. For example, in extremely poor neighborhoods in Kenya, the Bangla Pesa and Lida Pesa are neighborhood-owned and -controlled currencies, part of the larger Sarafu Credit system. The currencies enable members to capture and recirculate value created within the community while preventing the outside economy from siphoning it away. Such systems are complementary to conventional (fiat) money and serve as building blocks for a commons-based economy. Researcher Grzegorz Sobiecki estimates there are more than 6,000 alternative currencies worldwide.55

Each of these platforms and federations — Goteo, Terre de Liens, Mietshäuser Syndikat, Artabana, local currencies — requires some sort of collective return. Goteo, for example, requires that works are released under Creative Commons or other free licenses. This ensures that future creators will be able to copy, share, and/or modify those works. The basic principle is that anyone who takes from the commons must give something back to it. Also, they do not just seek to amass financial contributions, but to pay forward specific benefits so that others may enjoy them or so future commons can be created.

Creating new public-commons circuits of finance. The state provides plenty of support to market capitalism such as subsidies, legal privileges, and state-approved monopolies. There is no reason why it should not recognize and support the value of commoning as well, through state investment, cofunding of commons, and creative financial tools and systems. This could take many forms.

The most obvious approach would be for the state to provide generous direct financial support to commons-based projects. The state already uses taxpayer money for all sorts of important national purposes; certainly commoning creates immense value of its own that should be similarly supported. However, state funding tends to rely on restrictive bureaucratic procedures and strict sets of deliverables, while any commons requires the space and time for experimentation and creative evolution. In engaging with any state program that purports to support commoning, commoners must be wary of the procedural burdens of state funding and the risks of depending on such support. State funding can easily distort the integrity of a project, open the door to outside political influence, and risk the abrupt termination of support when the political winds shift.

Some of the problems of direct state funding might be avoided by instituting regimes for statutory resource-pooling, for example, similar to a government-mandated flat fee on recorded music, performances, and other types of creative content. The mandatory fee would recognize the actual role that nonmarket creative communities play in helping commercial entertainment: they help companies identify and recruit promising new commercial talent, and keep various musical traditions alive. Why shouldn’t commercial players indirectly repay the debt they have to collaborative creative communities? The finance mechanism of mandatory flat fees would be predictable and easily scalable, and could help large groups of creative people.56

Just as government agencies often assist businesses by providing loan guarantees or actual loan funds, the state could create state funding programs to finance commons-managed housing, Fab Labs, cosmo-local production, telecommunications, and other activities. The state could require that a percentage of tax revenues from fisheries or timber harvesting be put into a pool of funds managed by multi­stakeholder organizations acting as community-based trusts to manage coastal lands, forests, or natural reserves. Perhaps the most ambitious state–commons financing scheme would be an unconditional basic income. At present, this idea takes many forms, but the one that would most empower commoners would be to authorize communities to decide how to use and share their time and talents.

6. Provisioning Through Commons

There is a saying in Silicon Valley: eat your own dog food — meaning people at the company must actually use the software they make, in real-world circumstances.1 “Dogfooding” is considered the best way to ensure that something truly works well. It is revealing that the software industry has such a term to describe the internal testing of its products. It points to a hidden weakness of the conventional economy — the treatment of production and consumption as separate activities, and the ultra-specialization of production in ways that segregate design, documentation, and manufacturing as separate professional silos. This bureaucratization means that each employee depends on the work product of others without really understanding the complexities involved. It also makes it easier for any department to cut corners on quality and safety, knowing that unwitting consumers may or may not be able to do anything about it.

Some companies realize that integrating the lessons of real-world consumption into the design and production process is indispensable. As the primary creator of TeX Typesetting software, Donald E. Knuth, once confessed: “I came to the conclusion that the designer of a new system must not only be the implementer and the first large-scale user; the designer should also write the first user manual. The separation of any of these four components would have hurt TeX significantly. If I had not participated fully in all these activities, literally hundreds of improvements would never have been made, because I would never have thought of them or perceived why they were important.”2 Users have firsthand knowledge that is invaluable in design and production, even if economists regard the separation of production and consumption as an inexorable fact of modern life.

Trained to see the dismemberment of complex production processes as efficient and natural, and its segregation from consumption as a core premise of “the economy,” economists tend to overlook a more elegant, practical approach to provisioning — commoning. Commoning is at heart an act of social self-organization and constant learning whose central purpose is to help people meet needs by producing things or services together. (We prefer to use the word “provisioning” as a nonmarket version of “production.”) Meeting needs has long been a standard definition of what an economy is all about, so commoning should properly be seen as part of “the economy,” too, even though economics textbooks generally ignore this fact. Commons let people produce food and clothing, shelter and means of transportation, machinery and microscopes, software and hardware, drugs, healthcare, and even prosthetics.3 It is breathtaking how much people can provide for themselves by aligning interests, motivations, and agency toward a common goal. Commoning provides a way to leverage social trust within new organizational forms to coordinate people’s actions.

Through commons, people can blend their social and economic needs, providing the basis for re-integrating production and consumption. This practice is especially prevalent in the digital realm, where users and producers tend to be the same people (“prosumers”). In conventional economic terms, a commons helps reduce the need for administration, lawyering, “human resource” management, and marketing by instead relying on a community of trust and individual commitment. Who needs advertising when the goal is to meet needs, not promote consumption?

So why put the interests and needs of producers in one box and those of consumers in another box, and blindly assume that the marketplace will somehow reconcile them? Why not re-imagine the whole process as an enterprise where production and consumption are integrated as one organic process of planning, design, documentation, and provisioning along with use, reuse, and waste management? Production need not consist of a series of complex, interlocking markets for labor, commodity sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, retail, advertising, etc. It can occur through commons that let people decide to co-make and co-use what they need, often with a division of labor but without that strict provision of roles, organized through hierarchies. The most significant difference with corporate bureaucracy is that the output is made available to others and the benefits are retained and shared. Different skills, talents, and knowledge can all be orchestrated to contribute to production. Knowledge can be readily shared, designs can focus on quality, and provisioning methods can be adjusted to improve results — all without catering to the harsh quarterly profit demands of investors. Tasks can be rotated so that people do not need to organize their work according to narrow roles defined by objectified, artificial value (price, wages) and fixed job categories. Freed of market imperatives, greater flexibility and adaptability are possible.

Besides reintegrating production and consumption, as well as fragmented steps of production, commons can re-incorporate care into our conceptualization of the economy (see pp. 169–173). With the rise of capitalism, caring, childrearing, and education have been seen as activities external to the working of the economy. Except for public education, they are something for individuals to take care of on their own time, and at their own expense. A commons does not externalize care, and so is more able to take account of a person’s fuller life, not just their need to earn money.

* * *

In this chapter, we describe the character of “production in common,” or, more precisely, “provisioning through commoning,” by examining ten key patterns. These are the structured regularities that tend to be needed for commons provisioning. These patterns manifest each time in distinctive ways, much as a flower will grow differently in forest shade, direct sun, or moist riverbanks. Whatever the circumstances, provisioning remains a practical enterprise that aims to get things done.

The critical difference between commoning and the capital-centric economy is that the latter regards its work results almost exclusively as marketable products. They are fungible artifacts whose value is mostly defined by their price. Since commons blur (or even eliminate!) the roles of “producers” and “consumers,” so too the very character of the “products” changes. The things produced are not designed to be sold, or sold in high volumes at the highest prices, or to pander to our consumer fantasies and then fall apart through planned obsolescence so that the cycle can be repeated. Provisioning through Commons means producing useful, durable things that will have ongoing social importance to their makers and users, and so the end results are not “goods” or “commodities,” as the classical economist would call them. Commoners instead cultivate affective ties to their care-wealth — forests, farmland, water, urban spaces — which often become part of their culture, social lives, and identities. The goal of Provisioning through Commons is not maximum efficiency, profit, or higher Gross Domestic Product. It aims simply to meet needs and provide a stable, fair, satisfying, and ecologically minded way of life. There is no economic growth imperative built into provisioning except its motive to increasingly displace, and substitute for, exploitative or expensive market practices.

Most of the concerns that the dominant economy obsesses about —
growth, market share, competition, copyright, patents, advertising, branding, opening new markets — play hardly any role in the commons. This is because the commons economy invites people to reorient their perspectives and aspire to a different set of outcomes than those of market capitalism — the satisfaction of real, not contrived, needs. Security. A sense of belonging and connection. A meaningful life. Implicit in many commons, too, is a vision of advancing greater freedom, fairness, and sustainability for all.

The biggest shift that the commons economy brings is a move from the economy as an autonomous, globalized supermachine to an economy that nurtures life on its own terms, at appropriate scales. In the course of Provisioning through Commons a tapestry of relationships is woven, which confirms the wisdom of ecophilosopher Thomas Berry: “The universe is primarily a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”4 The basic difference between the commons and capital-driven markets could not be stated more succinctly.

The difficult challenge, however, is how to devise structures and encourage social dynamics for commons provisioning. We have identified ten recurrent, hardy patterns that can build out a more robust commons economy:

• Provisioning Through Commons
• Make & Use Together
• Support Care & Decommodified Work
• Share the Risks of Provisioning
• – Four Modes of Contribution and Allocation:
• Contribute & Share
• Pool, Cap & Divide Up
• Pool, Cap & Mutualize
• Trade with Price Sovereignty
• 
  Use Convivial Tools
• Rely on Distributed Structures
• Creatively Adapt & Renew

Make & Use Together

Make & Use Together is a time-honored way for people to meet shared needs. To reduce costs and affirm commonality, people often decide to co-create and share access to pools of information, knowledge, money, working spaces, tools, and infrastructures. To make and use something together is as old as the human species and as new as the internet.

Make & Use Together

As in other patterns we introduce in these chapters, the “&” matters. The pattern is Make and Use Together, not simply “Use Together.” If you think like a commoner, you think about the thing produced and the entire generative process as something to be used by yourself, shared, and potentially used by others. The process is not primarily about making and producing for your own or other people’s consumption. It’s about meeting shared needs. When making new creative works, a person forfeits his or her proprietary control under copyright (using Creative Commons licenses) to ensure that certain use rights such as copying and sharing are available. Commoners don’t want to restrict others from co-producing the same thing; they want as many people as possible to join in the enterprise. Encouraging more commoning in online contexts is highly attractive, because, as Linus Torvalds discovered in those early days of the World Wide Web, the more the merrier. On open digital platforms, where it is virtually costless to reproduce things (but for the energy-intensive infrastructure), more value can be generated as more people have the capacity to participate.

The making that goes on in a commons should not really be regarded as DIY (do it yourself) but as DIT — “do it together,” to meet one’s own needs and potentially the needs of others. This explains why CSA farms, for example, have no interest in preventing other CSAs from forming and flourishing in their region. You hardly ever read or hear about a CSA competing with another CSA. It is pretty much the opposite. As a member, you want to encourage other CSAs to form, at least until everyone has easy access to a nearby CSA farm.

This pattern has endless variations. It is the standard process in the makerspaces, open workshops and Fab Labs around the world that bring together hackers, professional technologists, digital artists, and amateurs to tinker, experiment, and fabricate things together. According to a Study by Cedifa (Center for Digital Fabrication), a Fab Lab (fabrication laboratory) can be opened within seven days and a basic investment of only US$5,000 if it relies on commons-oriented approaches, including the use of open source software.5 Open design and manufacturing communities build furniture, electronics, farm equipment, and open source motor vehicles in this manner.

In some commons, the focus is on shared use, in others it is on shared making. The popularity of both approaches can be seen in the 260 open workshops in German-speaking countries where hobbyists, master craftspeople, and others work with wood, 3D printers, metal, and electronics. Most anything that normally comes from a factory can be DIT-produced — bokashi buckets for urban composting, cargo bikes and solar-powered cars, lamps, microscopes, and motherboards, cloth, toilets and replacement parts, wooden furniture, and visors. Worldwide, volunteers in more than 1,300 repair cafes are fixing broken appliances and household items, bringing to life an idea introduced in 2009 in the Netherlands by journalist and blogger Martine Postma.6 The open workshops and repair cafes are places for community building, collective thinking, and learning. They Creatively Adapt & Renew (see below) countless objects that are considered waste, giving them a second life cycle.

Support Care and Decommodified Work

Work in a commons is not a purchased unit of commodified work, aka “labor.” It is an activity that draws upon people’s deep passions and values — their whole selves. Geographer Neera Singh calls this sort of commitment “affective labor”7 because people show love, devotion, and care — or simply awareness for what needs to be done —
when stewarding a forest, caring for elderly parents, designing and curating a web archive, teaching a craft or tending a community garden. Care and commitment in a shared endeavor is central for commoning. It is the elemental glue that holds people together. It occurs, for example, when parents cook, clean, and provide personal support to their children, relatives, and parents — the household as the core focus of the economy, as in the original Greek sense of the term oikos. In a commons this household is bigger than in a Greek polis; it comprises the space and all the people and elements involved in meeting needs.8

Support Care and Decommodified Work

Care occurs when people bring their full humanity to a task instead of having impersonal, money-mediated relationships with market resources. Affective labor in effect converts a mere commodity into something that is cared for. One might more accurately call it care-wealth. Unlike a market resource whose value is defined by its price, care-wealth has value because there is a nimbus of memories, meanings, and special feelings associated with it, the result of people dedicating their time and care. The social energy that hovers around care-wealth resembles the halo of electrical energy that pulsates around a magnet. It is no surprise that many communities have special feelings for sacred places or the focal points of people’s care — a public square, a riverfront, an ancient tree. Certain theaters of commoning — a food cooperative, a local forest, a land trust, a collaborative website — acquire special meaning and emotional resonance as people commit their heart and soul to them (and, indeed, only if they do so).

The personal and social energies of care accomplish a lot of meaningful work without which a society could not hold together. As we describe in this chapter, countless commons rely on care that is contributed freely, shared, divided up, or developed through gentle reciprocity. Caring is not the result of commoning, but clearly a core force of commoning that also takes place everywhere, even in markets. The difference is that the market economy — while welcoming what care and intrinsic motivation can accomplish — is incapable of summoning and supporting care. Cash inducements (wages, fees, bribes, subsidies) may or may not elicit genuine care because market incentives are mostly concerned with “productive labor” — outcomes that have measurable, tangible economic benefits. Caring and commoning, by contrast, attempt to speak directly to our inner selves, as Nested-I’s, with integrity and sensitivity. This helps explain why commons are better hosting spaces for enabling care and decommodified work to flourish.

To be sure, the conventional economy has commodified all sorts of care into “care work,” including childcare and healthcare. Care is often structured into units of labor organized by the logics of productivity and measurability. But it is impossible to squeeze human relationships and care into a regime of schedules, forms, and productivity metrics. When subjected to a calculative rationality, care is no longer care. It is a form of robotics performed by human automatons.

However, as we saw with Buurtzorg Nederland, the neighborhood home care described in Chapter One, genuine care can be provided to large numbers of people without market incentives degrading its essential human quality. What’s key is retaining the appropriate scale. “People are not bicycles who can be organized according to an organizational chart,” as the Buurtzorg founder put it. Providing care through commons, in defiance of market principles, does not mean that quality of care suffers. It improves care because people have the freedom and time to provide personalized, situationally appropriate attention to people.

While some care activities have been commodified, most care still takes place outside of the formal economy. Economists have externalized it, which is their way of simply ignoring this area of life. This indifference towards care and meeting basic human needs means that caring for countless societal problems — family life, intergenerational support in extended families, local culture, informal social pursuits — is made invisible. The care jobs created by markets are not only badly paid, but usually relegated primarily to women, immigrants, and nonwhite minorities.

The irony is that care and decommodified work are utterly indispensable to the functioning of the economy, including “productive labor.” No civilization could function without care activities. Where would the next generation of employees come from if families did not raise, educate, and socialize them? How could a community exist without people helping each other as neighbors and socializing young people to be good citizens? Once you enumerate all of the uncommodified work that is needed to keep a society functioning — subsistence provisioning, householding, civic life, voluntarism, etc. — it becomes obvious that money and markets are only the tip of the iceberg of the economy. “Unpaid work is worth billions,” as a German journalist has put it, using the only language many seem to understand.9

To Support Care & Decommodified Work is to rescue this neglected care sector from oblivion and put it at the center of economic thinking. It is to validate a different logic for organizing the economy. Commoning invites us to forgo self-advantage rather than maximize personal gain. By providing care, we make ourselves vulnerable and dependent on others. We sacrifice our time, energy, and awareness in order to develop healthy relationships — toward ourselves and our bodies, toward others, and toward nature. Instead of striving to be super-efficient with our time and money, we prioritize human presence and connection. In this respect, the commons challenges the very heart of market economics by asserting different standards of valuation. When economic traditionalists carp that care models cannot scale, they miss the point: real care is supposed to occur in small, intimate contexts where authentic relationships can develop. There is obviously a role for larger systems, but care is not just about units of service delivery. It is about another way of understanding the economy as an “oikonomy” or “ecommony” where “economy is care,” as Ina Prätorius of Care Revolution, an advocacy network in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria, puts it.

Iceberg with market economy

Two generations of feminist economists,10 many of them associated with the International Association for Feminist Economics, and researchers like Diane Elson, Julie Nelson, Alicia Girón González, Brigitte Young, Adelheid Biesecker, and Friederike Haberman, have pioneered incisive critiques about the deficiencies of mainstream economics when it comes to care. This literature shares a great deal of ground with commoning because both are generally ignored or dismissed as externalities. Both discourses attempt to leapfrog over the flawed premises of standard economics (e.g., homo economicus; value as equivalent to price) by asserting a different epistemological framework.

Studies show that people who can escape market regimes of valuation (i.e., money, prices) often show greater care, motivation, and concern for quality.11 This occurs because the use of wages, bonuses, bribes, and other cash incentives often sends a signal that induces people to behave as competitive and even cynical market players. By contrast, commoning tends to encourage people to give the best of themselves and nourish deeper relationships and social trust. By providing care and decommodified work, they become a Nested-I. The classic example of this (not necessarily conscious) dynamic is the gift economy of blood donation. British researcher Richard Titmuss in the 1960s found that volunteers who give blood are more likely to have safer, healthier blood than the people who are paid money for their blood — because the latter often have substance abuse problems or illnesses.12

Share the Risks of Provisioning

In the capitalist economy, companies are said to shoulder the risks of creating and marketing a product, even though their research and development budget is often subsidized by taxpayers and even though they often displace risks and expenses on to consumers, the environment, and future generations. This is their rationale for reaping the profits after production. In a planned economy, some risks are assumed by the state or simply ignored. In a commons, however, where the distinction between consumer and producer gets blurred, everybody who is actively involved accepts co-responsibility for the sharing of risks before and during production. These risks may include the uncertainty of the crop yields from a CSA farm, the complications of maintaining a community-based Wi-Fi infrastructure such as Guifi.net, or the uncertainties associated with the open source process needed to design an affordable, nonproprietary tractor such as the Life-Trac of Open Source Ecology.13

Share the Risks of Provisioning

The ways of sharing risks take many different forms. In crowdfunding campaigns, donors essentially give a gift to project leaders to develop a new software app, invention, or social service. When contributions are pooled for a collective investment, the risks are fairly small for any individual while the potential benefits for everyone are large. In many German CSAs, there is a process known as a “bidding round” (Bieterrunde) in which the CSA farm informs members at the beginning of the planting season how much money will be needed to grow the year’s crops. Members then gather in a circle, reflect together on the group’s overall need, and decide individually what each person can afford to give. Then members submit anonymous pledges of money into the common pot. If not enough funds are raised in the first bidding round, the size of the shortfall is announced and a second round of contributions starts. Usually the needed sum is raised in only two rounds. This is the way that risks for growing the season’s crops are shared without requiring people of unequal capacities to contribute equal shares toward dividing up the harvest equally.

When risks are shared, everything changes: the power relationships, the decision-making processes about what to produce and how, the cash flow, and obviously, the sharing of the wealth. For these reasons, sharing the risks of provisioning provides an important step in transcending a market-driven economy. This brings us to the next four patterns of Provisioning through Commons, each of which addresses how to allocate wealth that is generated. Before looking at each pattern, it helps to make some conceptual clarifications and to review the basic choices that commoners face.

Contribute & Share

Pooling means contributing to a stock of resources to reach a common goal or solve a specific problem, spontaneously or by voluntary agreement. Then the pool is shared. You can pool virtually everything –
knowledge, physical resources, one’s time, energy, food, tools, ideas, or money. Pooling is not just about putting things into a collective pot, it’s also about contributing one’s talents, energy, imagination, and services to create a commons that can benefit everyone. When people Contribute & Share, whatever is needed is freely contributed (sometimes with a gentle nudge) by all participants. And then it is shared without calculating everyone’s individual benefit. Participants reduce their individual costs of provisioning, increase the likelihood of meeting everybody’s needs better, and develop a sense of co-responsibility and solidarity. As in Pool & Divide, everybody can participate regardless of their financial means or social status.

Make & Use Together

Contribute & Share works in all realms of commoning, but it is particularly powerful on open networks, where the usefulness of information, ideas, knowledge, code, and design grows the more that they are shared and adapted. However, what matters most here as well is the “&.” Pooling without sharing in the commons is like shopping without money in capitalism: it won‘t work. You can only share what you pool, contribute, or co-produce in the first place.

Contributing software code has been likened to throwing vegetables into a common cooking pot into which everyone contributes what they have, and everyone can take what they wish.14 Indeed, Pool & Share is a routine practice among programmers and designers who contribute to a shared body of code and designs. It is also a routine practice among global communities of open hardware designers who create shareable blueprints for farm equipment (Open Source Ecology, Atelier Paysan), furniture (Open Desk), houses (WikiHouse), motor vehicles (Wikispeed), and prosthetics (Open Prosthetics Project). Institutions may Contribute & Share, too. A classic instance is the Europeana Initiative of nearly 400 museums, archives, and cultural institutions, which are collaborating on a public process to label and preserve public-domain art works.

Pool, Cap & Divide Up

In cases in which a common resource is finite and can be used up, Pool, Cap & Divide Up is a variant of Pool & Share. A cap on usage, set through a peer governance process, can address a threat of overuse or insufficient supplies that might occur if everyone takes what she wants. To Pool, Cap & Divide Up speaks to timeless experience and necessity. Hunters manage to kill only so much game but there are many people who need to eat … gatherers acquire only a limited store of nuts and fruit … guests at potluck dinners bring only so much food, which somehow must be made to serve everyone.

Pool, Cap & Divide Up

Farmers or pastoralists who use the same land for agriculture or grazing animals often create rules specifying how much and in which months an individual may harvest. It is typical in a commons to limit individual usage so that the land is not overexploited. Dividing Up the available water, fish, fruits, and harvest can be done in any number of imaginative ways.

Pool, Cap & Divide Up is arguably the most prevalent pattern of cooperation in the world today. It always has been. Its prevalence and practicality are often ignored because they don’t conform to the standard economic narrative, which insists upon seeing human beings as selfish, materialistic, rational individuals unable to negotiate a fair division of benefits. “In the conventional economy, they [economists] cannot see any more what really works,” said Rainer Kippe of SSM. “What we are doing seems impossible to a typical economist who has studied mainstream textbooks. According to classical theory, what we do can’t work. But in fact … we do it everyday.”17 They Pool, Cap & Divide Up. Indeed, beyond the ken of standard economics, as many as 2.5 billion people around the world manage about eight billion hectares of land through community-based ownership systems, according to the International Land Coalition.18 For things like land, water, forests, and wild game, Pool, Cap & Divide Up is arguably the fairest, most practical strategy.

Pool, Cap & Mutualize

Pool, Cap & Mutualize is useful for dealing with limited resources that you wish to use and steward in common, but don’t necessarily want to divide up. Everyone does not necessarily get an absolutely equal share. The point is for a distinct group of cooperators to collectively meet their needs in a roughly equivalent way and, in so doing, express a basic social solidarity. Cap & Mutualize is a familiar modern principle used in social security systems and healthcare, for example. It can also be seen in the Artabana community health insurance system, described earlier.

Pool, cap & mutualize

There is a reciprocity at play, in that everyone helps oversee the proper, respectful use of the common grazing lands while enjoying benefits from it. But the reciprocity is not a transactional, market-like trade because the commoning has the character of neighborly support and flexibility in fulfilling a shared agreement. This is far different from a cap-and-trade scheme in that users are deciding what an acceptable cap on usage is, based on their own experiences and careful observations. Another benefit of Cap & Mutualize is that it preserves a shared intentionality among the user group, whereas trading encourages individual exploitation of the resource to maximum legal limits (and beyond), otherwise known as the tragedy of the market.

Trade with Price Sovereignty

One of the great powers of a commons is its ability to emancipate itself from markets — and the prices they dictate. Somebody who participates in a commons to support some facet of her life does not need to submit to the omnipotence of many markets. A commons enables people to go their own path. If they need to engage with the market, they can choose their own terms.

Trade with price sovereignty

In the United States, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer came up with a shrewd strategy in the 1960s for dealing with community disempowerment, which in her case was caused by exploitative white-owned businesses. With support from singer Harry Belafonte and a Wisconsin charity, Measure for Measure, she founded an interracial farming cooperative in 1969 on a few dozen acres of Delta land. The goal was to empower poor blacks to grow their own food. “When you’ve got 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup for the winter, nobody can push you around or tell you what to say or do,” Hamer noted.19 Imagine what might happen if commoners emulated this strategy in dozens of realms. It would begin to put serious pressure on the market! That can already be seen in northwest Venezuela, thanks to the commons-based provisioning of Cecosesola.

By creating a quasi-independent provisioning system that operates independently of conventional markets, commoners acquire some freedom from market demands, including price. They can declare their own terms. The ability to assert price sovereignty is a significant source of power, for example. It includes the option to provide people with goods and services for free, or at lower prices than the conventional market does. This is a much-overlooked strategic power. By decommodifying production and rooting it in social practices and trust, commoners can pursue their own agenda in the face of the formidable powers wielded by capital and corporations.

The price-making exercises conducted by Cecosesola (and other commons) means that they are less vulnerable to the highly irregular forces of supply and demand. They have partially withdrawn from conventional markets and so are less dependent on its expenses and volatility. (Of course, peasants still have to buy seeds and other inputs for production from markets.) But the group’s relative price sovereignty is not anticompetitive in the ways prohibited by antitrust law. Price sovereignty is about counting provisioning costs accurately and transparently in the first place, based on actual need and context. Prices as set by conventional markets, on the other hand, tend to reflect the extra expenses of working within a bloated system: advertising, employee recruitment and retention, complicated value chains of suppliers and middlemen, lawyers, market research, packaging, brand identities, government lobbying, campaign contributions to buy better regulation, etc. All of these expenses are opaque and invisibly folded into prices. By comparison, commoning has a much lower cost structure for which it offers a straight-up reckoning.

One might say that there are two forms of price sovereignty — the ability of a community-governed system to determine prices through its own internal processes, and the ability to assert price sovereignty when trading with the outside market world. The goal in either case is to strive for as much autonomy as possible to insulate the commons from market pressures. By having a commons support a significant part of their subsistence, and by gaining price sovereignty, commoners can selectively trade with markets knowing that such interactions will not jeopardize the integrity of the commons itself. Commoners who, for example, participate in a commons of shareable research or databases, or reap the harvest from a cooperative farm, or live on an urban parcel or acreage held by a land trust, are insulated from the often harsh demands of debt and high prices.

The Linux operating system is another example of a commons asserting price sovereignty in its dealings with the market. Because it is available to anyone at no cost, commercial distributors of branded version of Linux are constrained in what they can charge. Similarly, open access scholarly journals such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) bypass the market entirely, making high-quality, peer-reviewed scientific research available for free. To be sure, PLoS journals rely on public funding to pay their costs as open access periodicals, but the point is that they have the price sovereignty to charge whatever price they want, including no price. This has put pressure on commercial journal publishers to offer their own open access journals (which, however, often charge excessive upfront author’s fees to publish works). Open access journals can succeed by out-cooperating commercial journals.

* * *

Once commoners pool their resources, should they Share, Divide Up, or Mutualize them? Each has different implications, but in general, any of these approaches is likely to reduce individual costs. Each is also more likely to meet people’s needs while developing a sense of co-responsibility for the entire provisioning process and its impacts. To summarize this discussion, here is a chart showing the different ways of allocating resources in a commons.

* * *

General types of allocation on Commons

General types of allocation in a capitalist market economy

Use Convivial Tools

The term “convivial tools” was introduced by the social critic and philosopher Ivan Illich in his 1973 book Tools for Conviviality, which described a vision of a world in which a community of users develop and maintain their own tools. Using convivial tools — a term that we extend to technologies, infrastructures, and processes for provisioning —
is about enhancing our individual freedom while enriching our relationships and interdependence — the essence of a commons.

Use Convivial Tools

Many contemporary tools and technologies are closed systems that lock us into their particular way of performing a task. Think of a factory assembly line, genetically modified crops, or an encrypted DVD. Such systems structure how we are allowed to work and relate to others, while making us dependent on control-minded corporations or state bureaucracies. By contrast, convivial tools are open-ended systems that anyone can use and adapt for their own purposes, in their own ways. As Illich explains:

Tools foster conviviality to the extent that they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action.22

Techniques for stable, eco-responsible agriculture such as permaculture and agroecology are convivial tools because anyone can use and share them, and contribute to their improvement. GMO seeds that have been genetically engineered and patented, by contrast, can only be used as mandated by the corporate owner. A free or open source computer operating system such as GNU/Linux can be used, shared, and modified however a person wishes, whereas Microsoft Windows® and Apple’s iOS® prohibit users from even looking at the source code of the program without permission. Convivial tools invite creative adaptations in a myriad of contexts. They deepen connections among people and with the Earth. They help bring about small, incremental, and socially appropriate solutions to problems. People can use them to escape institutional systems that inhibit our humanity and create dependencies.

The social character of our tools and technologies matter because, as Illich wrote, “Any individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image.” Ultimately, the tools we use shape the kind of society that is possible. “The result of much economic development,” writes Illich, “is very often not human flourishing but ‘modernized poverty,’ dependency, and an out-of-control system in which the humans become worn-out mechanical parts.”23 This dynamic is reaching alarming new extremes as a new surge of artificial intelligence technologies reach into our family life, households, personal health, and consciousness.

In our times, open source tools and technologies are convivial tools with great potential for Provisioning through Commons because users can determine how they will be used. They are open, accessible, modifiable, and shareable based on user wants and needs.24 Convivial tools allow for many applications, some very different from the originally intended use.

Rely on Distributed Structures

There is no inherent reason that commons cannot work at larger scales, as we have seen with countless networked communities that rely on internet platforms. Making a commons grow, however, requires not only political support, but also discrimination-free structures and infrastructures that make commoning easier. People must have fairly simple means to participate and give their consent, and systems must be devised to engender social trust, shared purpose, and coherence. Such (infra)structures need to be available for distributed use, when possible — 
e.g., peer-to-peer (open source software), team-to-team (Buurtzorg neighborhood home care), or node-to node structures (FairCoop). This means that the (infra)structures should enable peers, teams, and local nodes to interconnect and form semi-autonomous spheres of self-provisioning and -governance. Each part of the whole can then operate semi-autonomously, according to its own distinct rules and situational needs, while also coordinating with their other semi-autonomous peers.

Distributed structures differ from decentralized structures in that the latter are connected to central hubs whereas the former are interconnected peers (or teams, groups, nodes, or local commons) that relate directly to each other through a network or a federation, without a central hub.25 Distributed structures tend to behave more autonomously and enjoy greater self-determination. This helps prevent the consolidation of political power and render coercive, command-and-control authority systems unnecessary, but it does require initiative, creativity, and self-responsibility. Decentralized structures usually relate to a more authoritarian central body (municipality to states to a national government; franchisees to the corporate headquarters) and thus cede some of their autonomy, imagination, and potential to it.

In modern times, many institutional infrastructures and tools — law, bureaucracy, the internet — have been used to enlarge the size of stable, functional groups. While this has enabled the creation of modern institutions, it has also facilitated the centralization of power at the expense of individual participants and local knowledge. The challenge, then, is to transform and adapt modern institutions so that they can support human empowerment and conviviality.

Can the commons coordinate large numbers of people across large geographies while retaining a convivial human scale? The answer is yes, but this generally requires some infrastructure to enable partici­pants to reap the advantages of both distributed self-determination and larger-scale cooperation. This is essentially how many transnational projects are now operating. Examples include the Wikimedia Foundation’s funding and coordination of more than a dozen quasi-
autonomous wiki projects with commoners dispersed around the world; major open source software communities whose foundations and shared platforms enable small armies of programmers to show bottom-up initiative; and citizen-led movements such as the Transition Towns, and open design and manufacturing, which function at local scales yet coordinate across political jurisdictions.

The goal in each case is not to consolidate management through a central body, but to enter into a process of Emulate & Then Federate using digital networks. Power and creativity can then be dispersed locally or regionally while retaining important elements of large-scale coordination.

Creatively Adapt & Renew

Modern industrial culture has placed such a premium on “innovation” —
fueled in large part by an endless quest for competitive advantage — that innovation is often seen as an absolute good in itself. In such a world, its general goal is to help businesses prevail against competitors in the marketplace, improve return on investment, and entice consumers to buy an endless stream of “new and improved” products. By contrast, the commons as a system of provisioning is often considered backward, premodern, or tribal — ways of producing things that are seen as static, stodgy, and not innovative.

This is a gross caricature if not untruth because many commoners are extremely capable of adapting to changing needs, including the need to reduce one’s ecological footprint. In a commons, there is no imperative to constantly expand production and profit, and so creativity can be focused on what really matters — ameliorating quality, durability, resilience, and holistic stability. Innovation need not be linked to boosting market sales and ignoring planetary health. Countless commons exhibit the pattern of Creatively Adapt & Renew as part of their everyday activity.

As Eric von Hippel shows in his book Democratizing Innovation, all sorts of practitioner-communities — bicyclists, hang-gliders, skiers, extreme sports buffs — have developed breakthrough ideas that were later commercialized by conventional businesses.26 Indigenous peoples, too — long considered fixed and traditional in their ways — have shown immense creativity over the centuries in co-creating robust ecosystems through seed-breeding and animal domestication. The fertile soil in the Amazon region known as terra preta do indio — “dark earth of the Indians” — writes political economist James Boyce, “is not a random anomaly, but rather a deliberate creation of Indigenous farmers who long ago practiced ‘slash-and-char’ agroforestry in the region. A noteworthy feature of terra preta is its remarkable capacity for self-regeneration, which scientists attribute to soil microorganisms.”27 Such practices can also be seen in the creation of gravity-fed acequia irrigation in the upper Rio Grande valley, which transformed the semi-arid region into a rich landscape of wetlands, cultivated fields, and riparian corridors that allowed many animal species to flourish. The ETC Group, an organization that studies technological innovation, has called such creativity “Indigenous innovation” and “cooperative innovation”28 because Indigenous peoples have made countless ethnobotanical and ecological discoveries that transnational corporations have later sought to appropriate for free and privatize (“biopiracy”).

Commoners survive through creative adaptation and renewal. It is in their blood. They habitually have to make do with what is available and improvise. Among peasants and poor people in India, there is a word for such innovation — jugaad — the Indian practice of slapdash innovation from whatever is at hand.29 Creative adaptation, in truth, is a part of the human condition. Struggle and need induce creativity as a matter of survival.

* * *

The patterns of Provisioning that we have described here are dynamic and alive — which means that new configurations of commoning often emerge. One of the most salient in recent times is the rise of what many call cosmo-local production. People share “light” knowledge and design via peer-to-peer learning and the internet, but build “heavy” physical things such as machinery, cars, housing, furniture, and electronics locally. In the peer production community there is a saying, “If it’s light, share it globally — if it’s heavy, produce it locally.”

This phenomenon is taking many forms. Imagine a Cuban farmer working with peers from India and Peru to figure out ways to improve rice yields, a routine practice among farmers associated with SRI, the System of Rice Intensification. Or imagine designers in Amsterdam working with engineers and architects in Australia and the US to design low-cost, modular housing that anyone can build with local supplies. This is now a working norm among participants in the global Wikihouse network. There is a long tradition of cosmo-local cooperation in agriculture, as seen in such networks as Campesino a Campesino. This is an international mutual aid project that peasant farmers started in Guatemala in the early 1970s as a self-help alternative to multinational development interventions.30 Or consider Masipag, a nonprofit partnership between resource-poor farmers and scientists at research institutions around the world, devoted to breeding and cultivating locally adapted seeds.31

In recent years, digital technologies have greatly empowered global collaborations that have local outputs. Global communities of designers, engineers, and programmers are collaborating online to develop design prototypes for everything from farm equipment (tractors, wind turbines, rototillers and soil pulverizers, compressed earth block presses for brickmaking)32 to high-end scientific microscopes (OpenSPIM)33 to sailing robots to detect ocean pollution (Scoutbots).34 All of these machines are licensed to be shareable, open source style. This means that any farmer, scientific researcher, or curious amateur can take advantage of world-class innovation by building their own tools less expensively using modular, adaptable, locally sourceable materials.

Open Source Ecology is one such project that designs diverse non-proprietary types of farm equipment and machinery that can be locally produced. The project started in 2003 in the USA and now has local hubs in Germany, Guatemala, and other locations around the world. An array of architects, engineers, and designers with the WikiHouse project have developed an “open source construction kit” that is akin to “a big IKEA kit for your home that is easy to assemble and affordable.” In a similar vein, the Open Building Institute, an offshoot of Open Source Ecology, builds low-cost, modular houses that are ecological and energy-efficient using techniques that are open source, convivial, and distributed. These remarkable forms of “cosmopolitan localism,” as Wolfgang Sachs puts it,35 could not work without convivial tools.

The same dynamics of cosmo-local provisioning can be seen in the Wikispeed project, which is building a next-generation mail delivery vehicle and taxi cab, among other vehicles, using open source principles at a global scale. Also notable is Arduino, a global open source community that designs easy-to-use hardware and software systems for 3D printing, education, wearable computing, and Internet of Things applications, among other tasks.

Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation and a leading theorist of peer production, divides cosmo-local production into three distinct stages: input, process, and output. The input (resources, talent, creativity) comes from voluntary contributors who do not have to ask permission to participate. They can use “open and free raw material that is free of restrictive copyright so that it can be freely improved and modified,” writes Bauwens.36 The process is an open, peer-production system that is designed to be inclusive. There are “low thresholds for participation, freely available modular tasks rather than functional jobs, and communal validation of the quality and excellence of the alternatives,” Bauwens explains.

Finally, the output is licensed to ensure that the value generated by the commons will be available to all — again, without permission. Commonly used licenses include the General Public License for software, Creative Commons licenses for various forms of content, and the Peer Production License. The commons that the peer community creates is used, in turn, to create a new layer of open and free material that can be used for a next iteration. In general, open global design combined with local manufacturing has profound implications for potentially reducing the material throughput in the production process and especially the energy required for transportation. The authors of a 2017 report argue that “mutualization and relocalization” are “answers to the problem of nonrenewable materials.”37

Part III:
Growing the Commonsverse

Introduction

We have come a long way. Part I explained the importance of an OntoShift for understanding the insurgent power of the commons, and how language is an indispensable tool in helping us shed archaic understandings and cultivate commons-friendly perspectives. Then, in Part II, we introduced the Triad of Commoning as a way to explain how people can enact commons by emulating existing patterns of social life, peer governance, and provisioning. These first six chapters give us a fairly solid grasp of the dynamics of commoning. They explain how — within a commons — people can produce a world that is free, fair, and alive.
But as capitalism teeters under the weight of its own contradictions, leading to such existential crises as climate breakdown, economic inequality, and violent nationalism, an obvious question on the lips of most people is, how can the Commonsverse grow larger and transform the political economy and culture? How can we achieve changes in state power, law, and policy based on a commons approach? These questions are the focus of Part III.
It turns out that patterns of commoning, especially of peer governance, are crucial not only within a commons, but equally in handling relationships among commons. At both levels, it is important to Bring Diversity into Shared Purpose, Assure Consent in Decision Making, and Share Knowledge Generously, among other patterns identified in the Triad of Commoning. However, as commons grow and spawn a varied ecosystem of players, a new set of complications arises. Each separate commons must learn to connect and coordinate with others based on the commons ethic described in Part II. This requires new forms of cooperation not just within commons (the “micro” level) but in the spaces among individual commons (the “meso” level) and in complicated struggles and negotiations at the societal level (the “macro” level). This tripartite division of levels is too tidy a description because the dynamics at each level are all intertwined. It is nonetheless a useful way of conceptualizing how commons fit into a larger societal context.
Four strategies are particularly important. First, commoners must learn how to Beat the Bounds of their commons to prevent enclosure and/or reclaim privatized wealth. This is a basic survival imperative. Beating the bounds, you may recall, is the practice used by many English villages of walking the perimeter of their land to identify any fences or hedges that had encroached upon their shared wealth. In our times, beating the bounds may initially involve direct action resistance and civil disobedience against enclosures, and attempts to “de-enclose” them. The point of beating the bounds is to restore some measure of commoning with respect to land, water, seeds, code, creative work, and culture, and to restore the integrity of the community. Such tactics may be followed by longer-term strategies such as enacting laws, developing technological safeguards, or adopting protective social traditions. Institutional stability and legal security are fundamental.
But this is only a start. As the number of commons in a given field of endeavor increases, it is important for commoners to Emulate & Federate to build more integrated, collaborative networks and shared infrastructures. That is the approach used by La Via Campesina, the decentralized grassroots movement of millions of peasants, small farmers, landless people, rural women and youth, Indigenous peoples, and migrants and agricultural workers. The movement amounts to a large, loosely connected transnational federation. Similarly, community-supported agriculture farms in Germany (known by the German acronym SoLaWi) have federated as the Netzwerk Solidarische Landwirtschaft, following the growth of CSA farms in Germany from three in 2003 to thirty-nine in 2013 to about two hundred in early 2019. The purpose of the federation is to allow individual farms to trade insights, jointly sponsor research, develop new initiatives, connect commoners and farmers, and write shareable free software specifically designed to meet CSA needs. In digital spaces, there are many collaborations among commons involving free and open source software, Creative Commons licenses, open access scholarly publishing, the open educational resources movement, and open data initiatives, among other free culture projects. Participants in one community of practice keep loose track of advances in other communities, — such as new user interfaces, security protocols, or sharing behaviors — and adapt them within their own context.
These federations, whether organized or casual, do not function as representative bodies in any formal sense. They are shared spaces for forging mutual commitments. They are evolving heterarchies of mutual aid, consensus building, and joint action among commoners. The goal of federations is to fortify the many individual commons while building collaborative ventures such as shared infrastructure, finance, and political advocacy.
Beyond the activities of Emulate & Federate, it is important for commons projects and networks to pursue strategies of intercommoning. This is the process of active collaboration and mutual support to assist and inspire individual projects, make sense of unfolding events, and develop proactive strategies. All that’s needed is an open space in which people who would not otherwise meet can come together to work freely on self-determined agendas: hackers with farmers, for example, or low-income people with makerspaces, or open educational resources advocates with co-housing residents. The process of intercommoning also builds a shared culture, particularly as a new language of the commons takes root.
Why is all this needed? Because the harsh realities of the market/state system otherwise impede the development of commoning. State power is real and dominant, and generally privileges capitalist modes of production and culture as normative. It elevates legal frameworks that honor private property, capitalist-driven market transactions, and contracts among individuals. So if anyone wishes to advance an OntoShift, they must find ingenious ways to deal with some deeply rooted biases of the capitalist economy that are reflected in various structures of state power, law, policy, and socially embedded markets.
This is a formidable challenge, indeed! However, the hardy survival of many commons over the centuries suggests that they are not without their own remarkable powers of creative self-protection and expansion. It’s just that commoners generally do not have the support of conventional law, finance, technology, and state power that players in the market economy take for granted.
The next chapters therefore embark upon a bold quest. We try to imagine how state power and law might begin to support commons in both operational and structural ways. However, unlike many proposals that focus on enacting new laws, regulations, or state programs to change existing market or state structures — a setup for disappointing results — we propose a Grand Strategy that draws its energy and strength from the ontological shift and the patterns of commoning introduced earlier. In other words, politics, state law, and policy will not be the primary drivers of change. Commoning will. A great deal can be achieved right now without having to become embroiled in the compromises, betrayals, co-optation, and legal paralysis of conventional politics and government. This is not to say that politics and state powers can be ignored or utterly avoided; it is simply to declare that commoning must lie at the heart of any strategies for change. Politics must remain a means to an end, and not an end in itself. The best way to avoid the seductions of politics and state power, which have often co-opted leaders and derailed social movements, is to hew closely to patterns of commoning, even in macro-scale endeavors.
A fair question to ask is whether the powers of commoning can truly be transformational. How can we know if commoning can actually provide leverage points for a Great Transition away from state-supported market fundamentalism to something better? Geographer Dina Hestad of the University of Oxford has studied what characteristics must be present for actions and strategies to be socially transformative. She has provisionally identified the following criteria:1

▪ Work towards a vision which reflects the need to live in balance with the carrying capacity of the earth
▪ Consider that change in a complex system cannot be controlled due to uncertainty
▪ Avoid displacing problems to other locations or times, which could prevent wider system change
▪ Tackle the root causes of acceleration and growth — the feedback loops that cause most of today’s ecological and social crises
▪ Work towards systems that avoid unchecked imbalances of power and help avoid triggering humans’ (destructive) ancient tribal circuits
▪ Promote understanding that humans are part of a much larger whole, and create possibilities for resonance and meaningful, affective relationships between people and nature
▪ Develop healthy human agency at individual and collective levels for transforming and co-creating our future
▪ Open up new possibilities for acting rather than shrinking our opportunities to act
▪ Communicate a compelling and inspiring story of system change that names the problems and identifies commensurate leverage points and resonates with people from all walks of life and across ideologies
▪ Promote social cohesion and a sense of togetherness at different levels, which includes trust, a sense of belonging, and a willingness to participate and help
▪ Promote critical thinking, generosity of spirit, and openness to learn from diverse ideas and perspectives

Commoning has a rich potential to meet all of these criteria. Of course, implementation is critical! That is to say, strengthening and expanding commoning from within a market/state polity will be really difficult. But it is entirely feasible. The following four chapters of Part III offers some broad recommendations.
* * *
In proposing ways that state power can support commoning, we hasten to call attention to what we are not proposing. We are not trying to re-imagine the polity. We are not trying to reinvent the nation-state, much as that may be needed. We are not trying to smash capitalism in a traditional revolutionary sense, although of course any advance of the commons diminishes its power and represents an incremental triumph. The commons surely has a lot to say about these challenges, philosophically and politically. But one cannot simply propose a grandiose, long-term agenda and then try to educate others to agree and follow the prescribed insights. That approach ignores the deeper wisdom of the commons, which accepts the idea of distributed, local, and diverse acts of commoning whose very aliveness produces the creativity and commitment to develop solutions adapted to every context.
In this sense, the long-term agenda must be one of emergence through commoning. Our priority must be to grow the capacity to think like a commoner and to grow the Commonsverse as much as possible now, planting seeds of culture, social practice, and institutional power that can unfold in the fullness of time. It is this developmental unfolding of the ethics of commoning that makes it so hardy in the first place. It is this dynamic that we need to honor and develop rather than plunging prematurely or naively into frontal assaults on a highly fortified market/state system, a strategy doomed to fail.
The most natural opening for cooperation between state power and commoners is the local level. In smaller-scale political contexts, government tends to be less driven by ideology or party politics than by sheer practicality — what works? At the local level, politicians cannot so easily ignore needs nor hide behind ideology. Moreover, people at the local level can more easily make their political voices heard and pressure governments to innovate, as seen in the burgeoning “city as a commons” movement in Europe and dozens of urban commons initiatives documented by Shareable magazine.2 It is no accident that the words “commons” and “municipality” share the same etymology with the root Latin word munus, which combines the meanings “gift” and “duty.” Our challenge is to find ways to reinvent this ethic in the larger modern state structures in which we are inexorably entangled. Let’s begin.

Introduction

We have come a long way. Part I explained the importance of an OntoShift for understanding the insurgent power of the commons, and how language is an indispensable tool in helping us shed archaic understandings and cultivate commons-friendly perspectives. Then, in Part II, we introduced the Triad of Commoning as a way to explain how people can enact commons by emulating existing patterns of social life, peer governance, and provisioning. These first six chapters give us a fairly solid grasp of the dynamics of commoning. They explain how — within a commons — people can produce a world that is free, fair, and alive.
But as capitalism teeters under the weight of its own contradictions, leading to such existential crises as climate breakdown, economic inequality, and violent nationalism, an obvious question on the lips of most people is, how can the Commonsverse grow larger and transform the political economy and culture? How can we achieve changes in state power, law, and policy based on a commons approach? These questions are the focus of Part III.
It turns out that patterns of commoning, especially of peer governance, are crucial not only within a commons, but equally in handling relationships among commons. At both levels, it is important to Bring Diversity into Shared Purpose, Assure Consent in Decision Making, and Share Knowledge Generously, among other patterns identified in the Triad of Commoning. However, as commons grow and spawn a varied ecosystem of players, a new set of complications arises. Each separate commons must learn to connect and coordinate with others based on the commons ethic described in Part II. This requires new forms of cooperation not just within commons (the “micro” level) but in the spaces among individual commons (the “meso” level) and in complicated struggles and negotiations at the societal level (the “macro” level). This tripartite division of levels is too tidy a description because the dynamics at each level are all intertwined. It is nonetheless a useful way of conceptualizing how commons fit into a larger societal context.
Four strategies are particularly important. First, commoners must learn how to Beat the Bounds of their commons to prevent enclosure and/or reclaim privatized wealth. This is a basic survival imperative. Beating the bounds, you may recall, is the practice used by many English villages of walking the perimeter of their land to identify any fences or hedges that had encroached upon their shared wealth. In our times, beating the bounds may initially involve direct action resistance and civil disobedience against enclosures, and attempts to “de-enclose” them. The point of beating the bounds is to restore some measure of commoning with respect to land, water, seeds, code, creative work, and culture, and to restore the integrity of the community. Such tactics may be followed by longer-term strategies such as enacting laws, developing technological safeguards, or adopting protective social traditions. Institutional stability and legal security are fundamental.
But this is only a start. As the number of commons in a given field of endeavor increases, it is important for commoners to Emulate & Federate to build more integrated, collaborative networks and shared infrastructures. That is the approach used by La Via Campesina, the decentralized grassroots movement of millions of peasants, small farmers, landless people, rural women and youth, Indigenous peoples, and migrants and agricultural workers. The movement amounts to a large, loosely connected transnational federation. Similarly, community-supported agriculture farms in Germany (known by the German acronym SoLaWi) have federated as the Netzwerk Solidarische Landwirtschaft, following the growth of CSA farms in Germany from three in 2003 to thirty-nine in 2013 to about two hundred in early 2019. The purpose of the federation is to allow individual farms to trade insights, jointly sponsor research, develop new initiatives, connect commoners and farmers, and write shareable free software specifically designed to meet CSA needs. In digital spaces, there are many collaborations among commons involving free and open source software, Creative Commons licenses, open access scholarly publishing, the open educational resources movement, and open data initiatives, among other free culture projects. Participants in one community of practice keep loose track of advances in other communities, — such as new user interfaces, security protocols, or sharing behaviors — and adapt them within their own context.
These federations, whether organized or casual, do not function as representative bodies in any formal sense. They are shared spaces for forging mutual commitments. They are evolving heterarchies of mutual aid, consensus building, and joint action among commoners. The goal of federations is to fortify the many individual commons while building collaborative ventures such as shared infrastructure, finance, and political advocacy.
Beyond the activities of Emulate & Federate, it is important for commons projects and networks to pursue strategies of intercommoning. This is the process of active collaboration and mutual support to assist and inspire individual projects, make sense of unfolding events, and develop proactive strategies. All that’s needed is an open space in which people who would not otherwise meet can come together to work freely on self-determined agendas: hackers with farmers, for example, or low-income people with makerspaces, or open educational resources advocates with co-housing residents. The process of intercommoning also builds a shared culture, particularly as a new language of the commons takes root.
Why is all this needed? Because the harsh realities of the market/state system otherwise impede the development of commoning. State power is real and dominant, and generally privileges capitalist modes of production and culture as normative. It elevates legal frameworks that honor private property, capitalist-driven market transactions, and contracts among individuals. So if anyone wishes to advance an OntoShift, they must find ingenious ways to deal with some deeply rooted biases of the capitalist economy that are reflected in various structures of state power, law, policy, and socially embedded markets.
This is a formidable challenge, indeed! However, the hardy survival of many commons over the centuries suggests that they are not without their own remarkable powers of creative self-protection and expansion. It’s just that commoners generally do not have the support of conventional law, finance, technology, and state power that players in the market economy take for granted.
The next chapters therefore embark upon a bold quest. We try to imagine how state power and law might begin to support commons in both operational and structural ways. However, unlike many proposals that focus on enacting new laws, regulations, or state programs to change existing market or state structures — a setup for disappointing results — we propose a Grand Strategy that draws its energy and strength from the ontological shift and the patterns of commoning introduced earlier. In other words, politics, state law, and policy will not be the primary drivers of change. Commoning will. A great deal can be achieved right now without having to become embroiled in the compromises, betrayals, co-optation, and legal paralysis of conventional politics and government. This is not to say that politics and state powers can be ignored or utterly avoided; it is simply to declare that commoning must lie at the heart of any strategies for change. Politics must remain a means to an end, and not an end in itself. The best way to avoid the seductions of politics and state power, which have often co-opted leaders and derailed social movements, is to hew closely to patterns of commoning, even in macro-scale endeavors.
A fair question to ask is whether the powers of commoning can truly be transformational. How can we know if commoning can actually provide leverage points for a Great Transition away from state-supported market fundamentalism to something better? Geographer Dina Hestad of the University of Oxford has studied what characteristics must be present for actions and strategies to be socially transformative. She has provisionally identified the following criteria:1

▪ Work towards a vision which reflects the need to live in balance with the carrying capacity of the earth
▪ Consider that change in a complex system cannot be controlled due to uncertainty
▪ Avoid displacing problems to other locations or times, which could prevent wider system change
▪ Tackle the root causes of acceleration and growth — the feedback loops that cause most of today’s ecological and social crises
▪ Work towards systems that avoid unchecked imbalances of power and help avoid triggering humans’ (destructive) ancient tribal circuits
▪ Promote understanding that humans are part of a much larger whole, and create possibilities for resonance and meaningful, affective relationships between people and nature
▪ Develop healthy human agency at individual and collective levels for transforming and co-creating our future
▪ Open up new possibilities for acting rather than shrinking our opportunities to act
▪ Communicate a compelling and inspiring story of system change that names the problems and identifies commensurate leverage points and resonates with people from all walks of life and across ideologies
▪ Promote social cohesion and a sense of togetherness at different levels, which includes trust, a sense of belonging, and a willingness to participate and help
▪ Promote critical thinking, generosity of spirit, and openness to learn from diverse ideas and perspectives

Commoning has a rich potential to meet all of these criteria. Of course, implementation is critical! That is to say, strengthening and expanding commoning from within a market/state polity will be really difficult. But it is entirely feasible. The following four chapters of Part III offers some broad recommendations.
* * *
In proposing ways that state power can support commoning, we hasten to call attention to what we are not proposing. We are not trying to re-imagine the polity. We are not trying to reinvent the nation-state, much as that may be needed. We are not trying to smash capitalism in a traditional revolutionary sense, although of course any advance of the commons diminishes its power and represents an incremental triumph. The commons surely has a lot to say about these challenges, philosophically and politically. But one cannot simply propose a grandiose, long-term agenda and then try to educate others to agree and follow the prescribed insights. That approach ignores the deeper wisdom of the commons, which accepts the idea of distributed, local, and diverse acts of commoning whose very aliveness produces the creativity and commitment to develop solutions adapted to every context.
In this sense, the long-term agenda must be one of emergence through commoning. Our priority must be to grow the capacity to think like a commoner and to grow the Commonsverse as much as possible now, planting seeds of culture, social practice, and institutional power that can unfold in the fullness of time. It is this developmental unfolding of the ethics of commoning that makes it so hardy in the first place. It is this dynamic that we need to honor and develop rather than plunging prematurely or naively into frontal assaults on a highly fortified market/state system, a strategy doomed to fail.
The most natural opening for cooperation between state power and commoners is the local level. In smaller-scale political contexts, government tends to be less driven by ideology or party politics than by sheer practicality — what works? At the local level, politicians cannot so easily ignore needs nor hide behind ideology. Moreover, people at the local level can more easily make their political voices heard and pressure governments to innovate, as seen in the burgeoning “city as a commons” movement in Europe and dozens of urban commons initiatives documented by Shareable magazine.2 It is no accident that the words “commons” and “municipality” share the same etymology with the root Latin word munus, which combines the meanings “gift” and “duty.” Our challenge is to find ways to reinvent this ethic in the larger modern state structures in which we are inexorably entangled. Let’s begin.

7. Rethinking Property

To visit downtown Florence these days is to walk amidst dozens of lovingly restored fourteenth- to eighteenth-century buildings and public squares, the Galleria dell’Accademia containing Michelangelo’s statue of David, the priceless art of the Uffizi Museum, overpriced cafés and gaudy souvenir shops pandering to tourists. But look more closely, right behind the apse of the Carmine church, on the other side of the Arno River, where the Renaissance began, and you will discover the last part of the old town that has not yet been turned into a Disneyland of the Renaissance.
This neighborhood, the San Frediano parish, is only a few steps away from the world-famous Ponte Vecchio. Even though it is within an area of gentrification, a startled visitor who stumbles across the Nidiaci Community Garden will encounter, especially in the afternoons, a leafy oasis filled with energetic, noisy children and their parents. Rambunctious six-year-olds race around the grounds and play on swings while their older brothers take lessons with the city’s only self-managed soccer school, “The Lebowskis.” On certain days, a Portuguese musician who lives nearby teaches violin to children. On other days, a British writer teaches English in a studio space on the grounds. Families organize free swaps of outgrown children’s clothes. Some residents tend to a small vegetable garden. Others have organized a project to monitor city pollution and traffic.
This space of togetherness, tucked away in a corner of the central city, is stewarded as a commons. Its use “depends on what people decide to put into it,” as Miguel Martinez, an amateur historian of the Nidiaci garden put it. “It’s hard to say what we are doing there, because everything depends on what new arrivals want to create.” But in a neighborhood in which about forty percent of the children come from families born abroad, simply having a space to common is no small blessing.
How is it possible, you might ask, that this beautiful spot in the center of Florence — easily worth more than several million dollars on the real estate market — has not yet been sold to the highest bidder and turned into condos? How is it that a group of neighbors actually stewards this space? When we went looking for answers to these questions, we learned a great deal about how property law can be used for more than the buying and selling of real estate; it can be used to help people lead a more satisfying community life.
The land now occupied by the Nidiaci Community Garden has a long and complicated history of ownership. It was originally donated to the Carmelite church by a widow in 1273, nationalized by the Napoleonic mayor of Florence in the nineteenth century, and later sold to a private owner. What started out as a private donation to the church became public property before becoming private property again. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the land was again sold to two individuals, one of whom rented it to the municipality of Florence for use as an elementary school.
Then, something critical happened. Although the details are murky, the owner of the land in 1920, the head of the American Red Cross mission in Italy, Edward Otis Bartlett, donated it to a trust charged with using the land “for popular education, with special attention to children.” Ownership of the property was now tied to a social mission, providing a play space for children. In 1954, after trusteeship of the land had passed to another generation, most of the land was donated to the municipality of Florence, becoming public property once again. But because legal documents declaring the intended social uses for the land were lost or never kept in the first place — and perhaps because the later generations of trustees had commercial intentions for the land — city authorities had allowed a building and part of the garden to fall into the hands of real estate investors, who then tried to build luxury apartments and a parking lot on the site.
Thanks to some dogged legal sleuthing by neighborhood residents in the 1990s, a document from the 1920s was found showing that the land was supposed to be managed for the benefit of children. Families of the San Frediano district mounted public protests in 2011
to try to restore the trust but failed. However, the city — eager to save money and stung by neighborhood protests — agreed to let residents manage the garden themselves, at their own risk, expense, and responsibility. A neighborhood association was formed to sign a legal convention with the city to keep the space available to people, without cost to the city administration. It resembles similar agreements for other neighborhood gardens in Florence in which residents were authorized to act as custodians of the gardens. But the city government retained the right to revoke access at any moment through an unappealable decision. Commoning at Nidiaci Gardens can continue, but it remains legally vulnerable — the fate of countless commons around the world.
* * *
There are thousands of such stories of people trying to find legal protection for their commoning. The stories are different, but tend to be similar in at least two respects. First, legal forms matter because they privilege certain uses of the things around us and certain social relations. And second, the social reality of commoning must precede any property forms. The recovery of the Nidiaci Garden happened in the first place only because neighborhood residents organized to press for appropriate legal and political solutions. Legal forms matter because, as we see in the Nidiaci Gardens history, a trust can be a better legal vehicle than state property for advancing the goals of the donor and neighborhood residents. Even though the Nidiaci commoners prevailed in one sense (commoning is now possible there), they came to understand that there was really no suitable form of property law to protect the social relations they wish to cultivate.
This is usually the case. Commoners routinely must rely on “alien” legal forms to protect their shared wealth and community culture. For example, software programmers who wanted to assure that their code could be shared and modified by anyone — free and open source software — discovered that they had to engineer a “legal hack” on copyright law, which is normally used to turn creative works into private property. (More on this on pp. 258–260.) When American entrepreneur Douglas Tompkins wanted to preserve more than two million acres of wilderness in Chile and Argentina, there was no legal instrument to manage it as a commons. He had to buy the land as private property and donate it to a private land trust, which later gave the land to the governments of those two nations to administer as public property. Sometimes a group of farmers may make a local diner their favorite hangout, or bikers and football fans in a given city will make a certain bar their favored place. But the owners of such private commercial establishments may have their own ideas about to manage these de facto social commons, perhaps leading to tensions between the property owners and the users.
As these examples suggest, property law and commoning are not generally made for each other. That’s more or less the problem that Nidiaci commoners faced: they were not able to acquire clear title to the land or secure a legal vehicle that recognized their vernacular practices. But they got lucky — they were able to work out a deal that lets them use and peer-govern the space for children and families. They secured the municipal government’s legal permission, and for the purposes of commoning, that was enough, at least in the short term. But it is certainly not a reliable legal solution over the long term. Faced with existing frameworks of property law, commoners who wish to legalize their Peer Governance may have little choice but to attempt to creatively modify the law or turn to political pressure, social organizing, or civil disobedience.1
This should not be surprising. Guardians of the dominant economic and social order naturally see property law as an instrument to advance their interests. When early capitalism enclosed the commons and overrode customary practices, writes historian E.P. Thompson, the “political economy aided and abetted the law.”2 Property law was an essential tool of dispossession. In our time, a similar dynamic is at work, as we see in copyright laws that lock research away from the scholars who produced it, patent laws that prohibit farmers from sharing seeds, and large corporations that ravage local landscapes to extract fossil fuels. As the great political scientist and philosopher C.B. Macpherson once wrote:

For when the liberal property right is written into law as an individual right to the exclusive use and disposal of parcels of the resources provided by nature and of parcels of capital created by past work on them, and when it is combined with the liberal system of market incentives and the rights of free contract, it leads to and supports a concentration of ownership and a system of power relations […] which negates the ethical goal of free and independent individual development.”3 (emphasis in original)

In short, the combination of property law with capitalist markets and state enforcement of contracts has created a powerful narrative of freedom — but a freedom that is mostly reserved for owners. If we really want to be free, and we wish everyone to enjoy that possibility, we need to rethink property.
This is a very large and complicated topic, of course. It is not easy to imagine how we might subordinate property rights to the needs of our society and ecosystems, reversing the power of tradeable property to dictate terms for nearly everything. Chapters Seven and Eight are devoted to this ambitious challenge. We start by rethinking some fundamental dimensions of property that have long been neglected or ignored, but which have great importance to commoning. Then, in Chapter Eight, we explore the possibilities and ways of relationalizing property. The point is not to abandon property law as such, but to situate the things we use (sometimes known to the law as “property”) in a rich, diverse, and meaning-making web of relationships — social, economic, ecological, temporal.4 The legal concepts of possession, custom, and inalienability are important in helping us rethink the meaning of property.
In rethinking property, it is vital that we understand a basic idea —
property is relational and not just an object. This insight opens the door to a richer, more realistic discussion of how property actually affects us and the world. We also need to recognize that familiar forms of collective property — trusts, coops, partnerships, nonprofits — can achieve a great deal, but they ultimately do not overcome the structural biases embedded in property itself: the right to exclude, the over-reliance on markets, the habit of equating value with price, and the power of owners to dictate how nature and people will be treated.5
In this chapter, we will also clarify why the notion of possession is so important to the commons. In an existential sense, we cannot not possess. But something interesting happens as we possess. As firsthand users of water, land, wood, soil, landscapes, seeds, and much more, we develop knowledge and affection, a sense of responsibility, and situated knowledge about the resource — enough to convert it into care-wealth. Such attitudes are less likely to develop among owners primarily focused on the exchange value of their property.
By focusing on possession, we can begin to think about ways of having that may not be officially sanctioned by legality (as at Nidiaci Garden), but which are entirely functional and effective. Moreover, we can begin to think about how state law might recognize or facilitate these other modes of possessing, collaborating, sharing, and commoning. This mode of having and using is what we call Relationalized Property — a topic we will develop in Chapter Eight.
Finally, we explore why inalienability is critical to any vision of stewardship through commoning. Inalienability is the idea that it is ethically offensive to appropriate and sell certain cherished things. As creatures of the market, we moderns generally dismiss this idea as archaic. But the legal history of inalienability, especially during the Roman Empire, shows how a prohibition on alienation enables all sorts of vital relationships to flourish precisely because limits are set on market activity.
Me, My Freedom, and My Property
It’s no exaggeration to say that our ideas about property express a vision of personhood — one that radiates into the deepest corners of society, affecting our social identities and relationships, commercial dealings, institutional behavior, and treatment of nature. “The premise underlying the personhood perspective,” writes property law scholar Margaret Jane Radin, “is that to achieve proper self-development — to be a person — an individual needs some control over resources in the external environment. The necessary assurances of control take the form of property rights.”6 But property is not just a reflection of our sense of what a human being is; it is a legal enactment of our social relations. A vast market apparatus ratifies and reinforces a culture based on property norms every day. Thus the juridical way that we think about property largely determines the actual social relations that we can imagine and develop. Of course, this happens in other realms of life, too: how we think about “the economy” also determines how we relate to each other.
For the past 250 years, modern, liberal notions of property have been the defining feature of our general archetype of personhood. John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and the other early theorists of the modern state and liberal property rights started with the assumption that the individual matters most, and that everyone is “proprietor of his person and capacities.”7 Most of Western culture has embraced the idea that freedom is “freedom from dependence on the wills of others, … and freedom is a function of possession. Society becomes a lot of free and equal individuals related to each other as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise. Society consists of exchange between proprietors.”8
This modern catechism of freedom anchors the cherished cultural ideal of individual autonomy and individual property. The human being is conceived as an isolated-I with absolute freedom, expressed through ownership. It is a world in which we stand as selves ultimately disconnected from everything else — community, tradition, ethnicity, religion, nature. In such a world, property ownership constitutes an institutional bulwark for the freedom of the utterly autonomous individual. These three ideas — the individual, property rights, and freedom — have become the pillars of free-market ideology and Western civilization. The linkage among the three defines a world in which individual property rights are seen as determining people’s “actual freedom and actual prospect of realizing their full potentialities.”9 Once this linkage was established as the dominant political theory — modern liberalism — it was read back into the nature of the individual as if it had always been there and was not culturally created. It was presented as a self-evident, universal fact.
By sanctifying this vision of humanity, modern property law functions as a massive system of social engineering. It elevates instrumental, commercial uses of nature. It encourages the treatment of human beings as commodified labor and the internalization of such norms as people learn to sell themselves on the labor market. It creates artificial scarcities through copyright and patent law to help create markets that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Property law as it is today systemically privileges the individual versus the collective, self-serving control over relationships, and exchange value over intrinsic or use value. One might say that the very premises of property law dictate these outcomes. This makes it difficult to entertain legal schemes that might reflect a broader array of human values, practices, and social organization.
How then might we inaugurate an OntoShift (as discussed in Chapter Two) and new approaches toward value to achieve a more life-
nurturing conceptualization of property?
Property is Relational
At the very moment we recognize our condition to be that of human beings in relatedness, it becomes clear that the default premise of property law — that everyone is absolutely autonomous and separate from each other and the Earth — is highly problematic if not silly. The three pillars of modern liberal society — 1) the lone individual and 2) property rights as the basis for 3) “contract freedom” — represent a fairly crude, narrow vision of human fulfillment and social order.
If we wish to recognize our actual interconnectedness and take it seriously, we must start to imagine new types of institutional and property arrangements that recognize this fact. If we acknowledge that the libertarian individual as a cultural ideal is a fantasy, then we need to begin to rethink the very concepts of “freedom” and “property” as now construed. We must reassess the idea that boundless individualism is truly liberating, that property rights are the best guarantor of freedom and social well-being, and that we can continue to pursue market growth in a world of ecological limits.
The prejudices in modern thinking about property go back a long way. In his famous 1753 treatise on property, the English jurist William Blackstone wrote, “There is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination, and engages the affections of mankind, as the right of property, that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”10 Blackstone’s notion of an individual as an obsessive, self-regarding owner is something of a caricature, of course. Moreover, he talks as if property were only an object — an idea that has been commonplace in Euro-American contexts. The only relevant relationship raised by property seems to be between a person and a thing, as in, “This bicycle belongs to me. I am its owner.” Because property law privileges the idea of the lone, disconnected individual and property as an object, it has trouble grappling with the relationships that lie at the heart of commoning and, indeed, life itself.
Blackstone’s quote is interesting for yet another reason. He bluntly notes that one is either an owner or a non-owner, which means that property rights create a social boundary in the first place. The statement, “This bicycle is mine. I am its owner,” is more accurately understood as, “This bicycle is mine, therefore I can decide if you can use it or not.” The legal connection between me and the bicycle privileges my entitlements and denies yours. In other words, the legal relationship (property ownership) profoundly shapes and determines social relationships. Property law determines who may decide how the bicycle may be used — if it can be sold, destroyed, altered, co-used, or parked in a garage, and under what terms. Legal ownership determines everything, but particularly, the right to exclude. The way we construct and apply property rights actually reveals much more about us and our relationships to others than about our relationships to the actual thing owned.
There are, of course, some significant exceptions to the unlimited freedom of “sole and despotic” ownership. Owners of land, for example, are subject to zoning laws that restrict how land may be used. Nuisance laws prevent owners from making too much noise or burning leaves. Building codes protect health and safety. And so on. Despite such limitations, the presumption that property rights confer absolute dominion remains the default norm. This idea contains a built-in conundrum, however. In real life, everyone’s property rights cannot be absolute, so there are inevitable conflicts about the scope of one’s rights. These conflicts cannot be resolved through the law alone, but only through politics. What is allowed and forbidden to owners and everyone else is essentially a “policy determination, not a matter of neutral deductive reasoning” by courts, notes one legal commenator.11 Law reflects the political and economic order.
The Federal Republic of Germany’s Constitution, known as Grundgesetz, actually has a provision (in paragraph 14.2) that stipulates, “Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good.”12 The philosopher who provided the main arguments for contemporary property law, John Locke, gives passing recognition to the social implications of individual ownership by stipulating that a property right is legitimate “only if there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.”13 This so-called “Lockean proviso” is an attempt to acknowledge that one person’s property rights may directly affect other people’s lives, but in practice the proviso has been largely ignored.14
As this legal history suggests, highlighting the general idea that property is relational is not that remarkable. It quickly becomes controversial, however, when it comes time to hammer out specific entitlements, their scope and term, and limitations. Then we get to the heart of the matter. We see that property law is not about making a general statement about normative relationships, it is all about enacting those relationships with the enforcement powers of the nation-state. We need to be clear that property law has no content in itself; it is the outcome of politics — a struggle to determine what sort of enforceable meanings “property” will have in law and what its legal disposition will be. In this way law both reflects and profoundly shapes and determines social relationships. Something significant happens when states affirm certain types of social relationships through such property laws as the right to own land, music, water, or images: It becomes difficult to question the moral justifications for ownership. After all, once a sovereign state throws its authority behind certain classes of property, it in effect forecloses any further discussion about the legitimacy of ownership.
This often leads to a disturbing gap between legality and legitimacy, a distinction used by French legal scholar Étienne Le Roy.15 Political and corporate elites embrace formal law, bureaucratic rules, jurisprudence — “legality” — while the experiences and vernacular norms and practices of ordinary people — “legitimacy” — go ignored. Farmers around the world consider it entirely legitimate to save and share seeds, and scholars and internet users generally want to share their knowledge with each other. However, to the guardians of legality, such activities are often regarded as criminal. Property rights must be defended. Legality is thus used to eclipse the Vernacular Law of the commons — the informal, unofficial norms, practices, and customs used by peer communities to manage their affairs.16 In this way, we can see how property is given a higher legal standing than possession, regardless of the legitimacy of the arguments for the latter. Because law has endorsed a certain social order of property through ordained state processes (legislatures, bureaucracies, courts), customary practice, tradition, and possession can be shunted aside as illegal, or at least suspect. Property ownership is lawful, but possession is not accorded the same level of protection.
Wesley N. Hohfeld was an early twentieth century law scholar who popularized the idea that each right conferred by property law corresponds to a “non-right” that afflicts others. Each time the law recognizes a right or a privilege for one person, it denies a corresponding right or privilege to somebody else. Any legal power for one is related to a legal disability imposed on others.17 Or as one property scholar put it: “Legal rights are not simply entitlements, but jural relations.”18 Because property is a complex set of legal relations that govern how people may interact “no person can enjoy complete freedom to use, possess, enjoy, or transfer assets regarded as theirs,” writes Gregory Alexander. And this means that “[s]ome degree of social interference with one person’s ownership interest not only does not negate ownership, it is unavoidable.”19 (emphasis in original)
This insight is more profound than it may seem. Property not only establishes a relationship between a bicycle owner and a bicycle, and between the bicycle owner and non-owners. It indirectly establishes a dense web of multiple relationships — with the people who mined the metal for the bicycle and produced the parts, with the manufacturer and retailer, with the person to whom you may have lent it, with people driving cars and bicycles on the road, and so on. An object designated as property is not just implicated in a complex web of social relations, but also in myriad other relationships such as with a local community, the ecosystem, nonhuman life, and future generations. Property law focuses on the rights of the owner and sometimes the direct effects on others; it is essentially a short-sighted, parochial viewpoint.
The serious limitations of property — the market individualism and societal order that it prioritizes — prompt us to ask: can we come up with different ways of having, that honor relationships of life outside of the market — ones that formal jural relations and property law don’t fully recognize?
This is a difficult challenge because the capitalist economy, expressing a certain configuration of social relationships (competition, exclusivity, etc.), has its own propulsive logic and power that commodifies nature, labor, and money. Property law aggressively tracks and reinforces this very logic, creating a self-reinforcing, self-enclosed cycle. Law both reflects and fortifies the political and economic order. It’s a vicious cycle that must somehow be broken and overcome.
Collective Property as a Counterpoint to 
Individual Property?
Could collective property serve as a vehicle for recognizing a larger set of relations? That is certainly what a broad spectrum of political progressives have sought to do through cooperatives, land trusts, public trusts, foundations, nonprofit organizations, and other legal forms. Within the market/state system and property law, this approach certainly has a logical appeal. It is a way that groups of people try to serve collective social needs over private business interests. This approach has fed the belief that collective property is quite different from individual property. But in truth, they are more alike than different. Individual property means that there is one owner.20 Collective property has two or more owners, or even thousands of co-owners. But in either case, the character of property rights (the ability to exclude, transfer, etc.) is much the same. The chief difference is in the number of owners, not in the nature of the property rights.
What we are suggesting is that collective property is only modestly different from personal property. There is no difference in principle between the two. It helps to realize that the etymology of the word “private” traces back to the Latin word privare, meaning “to deprive.” Individual and collective property rights both authorize the right to deprive, or exclude others from use of the property. But beware of binary thinking: when we point to the commonality between individual and collective property, we are not naively suggesting that all property should instead be open to anybody at any moment, without limitation.
We are suggesting a reconceptualization — that it is possible to reimagine property in ways that limit use, honor social relations, and prevent domination. These are, of course, some essential features of commons. Finding ways to rethink property could help us support commons and reverse engineer the totalizing dynamics of capital. We will return to this topic in Chapter Eight, but for now let’s have a closer look at the supposed differences between private and collective property.
There are significant differences between the ways in which property rights are exercised by one owner as opposed to several owners. Collective property requires at least a common agreement among all co-owners, which itself can be quite complicated. And some forms of collective property such as co-ops, trusts, and nonprofits avoid the structural imperative to maximize profits, in the ways that corporations and businesses must. So some forms of collective property can achieve a great deal of social good despite using legal forms philosophically rooted in an individualist mindset.
Ultimately, however, the potential of collective property as a legal form has limits. It still divides the world into “mine” and “yours” or even “for our group alone” (a “club good,” in economic terms). As a result, even collective property can be bought out by those with more money or sold out by co-owners abandoning their mutual commitments. The owners of a co-op, for example, upon seeing an appreciation in the market value of their assets, may decide to cash out. Or its leaders may decide to turn away from a mission of mutual support and become a market competitor that functions as a quasi-corporation. Or the trustees of a foundation or trust may decide unilaterally to liquidate the entity without regard for the designated beneficiaries.
If we wish to imagine a post-capitalist order that gets beyond the built-in presuppositions of property law and the host culture of capitalism, we will have to look elsewhere. We see two general approaches: a Pre-Property Regime that allows anyone to access and use resources without restriction; and Relational Ways of Having that recognize and support commoning. A Pre-Property Regime is in effect an open access regime or free-for-all. This approach is attractive for the use of knowledge, ideas, and digital code because it establishes open platforms and open exchange, escaping direct proprietary control. However, in the case of finite resources like land, a Pre-Property Regime amounts to a free-for-all that can result in overexploitation.
The following table illustrates the differences between personal property and collective property, and how they differ from a Pre-Property Regime.

TABLA ‘PRIVATE PROPERTY REGIMES VS. PRE-PROPERTY REGIME”

The differences between personal property and collective property are gradual. However, there is a qualitative difference between private property regimes (personal/corporate/collective) and a No-Property regime.
Source: Authors’ elaboration on G.G. Stevenson’s classifications in Common Property Economics: A General Theory and Land Use Applications (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 58.
Relational Ways of Having is a way of using things that lets participants flexibly decide among themselves how shared wealth and social relations shall be managed. This regime moves beyond the presuppositions of conventional property law and its market norms. No single party or faction has absolute legal control over the wealth, and certainly no one has authority to sell it. It is protected from both internal capture and external alienation. This also means that the resource is protected from what we call Governing-through-Money, the capitalist practice of allowing those with greater money to out-govern and control others. This flaw is baked into property law. By presuming that value=money and that therefore more wealth=greater value, the principle of “money rules” is inescapable. It is not only a problem for commoners, but for capitalist enterprises forced to dance to the tune called by the owners of finance capital.
Relational Ways of Having help us realize that there are many ways to steward and deepen the multiple relationships affected by property. This conceptualization helps us see how individual use rights and collective property regimes are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, they need each other! Individual use rights are a key condition for a flourishing collective property regime. Individuals must always have spheres of personal discretion and privacy. To better understand how use rights and collective property can coexist, we need to see the distinction between Possession and Property.
Possession is Distinct From Property
In both common law and civil law systems, possession is what happens when you personally have control over something by (sometimes literally) “sitting on it.” The Latin word sedere, from which the word “possession” derives, means “to sit.” Think about the flat you’ve rented. From a property law point of view, you may possess it as a tenant, but you don’t own it. You cannot give it away, bequeath it to your children, transfer or sell it, or, in legal terms, “alienate” it. You can sell only what you own, not what you possess.
Privileging ownership over possession has far-reaching consequences. It means that the state, in alliance with corporations and investors, becomes the champion of owners. It installs a hierarchy of subordination and capitalist social roles. This can be vividly seen in the history of states sweeping aside Indigenous rights and traditional use rights, installing in their place modern, liberal property rights and the market system.
In the late 1880s, for example, the US Government sought to eradicate Native American commoning of land by imposing a system of private ownership. The Dawes Severalty Act, which mandated this radical cultural dispossession, granted US citizenship only to those Native Americans who took up “residence separate and apart from any tribe” —
i.e., to those who gave up their tribal identities and became private property holders. The prime author of the Dawes Severalty Act, Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, explained that under common ownership “there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization.”21
On countless other occasions, European and American imperialists have repeated this pattern. They have forced Indigenous cultures to surrender their stewardship of inalienable common lands and treat their land as “private property” and tribal members as individuals. Historian E.P. Thompson described how this model was imposed on Indigenous peoples in North America, India, and the South Pacific: “Property in land required a landowner, improving the land required labor, and therefore subduing the earth required also subduing the laboring poor.” Thompson cites a Lord Goderich, who explained in 1831: “Without some division of labor, without a class of persons willing to work for wages, how can society be prevented from falling into a state of almost primitive rudeness, and how are the comforts and refinements of civilized life to be procured?”22
Once again, ownership implies a different social order and set of relationships to the earth than possession. The two are similar in that both provide clear rights of access and use, and neither is “open to all and shareable without restriction.” If you own a flat, you are entitled to sell it or give the key to the person who rents it. If you only possess a flat (because you rented it), you can still determine access rights (you have the key) but are not entitled to sell it.
As this difference suggests, possession is focused on concrete use and use value (which are critical to commoning) while property ownership is oriented toward exchange value. Custom, vernacular practices, ethical norms, sacred places, and historical things are generally subordinated to the rights of owners.23 However, custom, or what we call Vernacular Law, has its own underestimated powers. It commands the respect of large numbers of people, and therefore has a moral authority and political power that the guardians of property law may be reluctant to acknowledge or confront. Vernacular Law also can provide participatory, localized solutions for problems that stymie bureaucracies and markets. We now turn to Vernacular Law as a potential counterforce to the overreaching claims of property rights.
Custom as Vernacular Law
In traditional commons, use rights were not enforced through formal, written law, but through social memory and lively traditions. Community life featured “an annual procession around the boundaries of the village and the lands belonging to it, and a communal drink after auditing the common box (the community funds),” as one property historian writes.

Folk customs were combined with the common pasture. To the peasants, the bell that the village bull wore around his neck on the pasture signaled, ‘the reeve is coming, the reeve is coming!’ (The reeve kept the community’s breeding bull.) On New Year’s Day, the herdsmen blew their horns, went from door to door and sang their song, asking the peasants to give them something — such as their best-smoked sausages. The gifts were considered an expression of the peasants’ esteem for the community employees’ careful handling of their livestock.”24

In all cultures, largely outside the gaze of state law and monarchies, another legal tradition has successfully managed resources on its own terms. It is not driven by the formal logic of state jurisprudence, and some might not even regard it as law because it is unwritten. But certainly the everyday practices, rituals, and ethical norms of ordinary people function as a powerful form of law. Custom is one way that people have sustainably managed themselves and their care-wealth without the centralized, top-down apparatus of state power.
Examples are plentiful. Throughout the world, fishing communities stage rituals to express thanks for the return of the fish. Harvest festivals celebrate and enact the proper ways to bring in the crop. The subak rice farmers of Indonesia have developed elaborate religious rites to coordinate when to irrigate and harvest. Forest commoners agree on ways to monitor for poachers and theft. The scholars associated with the International Association for the Study of Commons have produced hundreds of case studies about similar commons.
Sometimes the state chooses to recognize custom for its own administrative convenience, in effect ratifying customary practices as a matter of law. This can be seen in the ejidos of Spain and Mexico, the acequias for water irrigation in New Mexico, the obştea of common land and forests in Romania,25 the iriaiken for harvesting mushrooms and other natural resources in Japan, and their equivalent in Switzerland, the OberAllmeindkorporation.26 All of these customary commons have existed longer than any state or nation-state in history. The Allmeindkorporationen actually date back to 1114!
Although these forms of peer governance are variously referred to as informal, Indigenous, common, or local, we prefer to use the more general term Vernacular Law. We are inspired by social critic Ivan Illich, who used the term “vernacular” to refer to the living, social character of this mode of law. Vernacular Law thrives in “places and spaces where people are struggling to achieve regeneration and social restoration against the forces of economic globalization,” as one commentator put it.27 Custom as a form of law commands our attention because it can be an effective way for ordinary people to apply their moral sensibilities and practical wisdom to the management of their property, independent of the moral and political logic of the market/state. Precisely because custom defies Lockean notions of property (fixed, based on individual rights, market-oriented), it honors a richer set of relationships among people and the environment. By giving people a way to communicate their existential and affective relationships with rivers, forests, pastures, wild game, and fisheries that sustain them, custom expresses what is meaningful to people. Culture molds itself around natural rhythms. Custom thus can represent a more benign, relationship-based way of having than those sanctioned by modern property law and markets. People’s cherished, tried-and-true practices can be given due respect as a legitimate force in law and governance. Custom can ripen into a functional form of law, and the state may see the wisdom of validating it. The tradition of common law jurisprudence has done this for centuries (while generally subordinating custom to property rights). American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. made the classic defense of customary practice in his famous 1881 essay “The Common Law”: “The first requirement of a sound body of law is that it should correspond with the actual feelings and demands of the community, whether right or wrong.”28
Vernacular Law is valuable because it emerges from the community itself, and can evolve and mutate as new conditions arise. It reflects the sentiments of ordinary people, not the priorities of their elected representatives, political elites, or jurisprudential thought. As Holmes put it: “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”29
The modern world often denigrates custom as backward, superstitious, or inefficient. It sees bureaucratic systems — which purport to be based on scientific rationality, fair and uniform rules, and central administration — as the superior way to manage things. But custom, which mixes celebration and conviviality with the serious work of stewarding a living environment, has its own efficacy and moral authority. The annual beating of the bounds — the village procession around the perimeter of a commons described in the Introduction to Part III — was both a festive event with cakes and beer and a serious assertion of commoners’ entitlements.
Custom can be needlessly inflexible, to be sure, but it generally distills the wisdom of years or even generations of everyday experience in a particular landscape. It reflects a rich legacy of experimentation about what works, what doesn’t, and how people can achieve successful, long-term outcomes. In evolutionary terms, one might say that customs are adaptive because they take account of a multitude of subtle, dynamic relationships. That’s another reason why custom can be effective: it embodies people’s situated knowledge, ethical convictions, and emotional bonds to their land, forests, rivers, and mountains.30
Property law professor Carol Rose calls custom “a medium through which a seemingly ‘unorganized’ public may organize itself and act, and in a sense even ‘speak’ with the force of law.”31 This, indeed, is one reason why the state is often wary of custom: it embodies a moral authority and power that the state powers may regard as a threat. An American court in 1860 rejected the claims of traditional rights, saying that they are “forms of community unknown in this state.”32 Courts have generally declined to recognize custom as compelling because “if a community were going to make claims in a corporate capacity, then the residents would have to organize themselves in a way legally authorized by the state,” explains Rose.33 Despite the desire of politicians and state ministries to supersede and marginalize custom, an estimated half of the world’s arable land is managed collectively by some 2.5 billion people, according to Land Rights Now.34 A significant percentage of these people clearly look to custom as a force in Peer Governance.
Custom as a vehicle of moral authority and practical wisdom poses something of a conundrum for state power: how can it grant formal recognition and legitimacy to social practices that are so deeply informal? Yet the question can also be reversed: can state law enjoy legitimacy and support — and deliver effective results — without recognizing custom? Elinor Ostrom speaks to these concerns with her seventh and eighth design principles — that commoners must have the right of self-organization and that commons must be nested in multiple layers of governmental systems.35
Inalienability: A Crucial Concept for Commoning
While the social practices of Vernacular Law challenge the totalizing logic of property, history has shown the value of a legal doctrine to do the same. The concept of inalienability had its origins in Roman law, and is described in the original Latin texts as “things, the alienation of which is prohibited” and “things with which there is no trade.” The basic idea of inalienability is a prohibition of market exchange. What is inalienable cannot be bought and sold on the market. An inalienable thing cannot be inherited, mortgaged, seized, indemnified, or taxed.
Today, of course, almost everything is subject to almost unrestricted property rights. Virtually everything can be owned. The modern mind has seen fit to make property out of genes, words, smells, and snippets of sound. When combined with the sacrosanct “freedom of contract,” property rights facilitate the constant trading of nearly everything as a way to generate greater (monetized, private) wealth. The market/state enthusiastically encourages this dynamic because it promotes economic growth and tax revenues. In the process, however, trading relationships have an anti-social dimension: they constantly reenact the line between you and me and dissolve the bonds that connect the members of a society.
Surely one reason that inalienability has been such a hardy idea is that it originates as a social and ethical judgment — that it is wrong for some things to be appropriated. People would consider it a violation of community ethics or feelings of the sacred and profound if, for example, someone were to spray paint hateful graffiti in the town square or if religious shrines were used for commercial purposes. Most societies today regard the sale of babies, body organs, sex, legal rights, and votes as morally repugnant. There is a sufficiently strong social consensus that these things have such profound significance that the moral identity of the community itself would be compromised if they could be legally sold. Inappropriability is always a social judgment first, which legal systems later elevate into a legal prohibition. Roman law was endorsing the judgment that ancient places, theaters, roads, rivers, water conduits, and so on, should not be appropriable and tradable in the same way that bread and butter were.
It’s worth pondering the implications of this idea for our time. What if society were to regard certain artifacts as inalienable to anybody in general? What if our property rights did not entail absolute dominion, which includes the right to sell, but were instead limited? What if we recognize that the power of the commons also depends on the fact that, as French legal scholars Dardot and Laval put it, “Commons define a norm of inappropriability.”36
If this were the default legal position for certain realms of life, it would help reverse the damage associated with the alienation of so many things as tradeable property. As economic historian Karl Polanyi documented, the fledgling capitalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries forcibly redefined land, money, and labor as tradeable commodities.37 Polanyi called them “fictitious commodities” because none of them is actually produced for sale. Land is actually a gift of nature that teems with living creatures. Labor is human life itself. Money is merely a token of purchasing power — a means of trade — and not the object of trade, money itself as a commodity. Converting land, labor, and money into tradeable property was a precondition for creating market society.
It is therefore worth emphasizing: possession is not the problem. Tradeability, enacted through property rights, is. So what if we were to reconsider our treatment of land, labor, and money — and, we would add, knowledge — as commodities that can be owned? What if we began to treat them as something that should not be appropriated in the first place or be alienated for market use? What if we were to declare that digital code and knowledge, for example, could not be appropriated for individual use exclusively, but must be available to many individuals, separately and together, at the same time?
Creating protected spheres of inalienability in contemporary life may seem utopian. After all, modern society idolizes ownership. But it is neither far-fetched nor impractical to create zones of inalienability. When Dr. Jonas Salk, a co-creator of the polio vaccine, was asked in 1955 who owned the patent, he famously replied: “Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”38 Salk found it morally repugnant that a life-saving vaccine might be used as a source of private profits and become unaffordable to people who needed it. He therefore entrusted the polio vaccine to the World Health Organization to help assure that its benefits would be made widely available. A different cultural ethic has taken root in subsequent decades, of course, as nation-states grant patents to all sorts of essential medicines, mathematical algorithms, business methods, and knowledge that should be available to everyone.
In New Zealand, an inalienability rule is used to protect the trout population in Lake Taupo. The fishery regulations not only declare a cap on how many fish can be taken — a daily bag limit of six trout — but also a rule making it “illegal to sell or purchase trout.”39 So even though Lake Taupo is full of trout, you can’t eat any of them in local restaurants unless you fish them yourself, as allowed under the “daily bag catch.” You can bring your fish to the restaurant and they will prepare it for you — just as some restaurants in the US without a liquor license allow you to bring your own bottle of wine.
Rediscovering the Power of Res Nullius
Any project to reinvigorate the idea of inalienability would do well to study the history of an important doctrine of Roman law, res nullius. It is revealing that contemporary scholarship has all but forgotten this legal category and its judgments about shared culture. How did this happen? And could something similar to res nullius serve today as an effective legal element for responsible stewardship?
Res nullius had its roots in the early sixth century, when Emperor Justinian ordered a systematic synthesis of all existing imperial laws drawing upon the most important works in jurisprudence. The result, the Justinian Code — or, more formally, Corpus Iuris Civilis which means “Body of Civil Law” — issued between 534 and 528 B.C.E., greatly influenced modern law. The Code partitioned into separate classes the great mass of things that could be subject to property ownership, with different access and use rights for each class of property. (See table below.) Today, while we assume that property ownership falls into two basic categories, public and private, the ancient Romans remind us that there are more. They had a legal classification for personal property rights — res privatae. The state acted as a protector and trustee of res publicae — lands, civil buildings, and infrastructures — and recognized common property regimes, the so-called res communis, for air and water.40 It also declared that certain things known as res nullius cannot be owned.

TABLA ‘LEGAL OWNER/STEWARD VS. OBJECT OF OWNERSHIP/STEWARDSHIP’

Table based on definitions in the Institutes of Justinian.

A question that ought to concern we moderns is why the idea of unownability has virtually disappeared over the centuries. This is hard to say with any certainty, and diving into details and differing interpretations is beyond the scope of this book. But history tells us that when scholars were creating the new Justinian Code, they reinterpreted the original Latin terms used by prior legal scholars.
We can get an idea of how that happened by looking at one legal source, a text by Gaius, the celebrated Roman jurist of the second century. Gaius recognized five categories of property — the sacred, religious, and holy, (yes, three distinct realms!) as well as public and private — which the Justinian Code collapsed into four (see chart above). Why and how exactly this was done is hard to say with any certainty, but the point that is important to us is that new legal categories were invented, and old ones reinterpreted, as the Justinian Code was devised. and the very premises of law were reinvented. In that process, some pivotal shifts in the idea of ownability occurred, especially in distinctions that property law had previously made between things governed by divine law (ius divinum) and human-made law (ius humanum).41 While the latter body of law is clearly based on a social agreement, divine law (also sacred law) refers to any law that was believed to have come directly from the will of the gods (or in other societies, God or the Creator). And what was sacred, part of divine law, could not be appropriated and sold.
But to make matters more confusing, some pre-Justinian legal sources referred to so-called patrimonial things, such as objects of cultural heritage, that could not be sold. These were the opposite of extrapatrimonial things that could become commercial objects. The core of the matter is that things that belonged to the patrimonial sphere, or to divine law (depending on the text you look at), were considered inalienable by definition, and thus illegal to sell.
When the legal scholars assembled the Code of Justinian from such very diverse sources, they had to grapple with two sets of basic classification that existed in parallel — ius divinum/ius humanum in some sources, and patrimonial/extrapatrimonial in others. This obviously posed a problem. The classifications were not only overlapping, they were incompatible with each other. If the scholars were going to construct a single coherent restatement of law, they would either have to abandon one basic set of legal categories or generate a new classification system entirely. It’s as if designers were trying to meld the design logic of one interlocking, modular set of blocks — say, Lego — with a different set such as Playmobil. Within either system, everything fits together perfectly, but the two systems do not work together. This partly explains why the idea of unownability sank into oblivion: the framers of the new code of law could not accommodate the idea of sacredness, which had been attached to the idea of inalienability. The latter therefore lost its previous standing in law.
The process for synthesizing the new Justinian Code took another turn that affects us today. The ancient Romans, smart as they were, had wrapped the idea of inalienability in a “double cover” of protection. Legal historian Yan Thomas calls it a “double modus of being public and sacred,” by which he meant that inalienability pointed to the sacred character of public things. In other words, the Roman concept of “public” reflected a veneration for eternity and the sacred while also signifying something usable by all and publicly controlled in perpetuity.
Over the centuries, this latter idea of the patrimonial has been more explicitly preserved in law than the idea of “the sacredness of the public.” In fact, the idea of the patrimonial was given fresh life in 1982 when the Law of the Sea Convention (also known as UNCLOS III) was ratified. It declared that resources in waters beyond national jurisdiction, such as deep sea minerals, would be regarded as the “Common Heritage of Mankind.” However, it would be a mistake to presume that things considered part of the Common Heritage of Mankind are treated as inalienable and protected. Nation-states make conflicting claims to common heritage resources, and in fact, most negotiations revolve around how they should be exploited, by whom, and how profits will be distributed. Inalienability and protection of our heritage are not salient parts of the conversation.

RECUADRO
The Oceans as the “Common Heritage of Mankind”
In the Law of the Sea Convention, UNCLOS III Article 136 declares the resources in the waters beyond national jurisdiction to be the “Common Heritage of Mankind.” This has meant that minerals on the ocean floor, such as manganese nodules, cannot be claimed, appropriated, or owned by any state or person. Such rights belong to humankind as a whole, with the International Seabed Authority acting on its behalf (Article 137). Despite the ambitious pretensions of a legal concept known as the Common Heritage of Mankind, its actual impact has been disappointing. A close reading of the treaty text makes it clear that ocean “resources” are “only a small part of the international commons,” notes international law scholar Prue Taylor, and that the “freedom of the high seas,” the legal doctrine that allows the freedom to navigate the seas in extraterritorial waters, has not been replaced. The Common Heritage of Mankind idea has sparked neither a legal revolution nor strong United Nations’ support. Even diplomat Arvid Pardo, the driving force behind the Law of the Sea Convention, sardonically noted that the application of the doctrine had been reduced to protecting “ugly little rocks lying in the darkest depths of all creation.” But even this is largely incorrect because even the ugly little rocks on the ocean floor are being exploited. The idea of the Common Heritage of Mankind is a concept we should cherish; it was revolutionary enough that the United States of America refused to adhere to UNCLOS III. But it must be linked to the idea of inalienability and given legal teeth if it is going to actually protect our common heritage.
FIN DEL RECUADRO

The UNESCO World Heritage Convention is a treaty whose primary purpose is to protect the patrimonial, which includes “superlative natural phenomena or areas of exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance” as well as “masterpiece[s] of human creative genius and cultural significance.” Examples include the Serengeti National Park, the historic heart of Cairo, Egypt, and the ancient sanctuary of Machu Picchu in Peru.42
You, dear reader, might wonder why all this ancient legal history matters to us today. How do Roman legal categories help us to rethink property? First of all, they allow us to identify and move beyond legal principles that destroy the commons (such as the idea of property as “sole and despotic dominion”). Equally important, this history helps us recover forgotten legal categories such as possession and usufruct that privilege use over ownership.43 These terms help us more easily name moral and social concerns — heritage, inalienability, sacredness, res nullius — that ought to have greater legal standing. To be sure, the idea of the Common Heritage of Mankind has had a disappointing fate in international law. Still, it remains one of the few instances in which res nullius has been invoked by representatives of nation-states to authorize collective stewardship of shared wealth. An intriguing question is whether res nullius from the Justinian Code might be a versatile legal concept useful for declaring certain things inalienable, thereby empowering commoning.
Property and the Objectification of Social Relations
Here is a basic problem we encountered — much as the Common Heritage of Mankind as a legal concept has been marginalized, so the concept of public also appears to have lost its association with the sacred. It appears as if all legal categories to express inalienability or bans on unconditional appropriability have been abandoned. There are surely many reasons for this neglect, most significantly the rise of capitalist markets and culture. Western industrial societies eager to boost economic growth love to alienate as much as they can — they consider it progress.
There is another tendency that we must directly confront: the propensity to treat formal law itself as a reliable map of social and ecological reality, when in fact, both of those worlds are dynamic and changing. In his amusing book Slide Mountain: Or, the Folly of Owning Nature, Theodore Steinberg explores the silly pretensions of property law to control nature.44 Can farmers have a legal claim against a company that purports to make rain and fails to do so? How can property rights be claimed in land next to a river bend that is constantly eroding and forming elsewhere? Similar questions might be posed about law that asserts fixed social norms and applies formal logic. The problem is, people and societies are pulsating and alive. Values and norms change, such as social support for transgender rights and same-sex marriage.
The dynamic of using law to objectify social relationships seems to be a pattern in the history of modern law. Let us call attention to ways in which the notion of res nullius has transformed over time. The term res nullius is generally used to refer to unoccupied land or natural wealth that is free to be appropriated under the law.45 Res nullius has thus provided an important legal justification for the violent seizures of “unowned” lands through colonization. But there is another category: res nullius in bonis. This term points to realms that it would be legally and ethically wrong to taking appropriate. “Divine law” (ius divinis) made similar prohibitions on taking sacred things. Res nullius in bonis simply indicates that something is truly inappropriable and thus inalienable, now and forever. Why, we wondered, did only the first version of res nullius survive — meaning “things that have not yet been taken” and which therefore may be taken?
It is unclear why and how the legal meaning of res nullius in bonis disappeared over the centuries. Perhaps it has something to do with a cultural reinterpretation of the term res itself. Reading the studies of respected Roman legal historian Yan Thomas, we came to realize that in our times, res is usually translated as “thing.” Before the Justinian Code, however, it was not understood simply as an object or a thing,46 but as an issue to be dealt with or legal matter. The term res always referred to a thing in the context of a legal procedure, and therefore referred more to an affair than to just an object.47 While this may seem to be a subtle difference, it isn’t. This more accurate understanding of res obliges us to take account of particular social and legal realities. In other words, res was not just a matter of “property.” Remember that one of the basic qualitative distinctions before the Justinian Code was between patrimonial versus extrapatrimonial. If the res in question was considered patrimonial (heritage), it could never be treated as property and made tradeable. It would remain unowned and protected, and the legal proceedings could only discuss appropriate use rights. By contrast, something that qualified as extrapatrimonial (commercial) could be taken, occupied, and owned. Res, one could say, was always treated as “something in context.” It did not refer to a fixed, essential attribute of “the thing,” the property itself. It referred to the contested piece of property, but at the same time to its proper social and legal status. This is not a trivial detail. It helps us see that long before modern law began to dominate our minds, the web of relations in which a particular res was embedded was a primary legal concern. Res was not reified, one could say, but referred to a legal affair.
Understanding res or anything subject to property rights in relational terms means that there is no such thing as the natural character of the thing itself that determines the appropriate property rights. This approach is nonetheless still in vogue today. Economists routinely declare that certain classes of what they call goods can be managed only as public property or as private property.48 This mentality can be seen in a classic economics chart that declares the existence of four types of goods — private, public, club goods, and common goods — based on supposedly intrinsic traits of the goods themselves.49
This matrix of four types of property and corresponding governance regimes is profoundly misleading. It quietly suggests that what is actually a social choice inheres in the goods themselves. In other words, the chart reflects a serious ontological confusion — one that is taught to economics students around the world. Standard economics ascribes characteristics to physical resources that are in fact entirely open to social choice and governance. It is neither necessary nor most efficient for a lighthouse to be managed as a public good, for example. Civil infrastructure can often be successfully managed as a common good, as we have seen with Wi-Fi systems (Guifi.net). Digital code need not be treated as a private good or even as a club good; it too can be practically managed as a commons. And so on. The neoclassical monoculture for economic theory has simply chosen to ignore the sociopolitical choices that affect the creation of property rights, preferring to attribute those rights to something inherent in the resource itself.50 It has superimposed its objectivist worldview onto the field of goods, much as the legal profession transmuted a social matter, res, into an object. Despite the efforts of modern capitalism to objectify social relations into property, different notions of property expressing different ways of being in the world persist. Each authorizes or constrains how we may live in the world.
* * *
As we have seen so far, modern property law performs a great deal of social engineering in the guise of “natural, universal” principles. It privileges a distinct repertoire of capitalist/liberal relationships and it precludes, complicates, or even criminalizes other relationships such as sharing. Property law normalizes a worldview that sees human freedom and fulfillment deriving from individual ownership and market exchange. But more convivial, eco-responsible forms of law, and even “relationalized property,” are possible, as we explore in Chapter 9.

8. Relationalize Property

As we saw in Chapter Seven, our thinking about property and the legal categories for property shape the kind of human beings we become. They also shape the kinds of society we allow ourselves to build. We are encouraged to work hard, become owners, and become rich. This may not be especially meaningful or enlivening, but it is certainly a sensible and functional approach in a world that celebrates the competitive, acquisitive, self-serving mindset.
To be sure, a rich spectrum of noncapitalist behaviors — sharing, cooperating, assuming co-responsibility, practicing social solidarity — do not disappear. But neither do they flourish on their own terms. Such behaviors are often patronized as idealistic, innocent, and somehow unworldly. Unless they can be conscripted to serve the interests of property, markets, and capital (even corporate systems require cooperation), they are left to atrophy on the outskirts of the formal economy. It is no surprise that the idea of the commons has been nearly forgotten in the resulting capitalist thunderdome, where Governing-through-Money is the default.
It is beyond our capacity to propose a transformation in property law itself. We have a more modest ambition — to show the feasibility of alternative pathways that Relationalize Property, as we call it. We use this term to point to sociolegal systems that elevate concrete use rights and social relationships over absolute property ownership. As the following five fascinating examples show, it is possible to facilitate other ways of having without falling into the domineering or dependent social roles that ownership generally entails. Our examples explain some of the ingenious ways by which commoners have decommodified access and use rights, which in turn opens up an enlivening range of relationships that are otherwise marginalized or impossible. As we will see, regimes of Relationalized Property make it easier to use things to meet real needs as opposed to maximizing investment returns or asserting power over others.
Decommodifying a Supermarket
To visit the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, New York, is to experience a supermarket that has been transformed to live, breathe, and function instead as a social community. The Coop is a busy, well-organized, and fully staffed operation like most any other supermarket. But this place, in the heart of New York City’s commercial culture (Manhattan is two miles away), feels very different. The Coop isn’t a business that seeks to pander, cajole, and flatter its customers to buy, buy, buy. There is no promotional signage or splashy displays designed to spur impulse purchases. The Coop has a rather simple goal, skillfully enacted: to let people obtain high-quality food inexpensively by “buying from themselves.”
It takes a moment to realize that none of the cashiers ringing up groceries at the check-out counters are employees. Everyone who works there is a coop member themselves — perhaps even a friend or neighbor. More than 17,000 members take care of everything from unloading trucks and stocking shelves to serving up delicatessen meats and cleaning up — without pay. Upon arriving at the Coop, our guide, member Paula Segal, took us upstairs to the welcome desk to get a badge that let us to enter the store. (To prevent free riders, only members can enter and shop at the store, but anyone can join.)
The Park Slope Food Coop is at once a physical building, social institution, and distribution infrastructure. It also serves as a community center, meeting place, and ongoing host of bottom-up democracy for decision-making (without overcoming the limitations of representation or majority rule, however). Since its founding in 1973, the Coop has become a stalwart, beloved community institution in Brooklyn, not just because its groceries are cheaper than those of typical supermarkets. It is a vibrant institution because cooperativists don’t just own the Coop. They enact their ownership directly and have developed a social commitment to its success.
Much of this spirit of Peer Governance and Provisioning at Park Slope Food Coop stems from its organization as a labor cooperative, which is different from a consumer or producer cooperative (often conflated with commons). Each member is required to contribute exactly two hours and forty-five minutes of unpaid work every four weeks.1 This is a key element of the Coop’s success — a pool of more than 17,000 member-owners who reliably show up to work their scheduled shifts each month. The arrangement allows the Coop to slash the single largest expense for a normal grocery store, its payroll, and thereby keep costs to a minimum. Approximately seventy-five percent of the work at the Coop is performed by its members (the rest, around sixty people, are paid staff members). This work does not give members direct cash benefits for time expended (e.g., lower grocery bills for unpaid work), but on average the work performed by members translates into savings of twenty to forty percent off the retail price of groceries. For a family that might otherwise spend $500 a month on food, that is a saving of $100 to $200.
The scheduled workslots are part of a bold strategy to decommodify work at the Coop and cultivate a community ethic. The enterprise is not simply a bundle of market transactions for products, labor, physical infrastructure, and so forth. The Coop is not just servicing members with lower prices. Like Cecosesola in Venezuela (see pp. 185–187), whose below-market prices express its value sovereignty, the Coop is a serious force in taking “some control away from corporations” in the retail grocery market.2 With annual revenues of more than $49 million, the Park Slope Food Coop is in fact one of the biggest food or labor coops in the United States.
The strategy to decommodify labor has been well planned. Near the welcome desk, there is a child care space where members take care of other members’ children while the parents shop, run errands — or, often, while members work their mandatory monthly workslot. Most members fulfill their work commitments as members of “squads” that meet at the same time and place once every four weeks to do the work that needs to be done: packaging spices, bagging olives, cutting and wrapping cheese, answering phones, assisting members, doing administrative tasks in the membership office, receiving deliveries, keeping the shelves and coolers stocked, totaling groceries bills at checkout, bagging groceries, cleaning, and much else. Squad leaders, also unpaid members, take on the extra responsibility of running the squad.
Working on these tasks via squads helps members get to know each other on a regular basis and develop a kinship with the Coop community. Everyone ends up having to make a personal commitment to the Coop’s mission. No member can simply send a surrogate to do their workslot or pay someone, like a nanny or teenager, to do the work. This decision was taken by members at a general meeting, where important decisions are usually taken. The purpose was to “prevent members from paying their way out of a shift and losing the connection to the Coop as working members.”3 If you miss your shift, you can’t shop there again until you work two additional shifts. Members who don’t work or shop at the Coop for a year can obtain an “amnesty” and make a fresh start — but the amnesty privilege can be invoked only once in a lifetime.
Following a visit to the coop, a question that stuck with us was this: why aren’t there more labor coops? Why has this kind of labor cooperative model not spread around the world in the way that “normal” cooperatives have? There are many reasons, but one important answer is that most coops ignore the power of decommodifying work as a built-in feature of their property regimes — as a form, that is, of relationalizing property. Let’s explain: people at PSFC are member-owners, which means that the two roles are deeply and inseparably connected to each other. Whoever joins the Coop cannot be just a member or just an owner; they must assume both roles together. As the Coop’s membership manual puts it: “Membership is defined by a person’s participation in the so-called workslot system, while ownership is defined by your financial contribution. This contribution is officially called a member-equity investment.” It costs $25 to join the Coop — a one-time fee. A $100 financial investment is required as well, refundable upon leaving the Coop.
The real novelty of the Park Slope Food Coop is thus its redefinition of property ownership as a set of entitlements intrinsically bound up with decommodified work for shared purposes. This concept is a simple but ingenious way to Pool & Share (see Chapter Six) in the improbable context of a supermarket. The essential point is that you cannot share in the benefits — inexpensive, high-quality, local food products, free child care while you go shopping, community support and solidarity, and the satisfaction of co-shaping your environment and living conditions — if you don’t pool two hours and forty-five minutes of unpaid work a month. This arrangement is both economically effective in reducing costs and legally clever — it uses cooperative bylaws to define special terms of ownership.
Decommodifying work also changes the terms of institutional life by creating the conditions for people to develop shared emotional ties and community spirit. Property ownership is turned into a social vehicle for meaning-making and building a commons culture. “We studied why other co-ops failed, and in most cases, it’s because they were too dependent on super committed members who eventually burnt out,” Joe Holtz, a cofounder of the Coop, once explained.4 “One of our theories was to try and emulate what retailers do: stay at our place and have deliveries come to us …We decided that if we were to last, we’d have to operate as a real store, with set hours.” In one stroke, the work requirement helps solve the problems of altruistic burnout, high labor costs, and weak community culture.
Why Relationalize Property?
What exactly do we mean by “relationalizing property”? Before moving on to our next examples, let’s pause a moment to elaborate on the suffocating and repressive social implications of conventional property arrangements — to see how relationalizing property can help us slip the shackles of property law to open up enlivening new possibilities.
Property law as we know it has created a social order resembling a puppeteer and puppets. The property owner holds the strings that control the arms, legs, and head of the puppet — i.e., the non-owner. The property owner can jerk the puppets this way or that based on what he believes will be profitable or attractive to him. No wonder we all want to be puppeteers rather than puppets! As we are split up into haves and have-nots, property owners accrue great accumulations of capital and power, and acquire the motive, means, and opportunity to abuse non-owners and the natural world. When property rights are allied with markets, they radically disempower large segments of the world socially and economically.
To relationalize property means to arrange the enactment of use rights in ways that nourish our relationships to each other, the nonhuman world, and past and future generations. People are required and encouraged by design to take responsibility for these relationships and for the common good. Such cultural norms simply can’t take root and flourish within systems of conventional property grounded in the old ontology of Isolated-I’s, dominion, and exclusion. With Relationalized Property, they can.
“Relation” derives from Latin relatus (past participle of referre), which means “bring back” or “bear back.” To relationalize thus implies the idea of bringing something back — something that might have existed before an act of appropriation or market alienation. It essentially means to recognize and honor a wide range of relationships that preexist the ones that modern property law and markets generally impose. Instead, we must design systems that can strengthen a richer, more open variety of relationships through new ways of having.
This bring us back to the idea of affordances. Our ways of having must be able to support a larger spectrum of relationships, behaviors, and culture than is generally permissible through normal property rights and market exchange. Property must be able to support social cooperation, ecological stewardship, and nonreciprocal gifting. Once puppeteers/owners can escape their role in manipulating the puppets/nonowners, a new, more collaborative social dynamic can emerge.
Relationalized Property regimes help us escape the trap of helpless subordination to the wills of others. They recognize our interdependence, which is quite different from the subordination associated with modern property rights. Relationalized Property should not be confused with coercive collectivism, however. If property arrangements in a twenty-first century commons feel like an imposition or a trap, then something has gone utterly wrong. Everyone at the Park Slope Food Coop chooses to become a member-owner and, in so doing, to assume certain shared burdens and commitments. This is of utmost importance, because there is a big difference between voluntarily entering into relations with others and being tied to others. In the case of the Park Slope Food Coop, people join on a fully voluntary basis — and the legal arrangements then nurture these relations. In fact, they are enacted again and again through the specific property regimes. This can hardly be compared to situations where the relationships are formed by necessity or coercion from the very outset. Relationalized Property is about enhancing our range of individual options and enriching our humanity — while minimizing the hierarchical subordination to (or dominance over) others and the associated feelings of distrust and fear.
Individuals continue to enjoy individual use rights, as we have seen in the Brazilian Landless Rural Worker Movement (MST) case in Chapter Five. But those individual entitlements are brought back to and embedded in their very specific circumstances. They are not decontextualized, abstract rights disconnected from obligations towards others holding similar rights. Nor can individuals shirk their co-responsibilities for what is co-owned, co-used, and stewarded. One could call this arrangement a Nested-I approach to property.
The great virtue of Relationalized Property is its ability to open up all sorts of robust relationships that are otherwise stifled or commodified under conventional property regimes. Instead of placing the owner/object (puppeteer/puppet) relationship at the center, which triggers a cascade of harms, Relationalized Property makes it possible for human, social, and ecological relationships to live and breathe more naturally. People can escape the instrumentalist, money-making logic usually associated with property-rights regimes.
Relationalized Property helps align and empower at least six relationships that private property does not. The first relationships are (1) with ourselves, in helping us see more clearly the meaning of property in our lives; and (2) with our peers, in fostering mutually acceptable rights and responsibilities. At least four additional relationships are enhanced — our relationships with (3) lived experiences (memories, traditions, feelings) connected with places and property, which inspire our stewardship of what we love; (4) with other generations, as we honor previous generations and pay forward benefits and respect to future generations; (5) between commons and other societal institutions such as the state and markets; and (6) with the mysteries of the human condition as we search for ultimate meanings. To Relationalize Property means to respect, protect, and deepen these relationships through our use of property — which itself can only be achieved through commoning that negotiates consensual access and use rights.

TABLA ‘SIX KEY RELATIONSHIPS THAT RELATIONALIZED PROPERTY FOSTERS’

In a scheme of Relationalized Property, the familiar bond established by property — between the owner and the owned thing, as if it were only a subject/object relationship — continues to exist. But this relationship, while certainly important, is no longer considered the essence of property. Relationalizing Property is about restoring the legal space for myriad nonmarket relationships to flourish — affective care and customs, the aliveness of land and other natural systems, intergenerational respect. Through a different sociolegal framework for property, we can bring back all sorts of relationships that the modern, liberal understanding of property (dominion, monetized exchange value) has either banished or marginalized.
It is worth repeating, as noted in Chapter Five, that we are not suggesting a novel scheme that exists on a spectrum of property rights, situated somewhere between individual property and collective property. The goal is not to make individual property and collective property coexist in greater harmony as separate, independent realms. It means to say farewell to the argument that one or the other is superior. It means to open our minds to new configurations of use rights and new ways of having that enhance both individual and collective benefits at the same time. Rather than simply “balance” the benefits from individual versus collective property rights, the goal is to integrate the two by design so that both are more organically aligned, minimizing potential conflict. And still, conflicts will arise. Tensions do not automatically disappear through relationalized property. This is why the many patterns of commoning identified in Chapters Four, Five, and Six are so useful: they provide a means or methodology for addressing conflicts in relationship-preserving ways.
When this occurs, care-wealth emerges. Relationships animated by a person’s deep convictions, traditions, and love change how we perceive and experience property. We ascribe certain meanings and significance to the objects of our attention and love. These could be landscapes, sacred objects, heirlooms, or something otherwise regarded as “property.” Artisanal works bear the signs of careful, personal attention that mass-produced goods do not have. The Park Slope Food Coop feels very different from a supermarket, precisely because everyone who works there cares about the place in ways that go beyond the relationships people have as consumers or employees.
In sum, the concept of Relationalized Property reminds us that property relations are not just bilateral relations between the owner and owned thing. They always entail multiple relations — economic, ecological, social, intergenerational, psychic, spiritual, and so on. It is important to recognize this fundamental insight, that all property, all ways of having, and all societies ultimately depend on a living Earth and its dense web of relationships. Recall Thomas Berry’s wisdom that — the universe is “not a collection of objects, but a communion of subjects.”8
A Platform Designed for Collaboration: Federated Wiki
The most important design choice for commons may be to recognize ourselves as Nested-I’s with Ubuntu Rationality. This imperative is especially germane in the design of the next generation of wiki software, the Federated Wiki platform, which is based on the technology that Wikipedia helped popularize. Federated Wiki is a stunning server program that allows individual works of creativity to seamlessly combine into collectively available content without the administrative hassles and editorial disputes of a traditional wiki.
Since its founding in 2001, Wikipedia has proved to be a remarkably robust and flexible way to assemble authoritative, up-to-date knowledge on countless topics, with plentiful space for dissenting and diverse points of view. However, as a wiki designed to let multiple individuals (“clients”) interact with a single wiki platform (the “host”), Wikipedia requires that a moderator or editor make choices about what shall be posted. This can result in editors choosing the least-objectionable content and in disagreements among contributors and even flame wars. In a Federated Wiki, however, every individual user has his or her own wiki site, which can freely draw upon content from countless other Fedwiki sites. This means that all voices can be heard in their rich, authentic diversity. Participants in a Federated Wiki can decide to interconnect their wiki pages into a neutral, shared neighborhood of content, through which a consensus of viewpoints becomes visible.
This shift from the standard wiki to a form of writing based on “one person, one wiki, in a federated environment,” may sound like a step backward from the Wikipedia style of open collaboration.9 But in fact the effect is quite the opposite: giving online platforms to individual voices while bringing them together into a shared neighborhood of wikis results in a richer, more robust commons. We talk from experience: we used Federated Wiki in the course of researching and writing this book.
What does it mean to have and own something in a Fedwiki world? What does it feel like? How does it resemble and differ from conventional ownership? Imagine a huge continent of diverse residences.10 Some have only a few rooms. Others exist within skyscrapers and provide space for hundreds of rental homes with multiple rooms. Some are clustered together as neighborhoods. Others are smaller and more isolated from other flats and houses. These residences are dispersed all over the continent, but there are irregular corridors, pathways, and roads that can potentially interconnect them all. This roughly describes what having a site in the Fedwiki ecosystem is like. Everyone has a flat or a home of their own, but everyone can also be connected to anyone else. I might enjoy and value having visitors at my place, but when they leave it is still my personal space, my protected comfort zone. But unlike my actual home, visitors to my Fedwiki world can decide for themselves when and for how long they want to stay. Because a site is not a physical space but rather a virtual space, anyone can freely draw from the content that I’ve put in my “rooms” and copy it into theirs (the software keeps a record of where the content came from and who gets credit for it). As the developer of Fedwiki software, Ward Cunningham, explains, “I value visitors because I gain from their presence. My gain is not their loss.”

IMG ENHANCED SCREENSHOT OF FED WIKI

It takes only a few clicks to make a flat your own in the Federated Wiki ecosystem. You login and register with your online identity as if you were using the key to a flat you’ve rented. “You login to a site as if you were unlocking the front door of your home,” explains Cunningham. “To possess that key is what confers power over what is within.” This means that on these sites — within your “rooms” — the software is designed to allow only you to add text, images, videos. Only you can write, delete, and edit. However, others can easily draw from and integrate any elements from your site simply by dragging and dropping the desired wiki pages to their own wikis. You, in turn, can draw from their sites — or anyone else’s!
In other words, the Fedwiki software creates protected individual spaces for content generation while facilitating diverse permutations of collaborative authoring on a massive scale. It opens countless paths for individuals to organize their own knowledge while easily sharing it with others, and, what’s more, enabling a commons of knowledge to arise, without the intervention of an editor. To use another metaphor: people using Fedwiki sites are like gardeners or farmers. They can plant as many fields or gardens as they want, and reap the harvest from their own Fedwiki, but anyone else can also use someone’s harvest to enhance their own fields and gardens. Instead of toiling under a regime of private, competitive exclusion, the system encourages cooperative gains through commoning.

IMG TRADITIONAL WIKI VS. FEDERATED WIKI

Whether you work on your own Fedwiki space or join a neighborhood of sites, you keep the control over what is happening on your site. But meanwhile, sharing among sites through federating remains incredibly easy, by dragging and dropping content or forking it into new sites. This is how Federated Wiki sets up a protected space of individual control while nurturing the knowledge commons through a self-directed process of federation.
Consider how this technology design helps us achieve an OntoShift. The Fedwiki platform blurs the supposed duality of the individual and the collective. By design, these two realms in Fedwiki world are integrated in a mutually enlivening way. Having my personal wiki does not contradict or interfere with my contributing to the commons — quite the opposite. This is Ubuntu Rationality at work and a vibrant example of the Nested-I! The default position is that an idea becomes more powerful as it is shared, without the interventions (or interference!) of corporate algorithms (e.g., Facebook), editors (Wikipedia), crowd ratings (Yelp), or other hosts. Federated Wiki creates a digital environment in which whoever contributes enriches others without requiring anyone to give up control over his or her own site. It is like saying: “Come into my home, the door is open. Use what you wish, and don’t worry, you can’t mess up my space.” The Federated Wiki software prevents people from altering your content while still allowing them to “take” it.
But taking someone else’s content does have some strings attached. “We insist that the takers credit our home as the source,” writes Cunningham. Obviously, this is not meant in a literal sense. You won’t discuss or argue, nor send emails, letters, or threats of legal proceedings to others. Within the Federated Wiki environment, the software does it for you: it references any drag and drop or fork back to the source, basically by attaching a colorful little flag in a special shade associated with you. “A home,” muses Cunningham, “defines us while making room for others.”
The mutually nourishing relationship between one’s personal Fedwiki and the Fedwiki Commons is just one remarkable feature of the way ownership is reinvented in this cosmos. If a user decides to connect to the federation, claims to exclusive private control are surrendered and the fruits of collaboration are automatically shareable. (Of course, the user can also choose to retain exclusive control over his or her Fedwiki by not connecting online to the Fedwiki network.) This represents a dramatic re-imagining of the very idea of ownership of content. Instead of making sharing an individual, case-by-case choice (the strategy used by Creative Commons licenses, for example), the Fedwiki platform boldly uses technological design to make content sharing the default. Once a user chooses to use the Fedwiki software, deviations from this default norm, such as absolute private control or stipulated licensing conditions, are not an option.
All content posted on Fedwiki sites is automatically licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license upon publication — meaning that it is “born shareable” the moment someone publishes it, making it available to the federation of sites. The Fedwiki recordkeeping “journal” tracks who has posted what, so authorship can be chronicled even if people make mashups of someone else’s content.11
In the physical world, property law often establishes different ownership regimes for underground minerals, oil, or gas than for surface rights (conventional land ownership). It is common for infrastructure to be treated under one legal regime while the fruits produced via that infrastructure are treated under another one. Ownership rights for a building can be separated from ownership of land, for example, and ownership of website content is considered separate from ownership of the Wi-Fi network and telephone lines upon which the content flows. How layers of property rights interconnect can have significant implications. In most Latin American countries, national constitutions declare that underground minerals belong de jure to the nation-state.12 This legal power allows governments to exploit the resources via state-owned companies or to grant mining concessions to private entities, usually transnational companies. Clearly this property arrangement does not prevent the overexploitation of minerals or guarantee responsible stewardship of the landscape; indeed, it seems to promote highly destructive, neocolonial extractivism. In any case, the idea of regulating surface rights in one way and subsurface rights in another points to the fact that any arrangement of property rights is not self-evident or “natural.” To put it bluntly: there is no logical or compelling reason that those who extract oil or minerals should necessarily have the right to own it. That right is simply a political construct that has been sanctified by law.
Similarly, at one time landowners not only owned their plots of land but also the air rights reaching up to the sky, which legally meant that airplanes were violating private property rights.13 The principle followed the Roman legal maxim known as cuius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et ad infernos — “whoever owns the soil, it is theirs all the way to Heaven and all the way to Hell”14 — a principle that Blackstone reaffirmed centuries later, declaring that property ownership extends to “an indefinite extent, upwards as well as downwards.”15 Over the centuries, however, this idea has been radically curtailed, usually to augment the power of states and corporations. In other words, the interconnections among legal regimes are a potential zone of political struggle.
That is more or less what the Federated Wiki platform has overcome via an organic interconnection among legal regimes while relying on distributed structures. It has cleverly rearranged layers of property rights —
indeed, transcended them, in a fashion — as a way to promote commoning. “We distinguish owning and operating a server16 from owning and operating a site,” explains Ward Cunningham, noting that content is strewn across many web servers. Digital content is widely distributed and therefore largely beyond the control of any single server owner. In addition, as mentioned, the platform software privileges and empowers the sharing of content as a built-in feature. This, along with the required use of Creative Commons licenses, also helps move content beyond the reach of private property.17 The Fedwiki platform creates a space of creativity and culture in which the messy tangle of copyright law is functionally moot. Fedwiki empowers users to preempt outside legal challenges for control and to assert greater sovereignty themselves, on their own terms.
The Fedwiki commons does have one vulnerability to outside control that it has not, as yet, been able to evade: the authentication of digital identity. Because of the complexities of providing a commons-friendly alternative, Cunningham and his colleagues have relied on the identity systems developed by Google and Facebook that function as a default for many sites on the internet. This choice is understandable. It is technically complicated and expensive to create digital systems that can reliably authenticate that a self-identified person really is that person and not an impersonator or criminal. For the time being, this makes Federated Wiki vulnerable to the commercial power of the two tech giants, but this deficiency may be remedied in the future.
Nonetheless, we have seen how Fedwiki represents a new type of network platform that sidesteps the domination/subordination dynamics of conventional property. In this sense, it is a lodestar that holds lessons and inspiration for future commons-based innovation. It is possible to devise distributed, commons-based alternatives to the highly centralized and capitalized platforms that foster social polarization, user manipulation, privacy invasions, and concentrated political power. The presumption that private property (copyright, patents) is the only way to order online behavior and spur innovation is simply false. Interestingly, the core idea enshrined in the design of Federated Wiki is similar to the design of many monasteries, as discussed in Chapter Five, in providing supportive environments for collective life while also protecting personal choice.
Using law to balance personal rights with community needs and the common good is possible not only on digital platforms, but in our analog physical environment as well, as we now see in the case of the Mietshäuser Syndikat in Germany.
Neutralizing Capital in the Housing Market:
The Mietshäuser Syndikat Story
In cutthroat real estate markets dominated by ruthless investment banking, speculation, landlords, and apartment management firms, it may sound unlikely that we could carve out successful commons for housing. Yet that is precisely what Mietshäuser Syndikat has pioneered in Freiburg, Germany, a lovely scenic town at the southern edge of the Black Forest, before expanding throughout Germany and adjacent countries. Mietshäuser Syndikat is a federation of housing commons that has been operating since 1987. Its name, which translates roughly as “syndicate of rental apartment buildings,” conveys its basic mission — to help develop a commons federation of residential real estate peer-managed by residents. People own the buildings but at the same time individually pay rent to themselves and to the federation to keep the whole system going.
In societies where virtually all real estate is considered private property to be used for capital investment and profitmaking, the achievements of Mietshäuser Syndikat are remarkable. “Actually, we should not even exist [according to standard economics],” declare the syndicalists,18 “because our basic approach violates the rules of the market.” This is why the experience is so refreshing: dozens of Mietshäuser Syndikat projects are thriving and people enjoy living in them, yet no one fears that the market will force them to sell their apartments or that the syndicate will sell the buildings and evict people (it can’t). Over the past thirty years, Mietshäuser Syndikat has removed more than 130 rental buildings from the real estate market. This has made permanently affordable, collectively owned housing available to more than 2,900 ordinary people. Between 2013 and 2015, the syndicate nearly doubled in size, from fifty affiliated housing projects to ninety-five. By the end of 2018, 136 projects were associated with Mietshäuser Syndikat and another 17 were interested in joining it.
To newcomers, the housing syndicate appears like a hodgepodge of very different rental housing projects. Its holdings scattered across Germany — and now, beyond the nation’s borders, in Austria and the Netherlands — include a project for senior women, commercial buildings, a large apartment building for single parents, and a converted former military barracks that now houses more than two hundred people. However different in shape, location, and size, each project represents an attempt to decommodify the land, buildings, and individual apartments that people need.
“The idea of organizing buildings and real estate as commons is nothing new,” writes Stefan Rost, an organizer of the Freiburg project, citing the historic role played by large cooperatives and housing associations.19 What makes the syndicate so unusual is its distinctive sociolegal structure for decommodifying housing and keeping it off the market indefinitely. This structure has made it possible for renters to escape the often exploitative, speculative housing market, and to acquire nice places to live with reasonable “rents” and stable futures. (Monthly payments are not really rents because they do not reflect market prices or pressures, but rather normal building maintenance costs and pay-it-forward contributions to the solidarity fund.)
This is not easy to achieve over long periods, let alone generations. As mortgages are paid off and real estate prices rise over the years, even cooperatives and co-housing residents are often tempted to cash out. The idealistic sacrifices made by an earlier generation that started a housing cooperative, for example, may be liquidated when a later generation of residents decides that it wants to monetize decades of social equity for itself — and market interests once again prevail. This familiar dynamic poses a conundrum: how can a peer-governed commons be prevented from alienating the permanent assets upon which everyone depends? “One cannot simply supervise oneself,” as syndicate member Jochen Schmidt put it, because that does not always work.20 Commoners cannot seek (and don’t wish to seek) external supervision without triggering a risk to their sovereignty. And to whom would it surrender its authority in any case? Stefan Rost described the challenge well: “Rules and forms must be found — from within the Syndikat — that assure the longevity of the project and prevent its re-privatization and subservience to the capital market.”21
Mietshäuser Syndikat met this challenge by coming up with an ingenious legal mechanism that seems counterintuitive.22 It vests the ownership title for each real estate property not in the residents’ association alone but in a GmbH — Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung —
which is the equivalent of a limited liability company (Ltd. in the UK, and LLC in the US). The LLC has two and only two owners: the residents’ association for each housing complex and Mietshäuser Syndikat. The point of this arrangement is to give Mietshäuser Syndikat the authority to act as a watchdog body. It is given very limited voting rights over fundamental issues involving the real estate, such as the right to sell the property or convert it into condominiums, and to changes in a housing association’s governance rules. Otherwise, the residents’ association retains full powers of self-determination. This structure means that any fundamental changes regarding real estate holdings require agreement by both the residents’ association and Mietshäuser Syndikat. Each therefore has functional veto power. The syndicate can act as a check on any residents’ group that wishes to sell their property. And no single residents’ group can change the governance of the limited liability company itself, because it cannot be unilaterally altered or liquidated by one voting member acting alone. Thanks to this mutual veto mechanism, the syndicate is able to achieve what it calls “capital neutralization,” a term coined by Matthias Neuling.23 This mechanism can prevent assets held by housing commons from falling back into the market.
For the 136-plus projects associated with Mietshäuser Syndikat at the time we wrote this, each manages their own social and economic affairs as a peer-governed entity. Each is legally independent and functions as a typical housing cooperative. A members’ assembly makes democratic decisions about policies and practices for renting and managing the building, undertaking renovations, financing, and so forth.
The legal scheme for the group helps solve another challenge — how to federate so many different housing commons. If all housing projects are peer governed and legally independent (and should remain so), but all participating projects share a larger purpose (to decommodify real estate), how can this latter goal be assured when there might be disagreements among the dozens of projects? Mietshäuser Syndikat provides an effective vehicle for knitting together diverse types of housing commons. It is a so-called nicht eingetragener Verein (n.e.V., a German legal term that roughly translates into “unregistered association”). The n.e.V. legally owns Mietshäuser Syndikat GmbH. It is comprised of three types of members: individuals interested in decommodifying land and housing, groups that are not associated housing projects, and the residents’ associations for each housing project.

IMG MIETSHAUSER SINDIKAT

By creatively using the law in such an unusual way, syndicalists have been able to redefine the sense of ownership in housing. In conventional property terms, the residents are collective “owners” of the building who also, as “tenants” of individual units, pay a “rent.” But these terms imply the existence of a housing market and price mechanism, which is simply irrelevant here. The residents of a building self-determine how much they will pay to live in their units based on what they need to finance the purchase and renovation of their buildings and support the larger mission of Mietshäuser Syndikat. They are asserting a price sovereignty similar to what we saw at Cecosesola, the Venezuelan social-solidarity cooperative.
During one of our conversations, one resident proudly explained this specific way of having: “Of course I own my house and we own ours.”24 By this, the resident means that his family has effective ownership — i.e., permanent use rights of his residence (without the right to sell it outright), but everyone in the complex also has a sense of collective ownership in the building; they are not subservient to banks or outside financial interests. The circle of collective ownership is actually even larger because all of the real estate in all 136 housing projects also belongs to all of the members of Mietshäuser Syndikat. The levels of use rights are so entangled that “mine” always means “ours” and vice-versa. Remarkably, all work in running the Syndikat is performed by volunteers except for a paid contractor who does twenty hours a week of accounting, membership management, and basic administrative tasks.
The syndicate has succeeded in relationalizing a vast amount of property. For over thirty years, with one exception, no one has been able to liquidate the collective assets used by these housing commons for private cash-outs.25 This has resulted in attitudes toward property that are more about existential co-possession than absolute dominion. By taking real estate out of the market and sharing responsibility for its stewardship, residents have not only developed an allegiance to their own housing commons, they are committed to scores of other housing projects associated with the syndicate.
This is not just an ethical or social posture. Surplus syndicate revenues are used for so-called solidarity transfers to those projects that need capital to invest in their own housing commons.26 Existing projects contribute to a common pot, the Solidarity Fund, which is then used to support the launch of new housing projects — a clear instance of Pool, Cap & Divide Up. The financial transfers from older to newer projects help the federation grow. In a typical condominium, there are highup-front capital costs for investors and high profits later when they sell. In contrast, the housing commons collaboratively finance their projects (often combined with loans from banks), but the point is never to generate profit, but to make decommodified and peer-governed housing more widely available. The pay-it-forward ethic of the solidarity transfers underscores how intercommoning support is an integral part of the whole system.
In recent times, Mietshäuser Syndikat’s success and size have prompted some to suggest that perhaps the syndicate should begin its own mitosis, the biological term for a cell dividing itself. “The bigger we grow, the greater the complexity and the more work that has to be done by the watchdog organization,” said Jochen Schmidt. For some, this could imply the need for a cap on the number of projects that can affiliate with Mietshäuser Syndikat. But whether that would be wise or not, a cap could be a healthy recognition that continuing to develop housing commons will need multiple versions of Mietshäuser Syndikat, not just one of them. Syndicate members are discussing possible regionalization of the federation, perhaps reflecting the insight that the Mietshäuser Syndikat idea is best spread through a process of Emulate & Then Federate.
Hacking Property to Help Build Commons
In the three cases we have examined so far, we have seen how commoners have used ingenious means to relationalize property. In the case of Park Slope Food Coop, commoners used their co-op bylaws to define member-ownership not just as a financial stake, but as an entitlement that can only be secured through unpaid workslots every four weeks. The Federated Wiki platform created a clever software architecture that elevates sharing content as the default. Mietshäuser Syndikat’s creative legal structure and social norms have enabled it to decommodify residential buildings, prevent their being sold, and facilitate commoning.
Each of these examples amount to hacks on property. The concept of hacking goes back to the Tech Model Railroad Club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s. These hobbyists were always searching for creative technical solutions for problems with their model trains — a practice that they began to call “hacking.” The term was later picked up by amateur computer programmers who assembled their own personal computers with pieces of hardware and software code that they had scavenged, purchased, or improvised in some way. In his seminal 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, journalist Steven Levy wrote, “Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about systems—about the world—from taking things apart, seeing how they work and using this knowledge to create new and interesting things.” Hackers revel in overcoming difficult, complex problems with brilliant, elegant solutions. They also care deeply about their peers and the public good. As Eric Raymond put it in his Hacker Dictionary, hackers believe they have “an ethical duty … to share their expertise by … facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible.”27 (Hackers distinguish their practices from the malevolent, illegal activities of “crackers.”28) The same practice and ethic of hacking has moved into a number of legal circles. It is especially important to commoners, who frequently find that they must attempt a hack on legal forms in order to decriminalize or advance commoning. To perform a “legal hack” essentially means to use and recombine existing legal tools to change the purpose for which they were originally designed. Lawyers and activists who dream up legal hacks have similar ethical ambitions: to subvert conventional legal forms with ingenious legal workarounds that can support commoning. Legal hacks take myriad forms, some more audacious than others, but they generally require some measure of courage, creativity, and legal literacy.
Two famous ones have had far-reaching consequences: the General Public License (GPL) for software and the Creative Commons licenses. The GPL was developed by the legendary free software hacker Richard Stallman in the 1980s in response to the growing commercialization and private control of software. As software for personal computers became proprietary, the copyright holders — usually businesses — could prevent programmers from re-using, modifying, or sharing the code. This was immensely frustrating for coders like Stallman who wished to share code and collaborate to make it better. So Stallman, with the help of attorneys like Eben Moglen, devised a license based on copyright ownership of a program. It authorizes anyone to copy, share, and modify someone else’s code, in whatever way they want, without permission or payment. The only requirement is that any derivative versions must also be available on the same terms. The General Public License, or GPL, legally enabled the rise of free and open source software and spawned countless programs that have transformed computing, the internet, and commerce.29 Just as Mietshäuser Syndikat buildings cannot fall back into the market, GPL-protected code cannot be privately re-appropriated.
The Creative Commons licenses, inspired by the GPL’s success, is another important legal innovation that has facilitated commoning. CC licenses, as they are called, let copyright holders authorize in advance that their works can be freely shared, copied, and modified — something that copyright law makes no provisions for. They are free, standardized, publicly available licenses that any copyright holder can use to signal in advance that their works are shareable. Like Stallman, the primary creator of the CC licenses, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, wanted to find a way to use copyright law to make the sharing and remixing of works legal. After extensive deliberations with law scholars and the creative world, the nonprofit group Creative Commons issued a series of licenses that allow works to be re-used under certain conditions, such as only for noncommercial purposes (the NonCommercial license); only if no changes are made to the original work (No Derivatives license); or only if any derivative work is also licensed under the same license (ShareAlike license). The CC licenses have served as an indispensable legal infrastructure for legal sharing in countless contexts — scholarly publishing, scientific research, music, photography, video, writing, and much else. More than 175 legal jurisdictions around the world have adopted the licenses, and more than one billion digital documents are estimated to be available under CC licenses. Not surprisingly, many programmers with a hacker ethic contribute to software architectures that directly enable commoning. To date, legal hacking has been one of the few effective strategies that commoners can pursue to normalize their commons in a market/state system that has very different goals. Wikipedia and thousands of open-access scholarly journals would not be around if they were not protected by Creative Commons licenses.
In the early 2000s, Lessig famously wrote, “code is law.” By that, he meant that the design of software code so profoundly shapes what users can do on their computers and online that it has the effect of law. Code becomes the foundation for new forms of Vernacular Law. That is in essence what the design of the Federated Wiki platform is all about. It goes beyond the affordances of the conventional wiki by providing a more flexible, community-friendly design for codeveloping knowledge. Similar software designs are being developed by the platform cooperative movement, which is building new web platforms and mobile apps that will enable cooperative alternatives to Uber, Airbnb, and dozens of other proprietary, capital-driven platforms.

RECUADRO
Platform Cooperatives
Digital networks have immense capacity to enable sharing and cooperation. Unfortunately, tech companies have captured much of these social energies for their own purposes, namely, to carry out the usual work of capitalism on powerful platforms. They call the result the “sharing economy” and “gig economy,” but in fact it is simply a new species of markets designed for microrentals, piecemeal labor, data mining, and consumerism.
Platforms like TaskRabbit and Mechanical Turk have re-introduced piecework on a massive scale by offering pennies for a variety of microtasks that computers can’t perform, such as image tagging, transcription, and data cleaning. Other platforms entice us into converting our cars, apartments, and private time into rentable assets to compensate for our plunging incomes. As sophisticated computer algorithms constantly ratchet down wages for “independent contractors,” it is eroding the very possibility of stable jobs with benefits.
To counter these trends, the platform cooperatives movement arose in 2015 as a field of experimentation. Its goal is to try to develop more socially constructive websites and mobile apps. If people can own and manage their own platforms as cooperatives, argues Trebor Scholz, one of the catalysts of the movement, they will be able to reap greater long-term benefits and control in the face of well-capitalized tech giants like Uber and Airbnb. “What if we owned our own version of Facebook, Spotify, or Netflix?” writes Scholz. “What if the photographers at Shutterstock.com could own the platform where their photos are being sold?”30 A number of efforts are underway to do just that. The idea is to help producers and users co-own member-driven websites for distributing stock photography, streaming music, and other artworks.
Another type of platform cooperative is apps codeveloped by city governments and local users. Seoul, South Korea, for example, has been developing a Munibnb platform to enable apartment rentals on better terms than Airbnb, with revenues earmarked for public services. The app is also intended to prevent the conversion of stable rental properties into “ghost neighborhoods” used mostly by tourists, a problem afflicting many major world cities like Amsterdam, London, and Barcelona.
While still an emerging strategy, platform coops hold great promise for preventing monopoly, exploitation, and data surveillance in digital spaces. They can also help democratize ownership and control over platforms, and assure greater self-determination for working conditions.
FIN DEL RECUADRO

Hacks on the law remain a rich field of experimentation making artful twists on conventional state law. The Indigenous Quechua people in Peru developed the Indigenous Biocultural Heritage Area to protect lands with great agroecological and cultural significance, especially for the biodiversity of native potatoes. In India, the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library serves as a huge repository to document traditional knowledge, which can then be used to block patent applications that seek to privatize biomedical knowledge, plants, and therapeutic practices.31 The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, an advocacy group based in Pennsylvania, USA, has been prolific in developing town ordinances and charters to protect against unwanted corporate investments and ecological damage such as fracking.32 These initiatives are creative attempts to use conventional law to protect community autonomy in a state system that otherwise restricts it. The Legal Defense Fund has also worked to develop model statutes for states and localities to adopt to protect the rights of nature from industrial abuses — again, using legal hacks to try to establish principles that go beyond what law formally recognizes, or indeed, beyond what legislators originally intended. Since property is so foundational to how resources may be used, we are especially interested in legal hacks that can relationalize property. We turn now to impressive efforts to re-conceive ownership rights in seeds, because it is hard to imagine a physical object more deeply immersed in the web of life yet at the same time strictly controlled as private property to produce profits.
Open Source Seeds
For millennia, people have treated seeds as a mystical, sacred source of fertility and nourishment. Out of nothing, it would appear, life begets life. From its inception ten thousand years ago, agriculture entered into an intricate dance with living, natural forces — soil, water, animals, and the entire ecosystem — as a way to grow a rich bounty of food. That web of aliveness is under siege as large multinational corporations try to own and control seeds as much as possible. Since the early 1980s, companies have agitated for far-reaching intellectual property rights over plant genetic resources, giving them new powers to control plant breeding and production. As private ownership of seeds has consolidated into fewer and fewer hands — globally more than sixty percent of commercial seeds is now controlled by four agrochemical/seed companies33 — it has reduced the biodiversity of germplasm (living tissue from which new plants can be grown), making agriculture more vulnerable to pests, diseases, and climate change. The big industry players are intent upon controlling the basic inputs for food production — seeds, fertilizer, Big Data — to serve the interests of large-scale industrial agriculture, commodification, and profit extraction.34 This approach is eroding the independent production, stewardship, and biodiversity of seeds.
The concentrated ownership of seeds has radically disempowered farmers. Companies like Dupont and Monsanto use their oligopoly power to impose use restrictions — essentially, legal “fences” such as plant patents, utility patents, Material Transfer Agreements (MTAs), licenses, and use agreements — that restrict what farmers can do with their seeds. A “limited license to use” for example, turns out to mean: no saving the seed, no replanting the seed, no breeding of seeds, no research on the seed, and one-time use solely for planting. The licenses may also authorize the seed company to access the farmer’s land and online crop records to determine which seeds are used where. The seed corporations are not selling seed. They are renting seed for one-time use! Being the legal owner of the seed lies at the heart of this business model. On top of such restrictions, the seed industry legally treats the industrial farmer in the US reliant on 250-horsepower farm equipment in the same way as the campesino in Guatemala with his donkey. Each can use seeds only as specified by corporate licenses, much as software users are constrained by the software industry’s one-sided “shrinkwrap” licenses.35
Extensive privatization of seed has resulted in an institutionalized market failure. The global seed market has been captured by an oligopoly of large companies that have thwarted competition, promoted crop monocultures, failed to develop innovations to deal with climate change, and undermined organic local farming.36 “Corporations have used IPRs [intellectual property rights] over genetic materials not just to accrue monopoly rents, but to actively undermine the independence of farmers and the integrity and capacity of plant science,” writes Jack Kloppenburg, a leading seed activist and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The appropriation of seeds raises a profound challenge to farmers and, really, everyone, because we all have to eat. How can we steward the natural gifts of life that seeds provide and overcome the genetic engineering that has made them sterile or nonshareable under patent law, contract law, regulation, and/or court rulings? How can we restore the ethic of seed sharing and popular sovereignty over seeds that has been appropriated by large corporations through market power and the law?
Over the past thirty years, a movement comprised of farmers, agronomists, public institutions, lawyers, and sustainable food system advocates has tackled this question in a number of ways. Most seek to liberate seeds from the artificial constraints of property law. This fight is often blended with fights over land tenure, water rights, gender equality, and other concerns. These issues are important, for example, to two leading organizations in the Global South, La Via Campesina, a network of peasant-farmer and Indigenous groups, and Navdanya, an Indian advocacy group for seed freedom founded by Vandana Shiva.
Despite their different styles and emphases, most of the various seed-freedom players wish to establish a protected commons for seed sharing compatible with the imperatives of living ecosystems. Jack Kloppenburg notes that there is general agreement about the need for four universal rights: to save and replant seed; to share seed; to use seed to breed new varieties; and to participate in shaping policies for seed.37 The big seed companies generally oppose these rights by invoking legal tools that privilege private ownership of seed biowealth. The political and legal obstacles to seed sharing have led many seed advocates to look to a self-help option: building their own legally protected seed commons. Inspired by the success of the GPL and free and open source software over the past thirty years, some leading players in the seed movement decided to align behind the banner of “open source seed.” With two friendly but separate arms of the movement based in Europe and the US, respectively, the open source seed movement has adopted two general approaches to restoring user sovereignty over seeds: new types of licenses similar to the GPL, and campaigns to create strong community cultures of seed sharing. Both approaches seek to facilitate plant breeding and seed sharing as protected commons.
Just at the time when the huge ag-chemical and biotech companies Bayer and Monsanto merged, OpenSourceSeeds, a nonprofit project of AGRECOL e.V., the Association for AgriCulture and Ecology,38 based in Germany, launched its own legal response: an open source license that prohibits users from patenting any derivative plants grown from licensed seeds.39 It also prohibits the use of proprietary protections for plant varieties licensed under open source licenses, and applies these same rights and obligations to any future users of the seed. The Open Source Seed license does not grant exclusive rights in the way that most conventional licenses do; it confers the right to share the seed and any developments or enhancements conditional on fulfilling a duty of making it available for public use. Any follow-on users must then accept the same conditions. The license implicitly applies as well to the genetic information contained within seeds.
Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI)40 decided against using legal contracts and enforcement, for reasons of both practicality and principle. OSSI believed that it would be hard to print dense, complex legal licenses on a packet of seeds, and that legal language that might be honored by courts would probably not be understood by most farmers. Moreover, many people in Indigenous and Global South contexts objected to the very idea of legal contracts that define seeds as property. They preferred to base sharing on a peer-enforced social ethic. Finally, many farmers and plant breeders are wary of licenses because, while eager to share seed, they want to retain the right to receive payment for any breeding innovations that they do.41
Because of such diverse motivations among growers, the Open Source Seed Initiative decided to promote a vernacular seed law in the form of a pledge: “You have the freedom to use these OSSI seeds in any way you choose. In return, you pledge not to restrict others’ use of these seeds or their derivatives by patents or other means, and to include this pledge with any transfer of these seeds or their derivatives.” The pledge does not have the force of state law and enforcement behind it, but instead looks to the ethical and social norms of plant breeders to model behavior and shame transgressors. Drawing upon the ideas of the GPL for free software, the pledge means that users will treat seeds as openly available to all, and will not assert any private control over them. In other words, it is a pledge not to restrict access or use. Nourishing this ethos is at least as important as complex legal agreements that may or may not be understood by farmers and that may not be practically enforceable in any case. Can a peasant farmer realistically hope to prevail in litigation against Bayer-Monsanto? As of mid-2018, said Kloppenburg, “We have 400-plus varieties, fifty-one species, thirty-eight breeders, more than sixty companies [who have signed the Pledge]. We are there, we are real, we are doing it. And I didn’t think these breeders — public breeders — existed in the USA. Guess what: they do. They are real. They are there, they are surviving. We didn’t create them. We are building on a pre-existing network. This is why OSSI works … because we created connections to what already existed.”42 Kloppenburg’s comment points to the reality that relationalized property often exists already and doesn’t necessarily need to be created; it needs to be protected, whether through law, social sanction, or norms.
Despite the philosophical and tactical differences between the two open source seed projects, both share a concern with treating seeds as a commons — i.e., as something that does not belong exclusively to any individual owner, but whose value arises precisely because it can circulate freely and be shared. The open source seed movement seeks to affirm seeds as something that has deep, symbiotic relationships with other aspects of the ecosystem and human life as well as to past and future generations. The movement wants to restore the dynamic agency of seeds in living ecosystems, rescuing them from their status as sterile, controlled units of intellectual property. This insight is important not just as a moral claim made by commoners (who are responsible for breeding improvements) and by public institutions (which often finance agricultural research). It is a necessity for our planetary ecosystem and agriculture, especially as climate change intensifies.
Commoning Mushrooms: The Iriaiken Philosophy
Once a community escapes the conventional ideas of property (or never embraces them in the first place), it acquires the capacity to nourish new types of relationships, both within a commons and beyond its immediate boundaries. Stewarding seeds as biowealth deepens the interdependencies between human and nonhuman life. One inspiring example is the traditional Japanese right to common known as iriaiken. Its root, iriai, literally means “to enter collectively.” Iriaiken is “the right to enter collectively.” Iriaiken usually refers to the collective ownership of nonarable areas such as mountains, forests, marshes, bamboo groves, riverbeds, and offshore fisheries. From the 1600s through 1868, villagers in Japan allowed people to collect wood, edible plants, medical herbs, mushrooms, and more, but only if they followed rigid, peer-enforced regulations for usage.
In practice, iriaiken translates into many different, context-specific forms of collective ownership. There was sòyù (joint rights) and gòyù (joint ownership), for example. The most common type of the latter was called mura-mura-iriai, meaning “collective ownership of an area by the inhabitants of several neighboring villages.” This is intriguing because unlike most European commons that dealt with a specific human settlement and piece of land, the rights of an iriaiken extended to several villages, not just one. They were regarded as integral to the region and could not be divided up among villages. Thus the rights to common were not executed by the villagers of a village but by a federation of villages!
In the Meiji period of the late nineteenth century, when a new legal code was adopted and modern legal principles were introduced, the right of villagers to common was not abolished, but acknowledged as a rule of custom. So in modern Japanese law iriaiken is still recognized. It is defined as having the nature of joint ownership. Not surprisingly, the two conceptions of law — modern law and the law of the commons (Vernacular Law) — have come into conflict, especially on matters of property rights. The more that full private ownership of land and exclusive land titles were recognized, the faster the decline of iriaiken-style property regimes. But even today we can find iriaiken-based property arrangements in Japan. One of the most intriguing examples can be seen in the stewardship practices of matsutake mushroom gatherers in Japanese villages.
Matsutake are delicious wild mushrooms that grow in forests and cannot be artificially cultivated. This is partly why they are very expensive. Some Japanese varieties regularly sell for more than US$1,000 a kilo, with especially rare ones going for $2,000 a kilo. Annual harvests of matsutake peaked in the 1950s and have declined steadily since then,43 mainly due to two factors: the decline of their habitats (especially from a disease afflicting Japanese red pines, with which matsutake is associated) and the decline of traditional harvesting practices such as collective harvesting, undergrowth clearance, the thinning of forests, and the gathering of leaf litter as fuel or fertilizer, which once helped improve growing conditions for the mushrooms. Interestingly, forests that are hospitable to matsutake mushrooms tend to be disrupted, scarred landscapes with young trees. They are often full of human traffic, especially for gathering matsutake, explains anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in her acclaimed book, The Mushroom at the End of the World. The presence of human visitors “keeps the forests open, and thus welcoming to pine; it keeps the humus thin and the soils poor, thus allowing matsutake to do its good work of enriching trees,” she writes.44
Kyoto Prefecture in Japan has been famous for its matsutake production. It is there that a unique traditional auctioning system for matsutake gathering developed in the seventeenth century, at Kamigamo shrine in 1665 in the first instance, before being adopted by almost all villages in the prefecture. Two centuries later, in response to the privatization and dividing up of communal forests during the Meiji Period, villages adopted holistic bidding systems, reinterpreting the iriaiken spirit in modern times.45
The core of the holistic bidding system is difficult for the modern mind to grasp because harvesting rights do not correspond to property ownership. As the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing explains, “[E]ven if a villager owns a matsutake-yama (a forest or mountain where matsutake grows), he must bid for the right to harvest the matsutake growing on that land … and those who do hold the exclusive rights to the gathering and selling of matsutake … change from year to year through the bidding process.”46 This means that the owner of a plot of land is not allowed to harvest mushrooms that grow on that plot of land. Yet at the same time, neither is the owner absolutely forbidden from harvesting mushrooms because he or she may win that right through the community’s bidding process.
How is that possible, and what does that mean? The answer lies in the iriai philosophy and more concretely in the way villagers conceive the interconnectedness of the whole system. They see deep interconnections among the mostly invisible matsutake rhizomes in the soil with the mushrooms that grow on the land, and the relationships among the villagers and owners of different plots of land, among other relationships.
We can see one way in which the bidding process plays out in the village of Oka in Kyoto prefecture, where the iriai philosophy has always been strong. The basic challenge faced by villagers is how to aggregate and share mushrooms that are distributed unevenly across many different plots of privately owned land. The mushrooms are regarded as shared wealth because they arise naturally, without anyone’s active cultivation, and because the mushroom roots are a vast underground system that sprawls across the entire village, without regard to property boundaries on the surface. So the problem is how to allocate biowealth that is seen as both collectively owned (in the subsoil) and privately owned (on the surface) in a fair and equitable manner.
The villagers’ solution is an auction. That name is a bit of a misnomer because the bidding system is not used to raise money to grow the mushrooms in the first place, as members of a CSA farm might do for the upcoming crop. Rather, the auction helps assure that everyone gets some benefit from the mushrooms, either through direct harvesting, allocations of mushrooms reserved for collective use, or through community income.
The first step is to divide the whole terrain into five parcels without regard to anyone’s formal land ownership rights. Then, as in other villages, Oka auctions off gathering rights for three of the five parcels. The two remaining parcels are reserved for weekly Sunday expeditions by members of cooperatives established for managing the matsutake. “All participants climb up to the forest at the same time and gather matsutake together. In 2003, the highest daily amount harvested jointly was twenty-eight kilograms (about sixty-two pounds). Afterwards, the harvested matsutake are assembled and distributed to all participants in equal amounts, except when they are reserved for a joint feast…”47 A nice example of Pool, Cap & Divide Up. To make things fairer (and more complicated), the two types of parcels reserved for community use rotate every year. Thus a parcel that is bid out one year may be reserved for joint harvest the next year. Only cooperative members are allowed to participate in the bidding meeting and in joint harvesting activities.
Any villagers can participate in the bidding process, through which the community assigns harvesting rights to the highest bidder. The winner then holds exclusive rights until November 15, when the game hunting season starts. “During this time … no one, not even the land owners, can walk in their own forest even if it is not matsutake-yama, without permission,” write Saito and Mitsumata. “If they try to even get near the forest area without permission, they may be suspected of being a matsutake thief.”48
The purpose of the bidding is to get the mushrooms on private lands into a common pot that can be reallocated for community benefit. In essence, it’s a scheme to monetize three-fifths of the annual mushroom crop from sales to villagers only, and to apply all income from the bidding on activities and tools that improve the matsutake habitat. The bidding process is thus not like a normal auction. Because villagers agree that the mushrooms cannot belong to anybody exclusively, the auction provides a way to redistribute the anticipated income from selling matsutake to benefit all villagers. The partial monetization of the annual crop lasts for only one season, and it is used to benefit the village and mushroom ecosystem over the long term.
Communal income from matsutake harvesting in Oka fluctuates from years to year. But in a 2004 study, the village collected ¥329,000 in 2003, or about US$9,087.49 This income is not divided up among members,50 but is used to pay part of the cost of a group tour/celebration each year. In other communities it has been used for improving the infrastructures or education in the communities. In Oka, since 1962, all members practice what is called deyaku, compulsory work days, very similar to the famous minga system in Andean countries or irrigation ditch maintenance in acequias in New Mexico. Villagers can choose a preferred day from two designated days for deyaku. If a member doesn’t participate, a ¥7,000 penalty is levied, but the coop rarely needs to sanction anyone. The joint harvest activities and denyaku work to Ritualize Togetherness and forge a sense of community. When in 2004 researchers participated in the compulsory work sessions, “the work that day was easy and a sociable atmosphere prevailed — the female participants especially enjoyed talking to each other, and a break was held every thirty minutes.”51
The core idea of the holistic bidding system — that the owner of a specific plot of land is not entitled to harvest the matsutake that grow on that land by dint of ownership — is similar to laws that govern many individual forest owners in Europe who cannot simply decide on their own to cut a tree on their property. Villagers obviously have a particular understanding of who owns what — a multilayered tableau of protocols, as it were, for treating the world. Landowners consent to this arrangement because it is a traditional community arrangement; they see themselves as co-designers and co-decision makers of this process as part of the community. Community-regulated access is not seen as a prohibition, but rather as a sensible consensual agreement — obviously, a cultural shift from the Western, proprietary mentality. According to the researchers, “at a subconscious level,” the land belongs to the whole village.

IMG ALLOCATION, SURFACE LANDS, UNDERGROUND

Common land coexists with private rights. In harvesting matsutake mushrooms, Oka villagers regard the underground soil in which the mushroom fungi grows as commonly held land that cannot be alienated or privately owned. On the surface of the land, peer governance determines how people may access the mushrooms.

This understanding illustrates a larger point about property itself —
that “private assets most always grow out of unacknowledged commons,” as Tsing writes. “The point is [that] privatization is never complete; it needs shared spaces to create any value. That is the secret of property’s continuing theft … The thrill of private ownership is the fruit of an underground common.”52
One must wonder why this ethic should not also apply to the extraction of coal, gas, and oil from deep underground. There is obviously a difference between the value of that which exists in the ground, untouched and prior to any human activity, and the costs of exploring, mining, drilling, and refining — that is, the costs of making it available to human use. This is a serious difference. But consider what our economy might look like if the full value of oil could not be privately appropriated by corporations or by the nation-state simply because they drill it. The only economic return would be on the work invested to extract oil and refine it into useable fuel. The rationale for such a property scheme is simple: oil and minerals were formed over millions of years without any human contribution, so why should any private party be able to own them?53 This is the exact logic that Oka’s matsutake commoners have put into practice — a fair, ecologically minded way to steward the wealth generated via their shared underground wealth.54
In recent years, the iriai system has come under siege, particularly by younger people who don’t work in the villages and, not surprisingly, by those who own matsutake-yama where the mushrooms grow. In the villages of Kanegawachi and Takatsu, the classical Lockean arguments have been made, that “every landowner has the right to the fruits of his or her land on the one hand, and ought to pay a fixed asset [property] tax on the other.” It has been argued that these customs don’t guarantee “enough rights to matsutake-yama owners,” and that they have therefore created “a disincentive to landowners to carry out the habitat improvements needed to enhance matsutake production.”55
These assertions are groundless, however. No evidence to support them has been brought forward. In fact, the evidence points in the other direction: the most serious habitat improvement projects in the Kyoto region have been sponsored by the Association for Promotion of Matsutake Production of Kyoto, with help from government subsidies. Seven years later, a survey on improvement activities noted efforts “on 405 sites totaling 310 hectares in 15 districts, and in almost all cases the sites were communal forests as opposed to privately held lands.”56 This makes perfect sense because habitat improvement requires specific knowledge, regular activity, and patience. Most individual land owners, in contrast, discontinued their improvement efforts after a year or two. As the evidence suggests, there are not only philosophical but very practical reasons for treating the matsutake-yama as wealth to be owned and managed by the whole village.
According to the research, the decline of the iriaiken land use system has had negative effects on both village finances and matsutake productivity. Villages that chose other systems than Oka — e.g., allowing owners to harvest on parcels of their choice by paying sixty or seventy percent of the bidding income — have now had to introduce membership fees or other taxes to boost village revenues and maintain village infrastructures. Kanegawachi is such a case. Since the holistic bidding system was turned into a piecemeal bidding system in 1999, “bidding income has declined by more than 75% — from 250,000 Yen in the early 1990 to 60,000 Yen in 2004.”57 At the same time, the willingness of matsutake-yama owners to work to improve matsutake habitat has declined and a vicious circle of individual exploitation has arisen. This stands in stark contrast to the virtuous circle of the Oka villagers who common matsutake.
The Oka story tells us a great deal about how property, typically seen as a right of absolute dominion over a bounded object, can be re-imagined in socially minded yet practical ways. But this is not just a matter of enacting a state law or regulation; it requires a cultural ethic that can only be cultivated through social practice and agency. There must be a commitment to the shared ecosystem and infrastructure upon which everyone depends while also providing space to nourish social relations and human/nonhuman relationships. Notably, this does not preclude individual usage rights or even the right to sell a renewable resource. Perishable mushrooms, for example, can be treated as usufruct, which is the right to use something that belongs to someone else so long as the underlying resource itself is not diminished.
In a larger sense, the matsutake story demonstrates the virtues and practicality of relationalizing property. It is entirely feasible to use property to strengthen social and ecological relationships rather than rend them asunder through ownership and capitalism. Just as the peculiar history of the Nidiaci Garden (pp. 207–209) showed us how a single plot of urban land can be treated as both private property and public property, each with different outcomes, we can see in the matsutake story that managing land as a commons allows for qualitatively different kinds of value to emerge. That value is at once personal, social, and ecological, as well as economic. Things can belong to us as individuals and as part of a collective at the same time. Property arrangements can be designed to respect our freedom-in-relatedness to use things, fairness in providing wider access and use of them, and vibrant living communities as effective forms of Peer Governance.
Building Stronger Commons 
Through Relationalized Property
The idea of Relationalized Property is perhaps incomprehensible if seen through the lens of conventional property relations. People immersed in the dominant worldview doggedly refuse to concede that there might be other ways of experiencing and representing the world. We have tried to show through five vivid examples how people’s conceptions of property can escape the traditional forms, all of which entail some significant measure of exclusivity and separation. Instead, Relationalized Property opens up spaces that allow for developing different sorts of relationships that do not revolve around ownership or market exchange. These relationships take many forms — with other commoners, with the more-than-human world, with past and future generations, with external institutions, and with the cosmos.
It is worth emphasizing that practices for relationalizing property can be emulated, but they cannot be copied. Each instantiation is unique. There is no one-size-fits-all legal tool or model. Rather, the design of legal regimes for relationalized ways of having in the commons must be guided by this question: what do we (the respective community) need to protect our commons as a commons?

RECUADRO
Property and Legal History

IMG PROPERTY AND LEGAL HISTORY

This image illustrates some of the ways in which property law engenders specific types of social order. It empowers owners (the occupants of the squares in each drawing) and marginalizes and disenfranchises nonowners. The circle — a Buddhist ensō, which is often used to symbolize absolute enlightenment and the universe — encircles familiar property regimes.
Private property and corporate property are two familiar ways in which owners assert dominion over things that other people need or want. The market/state system as a polity and a legal system privileges these forms over all others. Even collective property enacts this dynamic, perhaps in less severe forms, because it also rewards owners and excludes non-owners.
Pre-property — social relations before any formal property rules are established — may appear more benign, but the resulting social order may or may not be cooperative, egalitarian, and fair. Hobbes argued that a “state of nature” allegedly preceding the rise of states was a barbaric war of all against all; anarchists and communitarians tend to have a more benign view. In any case, there is a void of larger political authority. We mentioned how the legal doctrine of res nullius in bonis once served to protect the land and other biowealth that everyone and future generations need. But we are not naive enough to think that this will be enough in today’s world — hence the need for legal innovations to secure the commons.
Relationalized Property is an attempt to steward resources for the benefit of commoners (or anyone else) through Peer Governance structures while respecting the inherent limits of the biowealth. Note that the line around the commons is not a strict boundary of ownership and separation; instead, the dotted line symbolizes a semi-permeable membrane that allows selective interaction with the larger world.
We encircle the various property regimes with an ensō, a hand-drawn image that Zen Buddhists use to symbolize “absolute enlightenment, strength, elegance, the universe, and mu (the void).” (Wikipedia) We wish to use this symbol to suggest that in reality we partake of the larger, integrated, whole in which everything is connected. A living cosmos encircles all property regimes. Only Relationalized Property formally recognizes this reality, however.
FIN DEL RECUADRO

Our descriptions of relational ways of having in this chapter may sound a bit complicated and convoluted. This is partly because the very idea is so unfamiliar. Moreover, describing something new can be much more difficult than experiencing it, just as describing how to ride a bicycle is much more difficult than doing it. Nor do we yet have a default set of legal forms for relationalizing property. We therefore wish to conclude by providing some conceptual definition to the idea of Relationalized Property so that it can be recognized as a distinct species of “beyond property” stewarded by a commons.
We have seen that not one example of Relationalized Property is exactly like another. Each represents a unique layering and overlapping of different forms of property, ingeniously interconnected. Each is based on a commons ethic and birthed through living social practices. A key purpose of such property forms is to open a protected space for commoning to take place. A way must be found to neutralize the usual power relationships associated with property, especially the inequality among owners and nonowners, and the domination associated with Governing-through-Money. Property rights — which today are so often allied with capital and calculative rationality — cannot be allowed to preemptively dictate the terms of social order. Within the context of capitalism and liberal democracies, Relationalized Property can create a kind of modern res nullius in bonis that makes shared wealth — an apartment building, a software platform, a supermarket, seeds, underground fungi — quasi-inalienable.
Let us try to describe some basic patterns of Relationalized Property and thereby make some generalizations about how to secure the special affordances that they make possible:

Redefine the line that separates owners and nonowners. Instead of strict boundaries of control, the boundary around the commons is treated as a semi-permeable membrane. This makes it easier to take account of and integrate the needs of all.

Blend individual use rights with collective possession as the default norm. Excessive conflict is symptomatic of a design problem. When individual use rights are created in conjunction with a collective way of having (which is always a relative achievement), a virtuous cycle of cooperation and trust emerges. It can eventually supplant the beggar-thy-neighbor ethic of individual competition that capitalism requires of everyone. For example, a Federated Wiki sidesteps the flame wars that plague so many conventional wikis. Mietshäuser Syndikat enables people to escape the cutthroat speculation, rising prices, and insecurity of housing markets based on individual or corporate ownership. Blending individual use rights with collective possession helps to generate more stable, fair outcomes, which itself is an affordance for minimizing conflict.

Avoid Governance-through-Money and control by stakeholders with investment interests. This is a central flaw with conventional property because it privileges those with money to override the ability of the many to govern themselves and protect their interests. Governance-through-Money is a problem even in nonprofits and cooperatives because wealthy board members and funding sources tend to have a disproportionate say and even veto power in governance.

Bypass conventional categories of property and the market/state social order they imply. Instead of a system that pits private property against collective interests, and owners against nonowners, Relationalized Property opens up a new safe space for more commoning. It also insulates people from being evicted or separated from the biowealth around them.

Give clearer legal standing to existential possession and use that satisfies needs rather than enhance dominion. Instead of a production venture revolving around an asset (a factory, a product, a brand name) and the choices of the owner(s), commoners relying on Relationalized Property are free to devise a governance system of their own making. They can build a culture committed to collective stewardship, Peer Governance, and mindful interaction with the more-than-human realm. The Park Slope Food Coop functions as non-property in the sense that no one can privately appropriate the co-op assets or sell them. The same holds for open source seeds: everyone can use them, and no one can monetize them at the expense of others. It is critical to note that in each instance social practice and culture must keep the system alive. Formal legal charters or bylaws are not enough.

Recognize the value of peer-negotiated use rights. Pre-existing formal property arrangements such as customary law or vernacular practice can evolve into Relationalized Property regimes. This is important, because moral legitimacy and effectiveness stem from commoning, not only from state law. Relationalized Property can work well because it draws upon so many of the patterns of commoning described in Chapters Four through Six, such as Pool & Share, Pool, Cap & Divide Up, Trust Situated Knowing, the desire to Share Knowledge Generously, Ritualize Togetherness and Deepen Communion with Nature. All of this enhances a person’s security and freedom. Commoning precedes and enhances the possibility of Relationalizing Property. Needless to say, if there is no commoning, there can be no Relationalized Property.

Weave property into the web of life. Property that is deeply rooted in living, interconnected systems has less need to sustain itself via markets or state support. Remember how Mietshäuser Syndikat lets each of its affiliates maintain a high degree of liberty and autonomy? When commoners can determine their own access and use rights at the local level, the resulting system will be distributed, diversified, and stable. This makes it easier for it to self-replicate, self-heal, and develop at appropriate scales. These capacities reduce the risks of system failure and the need for external supervision. They also prevent concentrated power and monoculture, and reduce dependence on the market/state apparatus — a big step toward enhancing resilience.

Keep conflicts over use-rights in the local arena as much as possible. This enables dispute resolution that is lower-cost and more accessible to ordinary people. Formal systems of state law may assert noble, universal rights for all. But the actual costs and complications of vindicating those rights are often enormous (imagine a peasant farmer challenging a large corporation), which makes state jurisprudence a charade of justice and equality. By contrast, Peer Governance in commons tends to provide accessible systems for addressing problems.

Recognize the need for future forking and emulation to avoid “bigness-problems.” At some point in the growth of any commons, complexity becomes so great and Peer Governance so thin that some form of forking, or bifurcation of energies, is needed. The Park Slope Food Coop works because it has deep roots in its local community, Brooklyn. It is huge, but it has no need to become bigger and bigger, just as the Mietshäuser Syndikat has no imperative to add more housing projects. In the commons there is no internal compulsion or systemic mechanism that requires constant growth, as businesses need to do in the capitalist market economy. Both Park Slope Food Coop and Mietshäuser Syndikat would welcome others to emulate their experience. In the Commonsverse, it is most logical to keep property regimes at a manageable scale to keep systems simpler, more modular, and functional, and with lower overhead costs — otherwise known as elegance.
Re-Introducing Meaning Making into Modern Law
The ramifications of Relationalized Property extend well beyond property law; they reflect the larger impact that commoning can have on law in general. As a form of world making, commoning enables people to play a genuine, formative role in making law. It provides a way to fight the pervasive alienation of modern times. This is what really is at stake in debates about commoning and property — and law in general.
Historically, law was embedded in the community. This enabled the relations and norms of the people as a whole to find expression through law itself. In countless subsistence communities around the world, even today, commoners are able to see that the pasture is being overgrazed or the fishery overharvested. They can then come up with their own appropriate solutions. While this is often a difficult process, it is one that necessarily builds the sinews of social connection and mission. It connects people to their landscapes and previous generations, and in this way becomes a vehicle of meaning making.
However, with the ascendance of the modern state and bureaucracy, the forms and procedures of law tend to become ends in themselves, supplanting law as a vehicle for expressing a society’s sense of purpose and identity. What matters most in modern law today is its self-referential logic and process, not really the suitability of outcomes. If your (expensive) lawyer makes a procedural mistake, or if some arcane technicality crafted through a political compromise decades ago is not satisfied, you lose! The point is not “justice,” as a famous professor of civil procedure once told one of us, as a first-year law student. It is whether there is “sufficient evidence and procedural integrity for the administration of justice.” Or as French novelist Anatole France put it more tartly: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.”58
In a strange sense, modern law is radically disconnected from social reality and real people. It is an abstract system of rules that presents itself as a neutral, impersonal process — “justice is blind” — but whose practitioners strive for this goal only by recognizing the world through the categories of law itself. As a creature of the state and its priorities, law has increasingly lost touch with the lives of people, especially their inner lives, perhaps because it is administered through cumbersome and often-corrupt processes. Even if prevailing legal forms offer modest scope for people to use the law for their own purposes (contract law, business governance, etc.), law is not really a robust source of meaning making any more. There is a simple reason for this fact: few people can realistically participate in or affect the character of law today. It is held forth as an expression of state power that must be complied with.
This is partly why so many people feel alienated toward the modern nation-state and its bodies of law. To be sure, the separation of legal forms from meaning-making activities has overcome many oppressive communal imperatives and enhanced our freedom, at least in a narrow, individualistic sense. Modern, liberal law has dispelled many stifling, unjust forms of domination and control — feudal, patriarchal, authoritarian. But such liberation has often entailed disconnecting people — sometimes forcibly and in the name of freedom — from the worlds they cherish. Countless Indigenous peoples throughout history have learned that the freedom to be treated as an individual, shorn of one’s collective identity, landscape, traditions, and cultural heritage, is an act of radical dispossession. So today, even among we moderns: state law often imprisons ordinary people within abstract formal categories that do not adequately take account of the full context of our lives and inner needs. Law may be able to assure the civil liberties of the homeless and mentally ill to live on the streets without harassment, and even to mandate basic housing for them. But it cannot provide meaningful relationships, purpose, and dignity.
In our time, law’s connection to people’s inner aspirations and desire for meaning is irregular at best. At worst, it is grandly indifferent, triggering displaced frustrations about law’s inability to speak to meaning and identity. This should be no surprise when law is a servant of the market/state polity and its priorities; when it is controlled by a remote priesthood of lawyers and legislators; and when it asserts universal legal categories that don’t take account of changing realities and desires.
When law fails to meet needs effectively and cannot change to reflect new circumstances and ideas of justice, law loses its legitimacy. The “imagined community” that the nation-state purports to represent, and which law seeks to constitute, begins to fall apart.59
Commoning and Relationalized Property rights are antidotes to these contemporary trends. They can help us re-imagine the very nature of law as a vehicle for meaning making. Instead of ceding this task to a distant national state and legislatures unresponsive to ordinary people, commoning re-integrates democracy and law-making into people’s everyday lives in substantive ways. It can be a vehicle for recovering and building relationships that are otherwise quiescent or suppressed in modern life — relationships among people, with the more-than-human-world, with our ancestors, and with posterity. It can help build new bridges between modern law and older, vernacular legal forms. The guardians of state law can learn to recognize the dynamic, situational nature of Vernacular Law — think how social norms rapidly evolve and mutate in online communities and social networks. And commons, for their part, can attempt to hack state law to open up new, protected spaces for exploratory commoning. They could humanize the impossibly remote and capital-oriented law of the modern nation-state.
This brings us to an inescapable dilemma: How to advance the commons with the help of the alien apparatus and laws of the state? How might commoning flourish within systems of state power closely allied with capital and markets — systems that are determined to assert their own power-enhancing ways of organizing the world? We turn to these questions in Chapters Nine and Ten.

9. State Power and Commoning

We have seen how ingenious sociolegal forms and ancient legal doctrines have the potential of neutralizing conventional property claims, thereby limiting the power of the modern market/state. But what might be achieved if state power were used to support Relationalized Property and commoning? How might states support commons-based governance and provisioning? Could state law establish a more muscular doctrine of inalienability for shared wealth? Could we develop legal regimes, infrastructures, and programs to empower commoning? There are no easy answers to these questions, yet there is no way around actively engaging with state power. How to do so, however, is a tricky challenge.
Most of the politicians, autocrats, and legislatures of the world’s 195 states agree that economic growth is their top priority. They believe that the only way to meet people’s needs is through relentless capital accumulation — and so they are always eager to expand markets, extract more natural resources, promote consumption, and contrive new needs. All of this keeps the capitalist machine humming and tax revenues rolling in. The market/state system is understandably interested in challenging or co-opting systemic threats such as the commons, by marginalizing them through the usual mystifications (“socially responsible business,” the “green economy”) or trying to make us ignore them.
This suggests that we need to be utterly realistic about the nature of state power and its alliance with capital and markets. At best, those in power and making decisions in modern state institutions are highly ambivalent about upholding the inalienability of shared wealth. They typically want to boost investment and market activity at every opportunity. As we saw in Chapter Seven, the international community adopted the legal doctrine of the Common Heritage of Mankind in a 1979 United Nations agreement governing the moon “and other celestial bodies,” and in a 1980 international treaty to protect the oceans. The idea was that certain significant planetary elements — deep-sea minerals, Antarctica, the atmosphere, the moon — should be treated as common goods, now and in the future. But few states, least of all the United States, have shown enthusiasm for respecting or extending this principle. This stems from the claim that something regarded as the Common Heritage of Mankind cannot be exclusively owned by any individual nation-state or other actor. It means that no state is allowed to claim national sovereignty over a resource, or try to use it solely for military or commercial purposes.1 They must share the benefits. In fact, the principle of “access and benefit sharing”2 has become a key line of argument in the debates about the Common Heritage of Mankind. This idea sounds helpful in principle and seems to prevent a system of first come, first served. But it isn’t quite that simple. To put it bluntly, the pragmatic political discussion about the Common Heritage of Mankind is mostly about economic interests. The premise of the discussion is that if we exploit the few areas of the Earth that are not fully commercialized, for example, through deep-sea mining, then the benefits should be distributed in a fairer way. And the only things considered “benefits” are those things that people can use and express in numbers and money — a framing that naturally favors commercial exploitation. After decades of debate about the Common Heritage of Mankind, the idea of inalienability of what is common has been completely lost.
This is true of outer space as well as the ocean floor. Today, all sorts of privately funded space exploration projects threaten to override the principles of the Outer Space Treaty, which was ratified in 1967. In 2018, President Trump’s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, proposed “turning the moon into a kind of gas station for outer space.” He noted that the dark surfaces on the moon are actually hundreds of feet of solid ice, “so the plan is to break the ice down into hydrogen and oxygen, [and] use those as the fuel propellant.”3 The Trump administration is also exploring the feasibility of “the large-scale economic development of space,” including “private lunar landers staking out de facto ‘property rights’ for Americans on the Moon, by 2020,” as well as the right to mine asteroids for precious metals.4
The dismaying history of the past forty years (at least) reveals how noble-sounding declarations such as the Common Heritage of Mankind doctrine are more symbolic than serious. There is a very simple explanation: the market/state system is structurally biased against protecting shared wealth as commons. It tends to interfere with private investment and market returns.5
The grab for celestial wealth merely extends the commercial exploitation of the Earth that has been going on for centuries. And it enacts a basic logic: contemporary markets and states co-constitute each other and are deeply interdependent on each other, even while each retains a sphere of relative autonomy. Market players need the political legitimacy and predictable rule of law that states provide, and states, in turn, need the tax revenues, geopolitical influence, and infrastructures that flow from an economy committed to relentless growth. Within such constraints, both market players and political decision makers have a loosely defined field of authority within which discretionary power can be exercised.
So constituted, the market/state system generates strategic dilemmas for political decision makers. At the end of the day, they cannot help but be ambivalent about anything that might impede investors and corporations from monetizing the Earth’s wealth (and beyond!). It’s no wonder that the governments of the world’s leading industrialized states have failed to take serious action against carbon emissions over the past thirty years despite growing evidence of a climate breakdown. When an actual attempt was made to keep the oil in the soil — as the Government of Ecuador proposed in a plan to sequester twenty percent of its oil deposits, with financial help from the Global North — the international political community simply ignored it.6
So, in trying to legalize the commons, we should have no illusions about the meliorative intentions of state power. The way that states are constituted today, it is not only difficult for the guardians of state power to support the commons. They can barely comprehend the idea! State power is committed to a static, individualist worldview, at least in liberal democracies allied with market capitalism. The polities of liberal capitalist democracies elevate individual rights and economic liberty over everything else — except perhaps the idea of sovereign state power itself.
If we wish to take the commons idea seriously, then, we have to fundamentally rethink our ideas about how state power might be used strategically to advance the interests of commoners. Needless to say, that is a daunting task we can only begin to tackle in this book. But one thing is clear: the prevailing forms of state power as a governance system — the nation-state — will surely have to change.
“The State” and “The People”
Before going any further, we must make two important conceptual clarifications about what we mean when talking about “the state.” First, the state is not really a subject or entity as popular usage of the term implies. The concept of the state is relational. Just as the notion of “I” cannot exist without “you” — both are defined by and exist in relationship to each other — so the state is a relational notion (as is the commons). Seen in this way, the state must be understood as a counterpoint to what it is not. “The state,” explains political theorist Bob Jessop, “is constituted as a division between itself and its other.”7 This means that the state only exists by distinguishing itself from and in relation to the market, civil society, religion and family even though no state is conceivable without these social systems. That’s because the state relates to these social systems.
So the state is more accurately seen as the power that shapes these relationships. Therefore, we prefer to talk about state power — or, more accurately, state powers — because it helps us see that the state as such does not really exist. It is not a monolith but a configuration of power relations that are constantly being (re)produced. So the state as such never acts; only specific groups with specific interests and positions of power act, relying on various instruments such as law, police, bureaucracies, etc.
And yet, the state is real in the sense that it functions as an ensemble of institutions — bureaucracies, an organized military, courts, etc. — that directly affect people’s lives. These institutions have their own way of fostering individuation — namely, by granting credentials (drivers’ licenses, occupational licenses) and defining us as “citizens,” which confers certain responsibilities and entitlements. To be a commoner is to understand the individual — and his/her responsibilities and entitlements — in another sense entirely. The notion of a commoner is at once locally rooted but also transcultural, universal, and beyond any state form. It is not simply an identity that lies somewhere in between the citizen and the individual. To be a commoner is to understand social reality in a different way. One sees that the I as an individual is always connected to others, and in a pre-political sense. The unresolved question is how to modify state powers to recognize and support commons-friendly modes of individuation — that is, to bolster the commoner in all of us.
To understand state power, we need to recognize how the term “nation-state” is misleading. It conflates the idea of belonging to a people (an anthropological concept) with a system of power, the state (a concept from political science and theory of the state). The term “nation,” from the Latin natio, is derived from nasci, “being born.” The term natio simply means “people, kin, type of people” and denotes a community of people of the same background and sharing a common language and customs. Even today, “nation” is often considered synonymous with “people.” The people of a nation are thought of as ethnically homogeneous — often for political reasons — which makes the term loaded. The term nation emerged in France in the sixteenth century, where people used it to designate themselves as a people with political/state unity; it was used more broadly in the rest of Europe only after the French Revolution. Today, two centuries later, “nation” is very familiar to us as the designation of the people of a state; so familiar that we forget that the citizens of a state are not necessarily a people in the anthropological sense.
The conflation of peoplehood and state is so familiar and deeply rooted in our minds and language that the difference described here may seem like splitting hairs. But pause for a moment to consider that almost no territorial nation-state is based on a single shared past and a single people (in the original meaning of natio) — not in Iraq, Mexico, India, or Bolivia, and not in other modern territorial nation-states, either. They are all composed of diverse ethnicities, distinct social traditions, and cultures. Bolivia is the only state in the world that officially recognized this diversity in its 2009 constitution, where it is defined as a unitary plurinational state.
States and many political players today routinely nourish a sense of national identity and patriotism. It is not unusual for modern state power to be founded upon and supported by it. Following years of debate, in 2018 Israel elevated the conflation of state power and national identity to quasi-constitutional status.8 In the text of the law, which is generally known as the Nation-State Law, Israel is defined as the “Nation State of the Jewish People.”9
The blending of nation and state is an endless source of strife and political trauma because it rides roughshod over the lived realities of ethnic identity and culture. In the end, it fuels racist, nationalistic, and fascist social movements, as can currently be seen in Brazil. As philosopher Hannah Arendt concluded in 1963: “The inability of precisely this state form to survive in the modern world was proven long ago, and the longer it is maintained, the more viciously and ruthlessly the perversions not only of the national state, but also of nationalism, will prevail.”10
We take pains to parse the nation from the state because it is second nature for citizens, as well as those exercising state power, to adhere to a narrative of the shared identity of a single people. Commoning offers a way out of this trap by acknowledging the actual diversity of social, ethnic, cultural, and religious identity. Identity-building processes emerge autonomously through commoning, with no imperative to integrate into one single political configuration, such as citizenship of a nation-state. In this sense, commoning serves as something of a staging area to co-create transnational, post-state identities that can get beyond the abuses of patriotism and nationalism.

RECUADRO
Equal Under Law, Unequal in Reality
Even though modern states may constitute all citizens as legal equals, in practice the exercise of civil liberties and rights often depends upon one’s wealth, reputation, political connections, and so forth. Societal discrimination plays a role as well. For example, discrimination may be so deeply embedded in our thinking, language, and institutions that people do not even see different points of view or they consider them irrelevant. Then, no individual person appears directly responsible for discrimination. It’s “nobody’s fault.” But in the end, it is people from Africa who clean offices at night and women (often Eastern European) who perform low-status care work.
Equality before the law can even provide a clever way to give certain groups of actors preferential treatment. In other words, equality before the law can serve as a brilliant disguise for privileging certain players in backdoor ways. Policies and regulations may purport to be neutral, for example, but in fact favor a certain class of large businesses over others. Finance, automobile manufacturers, and agricultural sectors have become too big to fail and too relevant for Gross Domestic Product to actually be held responsible for antisocial behaviors. This leads to privileged economic players more or less dictating the terms of law at the expense of unorganized individuals and the common good. Or as an unknown author wrote about English land enclosures ratified by the Parliament in the seventeenth century:
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.
FIN DEL RECUADRO

In our two concluding chapters, we have two ambitions — to imagine how commoning can help catalyze an OntoShift and thus use and potentially alter state power in significant ways (this chapter); and to suggest new legal forms and policies that commoners might use to transform specific state actions and in so doing support commoning (Chapter Ten). If we apply the worldview outlined in Chapter Two to our understanding of the way state power works, we can see no such thing as the state. This reorientation helps us envision new strategic opportunities for dealing with state institutions. It helps us to focus on specific institutional designs and bureaucratic processes that privilege certain groups over others, notwithstanding formal equality before the law.
A relational approach to state power helps us envision all sorts of piecemeal ways of advancing the commons. All can contribute to a more consequential, transformative agenda that will reconfigure power relations 1) within the state institutions; and 2) between them and commoners. If we can focus on the different agents and layers of state power instead of the fictional monolith known as “the state,” we can imagine other ways of involving the public in the day-to-day business of governing. We can get a glimpse of the possibilities in open platforms that invite citizens to help city councils in urban planning, government websites that encourage citizen feedback about public services, participatory budgeting programs that let citizens make spending decisions, and government support for co-housing and volunteer networks for the elderly. A fruitful collaboration between a commons and the state can arise because commoners can provide services that neither commercial enterprises nor government agencies can or want to provide.
The Barcelona internet provider Guifi.net, which we introduced in Chapter One, has developed a constructive relationship with the municipal government because it provides an infrastructure solution for a problem that politicians have trouble addressing — how to provide high-quality connectivity in the countryside and other remote, low-density areas. Guifi.net started by “connecting a pig farm to a cow farm,” and in a few years the network, functioning as a commons, was serving tens of thousands of people.11 “What if government trusted the people to share the job of governing?” asked Geoff Mulgan in a major report published by the UK think tank Nesta in 2012.12 A richer government-citizen dialogue in the exercise of state power would certainly help enhance the trust and legitimacy of states.
In more general terms, it is fair to ask what a strategic relational approach to state power in liberal democracies might look like in practice. Would it really lead to a situation in which, as British Labour MP Tessa Jovells writes, state agents “prioritize the giving of power to individuals and communities […] by allowing local residents to commission their own services, by giving communities the opportunity to identify the priorities for local spending, or by putting people in touch with local residents with skills and time to give.” This is certainly possible, but only “if politicians are prepared to trust staff and local people to make decisions.”13
It is all about trust! This insight is basic and challenging at once. State agents generally seek to assert control, and to use numbers, standard units, and bureaucratic systems to do so — even though all of us live in particular landscapes with unique histories, personalities, and webs of social allegiances.
There is a structural mismatch between state power and living systems. To be effective and trusted, state power cannot just impose bureaucratic master plans; it must learn how to foster relationships among real people who have their own creative agency. This requires that we get away from the idea of human beings as units of need to which “service providers” must minister — a mentality that has produced the dehumanizing, disempowering institutionalization so trenchantly critiqued by Ivan Illich.14 Focused on administering services, state agencies and service professionals tend to dismiss people’s own creative talents, desire to contribute, and capacities for commoning. In short, they neither recognize people’s actual human agency nor strengthen that power. For their part, most people have internalized this image of themselves as passive consumers of professional and government services, and fail to regard themselves as potential participants in Peer Governance or the state polity.
Thus, the central challenge we face is to re-imagine state power in ways that support commoning. We must find ways for state powers to provide time, space, assistance, legal authority, and organizational systems for people to devise their own solutions to problems.15
Some Working Notes on State Power
Many people presume that humanity has made a linear progression from hunting and gathering to nomadic tribes and clans, followed by small agricultural settlements and early states, monarchies, and feudal societies, finally culminating in the civilizational peak that we now enjoy, the modern nation-state. The narrative is a self-congratulatory exercise that celebrates liberal democracies organized as states as the best, most civilized form of governance in human history. Conversely, anyone who criticizes this point of view or wishes to avoid the governance of states is regarded as ignorant, primitive, and backward, or even prehistoric.
But what if the modern state in its intimate alliance with capital represents an evolutionary dead end? Has this centralized, hierarchical system of power become too brittle and inefficient to govern the riotous complexity of local realities and human diversity, notwithstanding its adaptations to the realities of networked society and hybrid governance institutions? Has it become too alienated from the more-than-human world and oblivious to its imperatives? Some critics note that civilization is not just facing the challenges of Peak Oil — the declining availability of inexpensive fossil fuels — but also of Peak Hierarchy, the declining effectiveness of centralized, hierarchical structures of administration. Michel Bauwens writes that “horizontality [in social and economic relations] is starting to trump verticality; it is becoming more competitive to be distributed, than to be (de)centralized. The two combined forces of Peak Oil and Peak Hierarchy are going to dramatically change the world we will live in.”16
Given these fierce pressures on the traditional lineaments of state power, we believe it is time to think about new possibilities that reflect a constructive, wholesome relationship with commoning. The theorist who has probably done the most to develop a coherent historical theory of the state from a commoner’s perspective is Yale anthropologist James C. Scott. Scott argues that countless populations have historically sought to avoid state power because of its military aggression, taxation, autocratic mandates, and propensity to enslave people. They also sought to avoid being drawn into living and working conditions that brought about disease and even pandemics.17 While the Leviathan18 purports to guarantee many rights and liberties for its citizens, the rise of the market/state is at least as important as a force for controlling people. The Great Wall of China was built as much to keep Chinese citizens in as it was to keep “barbarian” invaders out. In our time, nations like India, China, and the United States are deploying pervasive digital technologies to enable panoptical, constant forms of surveillance of their citizens and foreigners.19
State power too often regularizes the governance of life and consolidates power through centralized, bureaucratic systems, as Scott explains in his book Seeing Like a State:

[T]he modern state, through its officials, attempts with varying success to create a terrain and a population with precisely those standardized characteristics that will be easiest to monitor, count, assess and manage. The utopian, immanent and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observation.20
The state’s many attempts to impose a universal order are not without value. There are gains for a society when a state issues its own money; identifies everyone in order to collect taxes and control territorial borders; establishes weights and measures to make land and agricultural output legible; and so on. However, a state’s obsession with standardizing its means of control and ability to coerce compliance can be highly repressive, too. State power often relies on positive law and police action to insist upon state-friendly behaviors and norms. Bureaucracies are especially useful in this task because their centrally managed systems can override the many natural differences among people. Over time, states prod their citizens to internalize values and goals, to bring about a unified, regimented order from what they regard as the chaos and barbarism of the pre-state. Thus, while modern, liberal states may manage to enlarge the scope of freedom that ordinary people have, such gains come at a price: special privileges for the political authority of the state and the market power of capital.
The drama of the modern liberal nation-state, however, is precisely its inability to truly control everything within its territorial borders. It cannot really control countless ethnic subcultures and social activity; cross-border flows of information, software code, and drugs; the quasi-independent credit systems that capitalists and organized crime have created; and the stability of ecosystems, among many other things.
The state, which presents itself as a stable, durable institution reliably exercising authority and power, cannot escape the reality that it is immersed in a churning ebb and flow of relationships. A state consists of a menagerie of bureaucracies, each directed by officials enmeshed in different political and professional networks and committed to different political and technical agendas. Even though modern states seek to standardize life, each does so in different ways. One might say there are variations among states — a left-wing variation that focuses on fairness and material equality, for example, and a right-wing variation that accents economic freedom, the terms of legal contracts, and other commercial concerns. In other words, social outcomes may vary from one country to another, but the essential political functions remain much the same.
This means that states are handicapped when it comes to honoring diverse forms of self-determination or delegations of power. As Marc Stears puts it:

States work best when a problem has a technical, mechanical solution which can be employed everywhere within a shared geographic space. They are at their worst when they need to respond flexibly to local particularities, when they need to act nimbly or with nuance, and — most importantly of all — when they delve into problems of the nation’s spirit or of the human heart. Anything which requires difference, contingency and essential unpredictability is not going to be a skill of the state.21

Indeed, you might say that states are afflicted with methodological nationalism for good or ill, whether to spread “civilization and democracy,” or to seek colonial or imperialist conquest. Fetishizing the sovereignty of the state blinds us to the pluriversal, self-governed worlds that everyone lives in, day in and day out. It is no surprise that the world making and Peer Governance that commoners routinely engage in are generally invisible to state bureaucracies. That is why viewing the world through the lens of the commons is useful: it brings into focus a plethora of solutions and widens our opportunities to act.
Once we choose to see the state not as an omnipotent monolith but as a configuration of power that varies a great deal and is even parochial and vulnerable in certain respects, we can begin to imagine ways to alter state power in piecemeal ways, as opportunities arise. We can see how social practices and relations can help us transform state power, at least at some incremental level. While modalities of governance and state authority vary immensely, people in more intimate local contexts experience politics as more accessible, adaptable, and accountable.
This is one reason why cities and towns are likely to play an outsized role in transforming state power. Their smaller scale offers more opportunities for change. Political scientist Benjamin Barber saw mayors as vital figures in the transformation of societies in the future22 and theorist Murray Bookchin argued that “libertarian municipalism” offered the best opportunities for social change by empowering democratic assemblies and confederations of free municipalities.23 It should not be surprising that one of the most robust forces for change in Europe is a “new municipalism” movement that is trying to decentralize the power of the state and remake state power from the bottom up.24
In the standard understanding of the economy and politics, local action is often patronized as too small-scale to be significant. But in today’s world, everything is in fact SLOC — small and local, but open and connected25 — which means that even discrete, particular actions can catalyze important change. An obscure Occupy Wall Street protest in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park in 2011 sparked scores of Occupy protests around the world and made wealth inequality an urgent public issue. The Global Covenant for Mayors for Climate and Energy, similarly, has been highly influential in bringing valuable initiatives to the attention of international policymakers.26 When São Paolo activists fight for affordable housing as something that helps reduce carbon emissions, or when Barcelona activists turn Airbnb apartments into social housing, the reverberations are felt across the globe in many other cities, state legislatures, and international fora. “What some people deride as ‘localism’ is actually the very foundation of transformative change,” argues the Symbiosis Research Collective.27
This is entirely plausible, not just because local political arenas are smaller and more accessible, but because localism allows for new types of grassroots, networked political organization that goes beyond political parties. We see this in Spain, for example, where the 15-M movement is influencing municipal power. It has helped the idea that “the personal is political” become visible and easy to grasp. This concept means that individual, concrete experience — instead of theoretical or strategic considerations — is taken seriously and employed as the starting point for policy. It is fundamentally different from “conceiving politics as ‘technically correct’ management of ‘unavoidable’ necessities of global capitalism,” in the words of journalist and writer Amador Fernández-Savater.28
When activists gain radical democratic experience — simple things such as the “procedural forms of 15-M, assemblies with direct democracy, facilitation methods, working groups, shows of hands, or consensus-oriented decision-making,”29 — they are able to contribute at the municipal level. Radical municipal activism, when federated with similar actors elsewhere, can help carve out protected spaces for commoning ultimately to flourish and expand, with formal legal authority and administrative support.
Beyond Reform or Revolution
The primary goal of commoning is not to seize state power through revolution or elections. It is to develop stable independent spaces that have relative freedom to establish their own systems of Peer Governance and Provisioning. History has shown that even when leftists win state power through democratic means, it has dubious results in achieving system change. Since 2015, the Greek political coalition led by Syriza discovered that its stunning electoral victory, nominally giving it control of a sovereign state, was not enough. The Greek state was in fact still subordinated to the power of international capital and the geopolitical interests of other states. The rise of Indigenous politician Evo Morales to the presidency of Bolivia revealed a similar lesson: even smart, well-intentioned electoral movements have trouble transcending the deep imperatives of state power because the state remains tightly yoked to an international system of capitalist finance and resource extraction. Pablo Solón Romero, a long-time Bolivian activist and the former Ambassador of the Plurinational State of Bolivia to the United Nations (2009-2011), told a cautionary tale:

Fifteen years ago [in the early 2000s], we had a lot of commoning in Bolivia — for forests, water, justice, etc. To preserve this, when our enemy was the state and privatizing everything, we decided we would take the state. And we succeeded! And we were able to do good things. Now we have a plurinational state. That’s positive. But … ten years later, are our communities stronger or weaker? They are weaker! We can’t do everything that we wanted to do via the state. The state and its structures have their own logic. We were naïve. We didn’t realize that those structures were going to change us.30

What this suggests is that while electoral politics can achieve some important things, it has clear structural limitations as well. The guardians of state power constantly strive to constitute and extend the very culture that sustains it: a patriotic and civic mythos, infrastructure and institutions, money and commerce, and, of course, vigilance against potential challenges and subversion. Reformers are quite happy to seek gradual transformations through the apparatus of state power itself. Revolutionaries might appear to want the polar opposite — to abruptly overthrow state power entirely. And yet, “the substance of modern revolutionary theories is unfortunately thin,” write German political theorists Sutterlütti and Meretz.31 Revolutionaries focus on the old structures and have to situate themselves within them, and then seek to overthrow or abolish them. But they usually don’t have much to say about what the new order should look like. Nor do they speak to the inner transformations needed to bring about a new polity and culture. Sutterlütti and Meretz conclude: “Reform and revolution turn out to be children of traditional Marxism: They can imagine how to seize political power and redesign the state, but not how to enact a free society.”32
We need to go beyond the “reform or revolution” narrative! Perhaps towards something that German political scientist Joachim Hirsch calls “radical reformism.” Radical reformism need not be fixated on the state. The term refers to the role of cultural and societal changes, the importance of which cannot be overstated. First, there was the revolt of 1968, then the changes in the law — not the other way around, But the idea of radical reformism still remains “reformism” because, in Hirsch’s words, “it is not about seizing power through revolution” and it is “radical” because its target is “the societal relationships that bring forth the dominant relations of power and domination.”33 The idea is also radical because it encompasses how people can change themselves. That, in turn, Hirsch claims, is possible only “if people succeed in creating forms of political-social self-organization beyond and independent of the existing governing apparatuses, the state, and the political parties, and in putting a concept of politics into practice that takes up the ‘political’ aspects of the ‘private.’”34
This brings us to our contemporary impasse. Can we imagine a transformation of the world that avoids the pitfalls of both reform and revolution? Can we envision a world that is not utopian — in the sense of being “nowhere” (the literal meaning of utopia) — but built on successful experiences, inhabited and run by real people? That is what we attempted to do in Chapters Four through Six — to sketch the actual dynamics of social life, governance, and provisioning in the new order. There must be practical pathways for the vision to be achieved, and for no one to be left behind. As Murray Bookchin wrote, “Perhaps the greatest single failing of movements for social reconstruction — I refer particularly to the Left, to radical ecology groups, and to organizations that profess to speak for the oppressed — is their lack of a politics that will carry people beyond the limits established by the status quo.”35
So our questions are: Can commoning as we’ve described it potentially enact a more humane social order at scale, notwithstanding state power? Can commoning generate new ways of governing and provisioning that advance freedom, fairness, and eco-responsibility for everyone? Can this occur in ways that make us feel alive, rather than like puppets at the command of a totalistic megamachine?36 Can commoning help us regain sovereignty that the systemic power of the megamachine has eclipsed? We immodestly think the answer is yes. Yes, it is indeed possible! That is the power of commoning. We are convinced that it starts with learning how to be the revolution rather than only doing it — often known as “prefigurative politics.” That means trying things out. Living with them for a while. Reflecting on them. Making corrections and adjustments. Our focus need not be on state policies as such, even if they cannot be completely avoided. The focus must be on building a new social order.
There is a simple reason for this approach: a truly free and fair society cannot be generated out of a political or state-driven process which is based and dependent on “the way things work.” This won’t change the cultural foundations of society or its inner mindscape. Real transformation must draw upon the foundations we sketched out in the first chapters of this book. It must develop its own vision and be actualized through its own structures. It must enact a social process that can constitute an alternative order over time at all levels — individual, collective, societal — for independently fulfilling people’s aspirations for transformation. To recall J.K. Gibson-Graham’s advice again: “If to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and the relation is reciprocal, then the project of history making is never a distant one but always right here, on the borders of our sensing, thinking, feeling, moving bodies.”37 Dealing with state power poses a formidable challenge. But perhaps the most powerful, durable way to meet this challenge is to reorient ourselves and build protectable commons. This approach offers a path for moving ahead despite state power because it transforms us as well as external political and institutional structures. The two must proceed together, with the details emerging and not truly predictable.
The importance of state power is undeniable, but the ambition to take over state power is almost certain to result in disillusionment. The capitalist state is simply too deeply committed to property, individualism, and a culture of commodification. And those political leaders who may wish to explore post-capitalist possibilities will find themselves locked into a global system of states that themselves are locked into a world market. This is why, at the end of the day, the strongest argument that any politician in the world can make for a policy is, “It will create jobs.” In other words, everyone must constantly recommit to the prevailing economic model and simply accept the collateral damages. Various social movements have proposed other ways forward — 
other ways of living that are less dependent on the market/state megamachine — but this path is largely blocked because state leaders in alliance with the corporate sector can usually co-opt or subvert any perceived threats to the system.
The Power of Commoning
Where does that leave us? How might commoners grow the Common­sverse while living within a market/state system that is otherwise poised to ignore or fight it? Any answers must deal with a paradox: state power is too formidable and coercive to ignore, yet conventional attempts to transform it are likely to be unsatisfactory. Somehow the very terms of politics, governance, and law must be re-imagined and changed. Bold manifestos or rhetorical postures will not be enough. Only actual social practice and living culture can make headway. If this may sound a bit fanciful to some people, remember Hannah Arendt’s concept of power as something that “springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse,” as she wrote in The Human Condition.38 If power arises whenever people come together, it is always capable of being created. It does not inhere in state institutions themselves; it is not a fixed, inherent capacity that can be stored. Such power is not necessarily power over something or somebody; it can empower people to take their lives into their own hands, rather than making them powerless vis-à-vis the omnipotence of those in power — if it is created through enabling structures, dialogue, and responsibility.
Seen from this perspective, commoning is a vehicle for creating power. Perhaps, in time, it can also become a means to incrementally challenge state and market omnipotence by withdrawing its fuel and depriving the megamachine of its sustenance — us. Our participation fuels the market/state. Of course, there are reasons for this. Viewed individually, it is functional, if not essential, to play along with the game being played. Otherwise, we will lose income and status, forms of security that we are accustomed to, or even our jobs. That’s why so many of the familiar strategies for pursuing long-term social transformation are, structurally speaking, dead ends.
The most powerful feature of commoning may be its ability to redirect people’s energies and stop feeding the power engines of modern markets and nation-states. It does this by providing alternative ways of meeting needs and by building quasi-autonomous modes of power. The modern state retains many enormous advantages, of course — its alliance with capital, its commitment to economic growth, its consolidated control of power. These capacities seemingly insulate it from the need to negotiate with citizens about transformational change. This is a darkly hilarious conceit because in this time of climate breakdown, ecosystem collapse, desertification, etc., even state power cannot defy planetary systems that are becoming political agents in their own right, as Bruno Latour has noted.39 The sheer amount of energy and material throughput needed to sustain economic growth is reaching physical limits, exhausting everyone and the planet. Growth is subverting the very social emancipation and progress that is the alleged justification for growth. And this is occurring even before the governments can contemplate fairer redistributions of wealth — a possibility that itself is shrinking as the wealthy use their money to undermine liberal democracy.40
While most commoners have no aspirations to frontally seize state power or compete in markets, their activities nonetheless have important long-term ramifications. They help reallocate power. Commoning creates new vessels of non-state power simply by bringing people together to collaborate. We can see this effect in the ways that GNU/Linux, and other open source programs profoundly, albeit indirectly, transformed software markets and a massive industry. Today it would be silly to produce an encyclopedia the old way, through a top-down assemblage of experts producing an expensive commodity, when the bottom-up, cooperative alternative, Wikipedia — with its flexible, decentralized structures, multiple languages, diversity, and topicality — has so many advantages. We can see how local organic farming and allied food movements, by building an alternative universe of wholesome agriculture, have induced industrial agriculture to grow organic produce and reduce processing in food products. The more food commons that arise to “crowd-feed the world”41 and the more CSA farms that provide fresh, local, affordable food, the less people will have to depend on industrial agriculture or charity handouts. The bottom-up activities of feminist movements worldwide, too, have changed how state power is exercised on all sorts of reproductive, gender, and workplace issues, as the #MeToo movement has shown.
Such histories persuade us that social movements are more likely to be transformative if they develop parallel economies with structural independence from the conventional market/state. This means also that commons are more likely to survive and retain their independence if they are less entangled with the conventional economy and state power, and if they can rely on internal systems (Peer Governance, knowledge-sharing, federated support from other commoners) for resilience. At the same time, it is imperative to engage with state power through elections and traditional advocacy, if only because that field of action can change the conditions for widening spaces of commonality. It is too consequential to be ignored.
So commoners need a two-track mindset in dealing with state power: a primary focus on building the new — keeping the conceptual insights above in mind — while also attempting to neutralize the old.
Revamping State Power to Support Commoning
We have outlined a general stance towards the state in moving forward, but we have not burrowed into the deeper questions: In what specific ways can state power itself be altered to support commoning? What openings in law and bureaucratic behavior, or in politics and local action, might be exploited to secure stable beachheads for commoning?
The first priority is to convince state institutions to back off. Recall Elinor Ostrom’s wisdom in her seventh design principle for successful commons. She asserted that state authorities must recognize the right of commoners to govern themselves.42 External governmental authorities must not challenge the right of the users of common resources (or “appropriators,” in Ostrom’s language) to devise their own rules and governance regimes. This is our starting point and a minimal requirement. We could derive a principle of noninterference from it. The state must get out of the way so that commoners can engage in the value-generating activities that only they can do.
Given the realities, however, commons may find that they need legal recognition to grow and flourish. In instances where state institutions regard sharing as a crime — e.g., seed sharing, software collaborations, information sharing — commoning must be decriminalized. This is part of normalizing commons and acknowledging that the moral and political legitimacy of commoning exists prior to and independent of modern states.43
Consider how state power has been used to let investors form corporations and limit their liability, ostensibly because such organizational forms serve the public good. Monarchs and, later, legislatures saw corporations as a way to encourage activities that the state itself could not or did not want to undertake. Early ventures such as the investor-owned British East India Company, for example, developed colonial trade regimes, extracted natural resources, exploited cheap labor, and built railroads and waterways. Why shouldn’t state power also recognize the immense value generated by commoners by granting their institutions legal standing?
Such recognition will not come easily, of course. Political leaders and bureaucrats who bow down before the standard economic narrative have trouble seeing other modes of value. Moreover, some state institutions themselves are designed to depend on market revenues. For example, the European Patent Office — an interstate governance body that grants patents under the European Patent Convention — is designed to finance most of its one billion euro budget by collecting fees from patent applicants. Since the more patents it grants, the more money it collects, the Patent Office has a strong incentive to make more scientific and technical knowledge proprietary. While it is understandable to charge patent holders for services provided — and not, say, the general taxpayer — this mechanism is a disincentive to support a world in which we Share Knowledge Generously. Such a societal ideal tends to be regarded as aberrant, if not faintly ridiculous. So are any ambitions to achieve social harmony and intergenerational continuity and protect cultural heritage. As for the potential contributions that subsistence communities and nomadic tribes make to eco-sensitive choices, many moderns continue to depict them as primitive, uncivilized, and hopelessly backward.44
Thus, we are imprisoned within a progress narrative validated and reproduced by state institutions. We are told the economy must grow (to fulfill targets contrived by corporations) so that we can compete successfully on the global market. World leaders urge us not to fall behind. Being outpaced in technological innovation is considered by the business and political communities to be the worst fate of all. One innovation after another — driverless cars, synthetic biology, nanotechnology — is pushed through regulatory procedures, at times with too little time to consider the full societal costs and benefits. All this makes it difficult for people to embrace a shift to the commons. Moreover, guardians of state power understandably think: why should the state cede any authority to nonmarket, decentralized activities or provide funding support to things that have no market value? It would only enrage elites and disrupt internal political arrangements. In addition, letting people withdraw from the circuitry of the market/state system will only embolden the yearning for self-determination, goes the thinking … and that could be dangerous. It would only encourage unregulated activity, amateur experimentation, and perhaps demands for greater autonomy. The guardians of state power may understandably fear that if people decommodify their everyday lives and wean themselves away from dependencies on market/state systems, it will reduce the state’s moral standing, political authority, and tax revenues.
Thus the challenge: if the commons is going to evolve as an alternative matrix of governance and provisioning, it must somehow overcome a deep-seated skepticism about commoning among many bureaucrats, politicians, and governments. This does not mean that no workarounds are possible. As stated earlier, the state is not a monolithic institution. State decision makers, despite their zeal in defending their authority, could find it advantageous to authorize and support commoning under the right circumstances. At the local level, this means: allocating land for community gardens and co-housing; facilitating the formation of community land banks and trusts; encouraging local agriculture and food systems; using open source software in public administration; providing free community Wi-Fi everywhere; using open educational resources (OER) in classrooms; providing space and support for timebanks, repair cafés, hackerspaces, and much more.
This is not a quixotic agenda. Those who wield state power are mindful of the need for public support and legitimacy. Many politicians, feeling the heat from fierce social protests against extractivism and the international trade regime, are looking for credible ways to escape the iron cage of neoliberal capitalism. Some political leaders are willing to concede the failures of the market/progress narrative to address climate breakdown, inequality, poverty, and hunger; but on the other hand, they are also fearful of breaking from dogmas about free markets and national identity.
Around the world, many authoritarians have seized upon the many failures of the market/state system to promote various forms of nationalism. Although a complicated and varied process, much of this political trend is fueled by a search for meaning, purpose, and belonging that the market/state is incapable of fulfilling. The political left and center, meanwhile, cling to conventional vehicles for change: new laws, policies, programs, and procedural reform. While sometimes significant, these approaches generally are carried out in distant state venues (courts, legislatures, government agencies) and fail to engage people personally. In the end, many liberals and social democrats remain tethered to the dominant narrative of progress and show little interest in bottom-up empowerment or social transformation. The cultural dimensions of commons-based initiatives such as agroecology, community land trusts, platform cooperatives, and cosmo-local production, are generally ignored or seen as too small and inconsequential to be taken seriously. Businesses, for their part, generally see them as threats to their market share and profits.
By this reasoning, the political mainstream cedes the politics of the local and vernacular to right-wing authoritarians. It focuses instead on the distant state, the brokering of power, and the usual forms of law and policy — but not on the ways in which ordinary people can find wholesome purpose and social connection in what they do. Anthropologist David Graeber has said that the problem of the left is that it has no credible alternative to bureaucracy.45 He’s right, and that’s why empowering people to meet their needs more directly, in ways that engage their sense of local identity (without creating tribes of the righteous and resentful), deserves serious attention. The commons can address many of these challenges in constructive, democratic ways, and that is one compelling reason for politicians to embrace the commons. State support for the commons would take a fledgling agenda to an entirely new level. It would move beyond bureaucratic supervision to outright delegations of authority to commoners.
But a simple shift of legal authority is not enough. Any state support for commoning will require many novel forms of administrative coordination, legal support, infrastructure development, and public education. Four general types of support are needed.
1. Catalyze & Propagate

IMG CATALYZE & PROPAGATE

Imagine a town in which supermarkets are run as cooperatives, helping residents to buy higher-quality, local food produced under fair and eco-responsible conditions. The local taxi service and tourist lodgings are managed by platform cooperatives, letting households and the community share the benefits. Nursing services are run by a neighborhood home care venture such as Buurtzorg (Chapter One). Electricity generated by rooftop solar panels is pooled and shared via distributed ledger technology software,46 which is reducing high electric bills and allowing public divestment from fossil fuels and nuclear power. The state at all levels is providing infrastructures, technical advice, and funding that let people launch their own makerspaces, CSA farms, energy cooperatives, tool-sharing commons, repair cafés, and timebanking exchanges.47
This scenario may seem laughably utopian, but that is only because the state already has so many deep, often-invisible commitments to supporting the market system. Contrary to its ideological pretensions, the market system depends on countless state expenditures and interventions: subsidies to entire industries, special tax breaks, legal privileges, research funding, regulation to bolster consumer trust, trade treaties to facilitate exports, potential military support for overseas market assets, and much else. To spur market activity and growth, the state routinely uses its standard powers to build and finance infrastructure, create and oversee finance systems, and establish bodies of law to assist commerce.
Yet the benefits of this model of economic development flow primarily to a narrow class of investors and corporations, not taxpayers and ordinary people except in trickle down ways. Given the enormous costs and inequities — and dwindling returns — of this approach, the stewards of state power, or at least the shrewder ones, may find some genuine appeal in the commons. They could leverage the passions and imaginations of countless people while meeting their needs in fairer, more efficient, lower-cost ways. Why can’t the state’s capacity for building infrastructure, supporting finance, and drafting new bodies of law — now used primarily to support markets — be deployed in an analogous fashion to support commoning? One can imagine using state law to encourage free and open licensing, relationalized property rights in land, chartering regimes that authorize commons, cooperative finance, and technical assistance programs. In short, state institutions could do a great deal to Catalyze & Propagate the commons.

RECUADRO
Functionaries for Commons?
Imagine if commons seeking to deal with city agencies could deal with a one-stop process rather than having to approach numerous public agencies one by one! For many projects, that would be like winning the lottery. The designated contact persons would have to be very knowledgeable in order to help commoners find their way through the thicket of rules and regulations they are confronted with. They would also need to have the authority to act independently, perhaps by being an organizational arm of the mayor’s office, and have the competencies to grant permits and funding.
Amsterdam has taken a step in this direction with regional liaisons known as gebieds-makelaars. The “area brokers” maintain relationships with citizens’ groups and share knowledge and information about public agencies with the citizenry. However, they lack an independent status within the municipal bureaucracy as well as the power and the personnel which would make them true clearinghouses for commons.48
FIN DEL RECUADRO

The challenge is huge, because so much of it is cultural, in making commoning more publicly visible and developing a larger narrative about cooperation and sharing. State-supported institutions could serve as clearinghouses for technical, legal, and financial guidance about peer governance and commons-based provisioning in diverse contexts (agriculture, social services, energy, alternative currencies, etc.). A national office for timebanking could greatly expand that social system for meeting needs. Government support could be of immeasurable help in establishing community supported agriculture, acquiring land for housing commons, funding neighborhood services, providing technical guidance in getting Fab Labs started, and nurturing little-known innovations on the fringe.
2. Establish Commons at the Macroscale
One reason that state institutions are so indispensable to helping foster commons is the scale and coordination they can provide for managing large-scale resources. Forests, waterways, grazing lands, and underground mineral deposits often traverse large landscapes and cross political boundaries. Legal and administrative coordination at a macroscale is therefore required to figure out how multiple claims to a given landscape or resource will be resolved, and how various individual commons should be defined and delimited. One example is a Dutch project called King of the Meadows.49 Many people became alarmed at the disappearance of the once-common Black-tailed Godwit, due to agricultural practices that have wiped out its meadow habitat. The King of the Meadows project brought together citizens, farmers, musicians, artists, scientists, dairy producers, and others to reconnect people to the landscape and promote “nature-inclusive agriculture” to help restore the godwit and celebrate the connection between biological and cultural diversity. The initiative is now a robust regional, networked collaboration.

IMG ESTABLISH COMMONS AT A MACROSCALE

In cases such as this, state power can play a useful role in providing “macroplatforms” to facilitate action that may exceed the capacities of individual commons to solve. State agents have an obvious role in serving as an honest broker among factions in conflict resolution and cross-border negotiations. Of course, the political chemistry of serving such a role effectively depends upon many circumstantial factors. But a state role is entirely plausible and should not be dismissed. Demonstrable public support can persuade the state to try new approaches.
Following a long-running controversy over the management of the Siuslaw National Forest in Oregon in the 1990s, the US Forest Service decided to abandon the standard bureaucratic processes driven by congressional politics and industry lobbying. Instead, it invited anyone with an interest in the forest to attend open roundtable meetings to discuss how forest policy might reconcile the competing interests of timber companies, environmentalists, recreational fishers, local communities, hikers, and others. The agency established a watershed council, which helped warring factions overcome mutual distrust and come up with durable consensus resolutions to jurisdictional conflicts (e.g., salmon spawn in one area of the watershed and later swim hundreds of miles to the ocean). The state’s mediation also encouraged people to entertain flexible, long-term plans that would not otherwise have emerged through the bureaucracy or litigation.50
A remarkable number of innovative legal vehicles have been created in recent years to protect commoning. The government of New Zealand has granted legal personality to the Whanganui River, as sought by the Maori, recognizing it as “a living and organic whole … from the mountains to the sea, incorporating all of its physical and metaphysical elements.”51 The legislation means that the Whanganui iwi (people), as the designated guardians of the river, can continue their ancient commoning practices with the official sanction of state law. In Peru, the Quechua people have established the Indigenous Biocultural Heritage Area, or Potato Park, to protect the biodiversity of potatoes managed by Quechua people.52 By having a legal instrument that can be recognized by Peruvian courts, the Quechua have greater assurance that they can live in intimate reciprocal relationship with the land, each other, and the spirit world. Most notably, the Quechua’s legal protections help them protect their commons against attempted acts of biopiracy when biotech corporations try to patent the genetic information of rare potatoes.
3. Provide Infrastructures for Commoning
States have a special capacity to help disparate enterprises grow more rapidly by building infrastructures and requiring technical standards that allow for easy interoperability and safety. Infrastructures designed with commons in mind — or even better, designed to be stewarded by commoners themselves — can make it easier and cheaper for people to initiate their own self-organized systems. The classic example is the US Government’s development of technical protocols known as TCP/IP, which enable diverse computing networks to interconnect into a single, integrated internet. The state could do similar things today by recognizing open technical standards that limit proprietary control, while taking steps to ensure that the largest, wealthiest businesses do not simply use open standards to capture the innovation space. We need open but protected commons (see pp. 69–72) to assure interoperability and nondiscriminatory access (as platform neutrality does).

IMG PROVIDE INFRASTRUCTURES FOR COMMONING

Open technical standards for government procurement could be issued to make free and open source software a default infrastructure in government agencies, especially in schools. Instead of being familiar with proprietary software, students would graduate from school with extensive skills in working GNU/Linux and other open source software. Schools would not be degraded by becoming quasi-captive extensions of large software corporations’ marketing departments. This would have spinoff benefits for general education, higher education, municipal governments, and the general public. State-endorsed protocols for word processing, database, and email software and APIs (application protocol interfaces, which are the technical linkages between software programs and operating systems), could foster greater open source innovation, avoiding the walled gardens owned by Apple and Google. Cities might more easily develop platform cooperatives for housing, ride-hailing services, and information services to benefit local residents instead of Silicon Valley investors. Open design protocols for energy grids could replicate the success of the internet by using open standards to encourage bottom-up innovation by smaller, creative players and preventing proprietary lock-ins by larger companies.
The point of state support for commons-based infrastructures is to neutralize private aggregations of power and shift it to commoners. For infrastructures used by society in general, it is critical that they be discrimination-free, so that no class of users can be arbitrarily excluded from access.53 This is one reason that the US National Institutes of Health now mandates open-access publishing protocols for taxpayer-funded research: it assures that state funds are used in open, accountable ways.54 The guiding principle is simple: that which has been publicly financed needs to remain in public hands.
Direct spending on infrastructure to support commoning is always an attractive option. Local governments could directly install Wi-Fi in public squares, as many cities around the world, such as Tel Aviv and Mexico City, have done. Others even provide free server space for websites, email, and data. This is what the city of Linz, Austria, has done with its Open Commons Linz initiative.55 Or states could support commons initiatives such as Freifunk, a network of German commoners that has built a free Wi-Fi network involving about 400 local communities and over 41,000 access points.56
4. Create New Types of Finance for the Commons
State agencies could provide essential support for all sorts of commoning by establishing commons-friendly finance systems. Even though most commons are nonmarket systems of provisioning, they operate within a larger world of market capitalism. They often need credit to build their own facilities and infrastructure, and to pay staff and buy goods and services. But unlike businesses or nonprofit organizations, commons seek to avoid types of debt that suck them into the world of competition, growth, and subordination to banks. They prefer to reject financial support linked to conditions beyond the scope and mission of the commons because debt entails a loss of freedom. Commoners also dismiss financing schemes that would allow private players to appropriate the value created (for example, through an equity stake that entitles investors or banks to skim off profits or to claim shared assets). Here, too, the very same logic seen in public settings applies: what has been created in the commons needs to stay in the commons.

IMG CREATE NEW TYPES OF FINANCE

At the moment, this is a field of experimentation and innovation. Some familiar progressive forms of credit such as public banks, cooperative banks, community development finance, and social and ethical banks, often support worthy social enterprises. But most of these finance schemes are geared toward providing less burdensome terms of credit (lower interest rates, easier approval, etc.) for enterprises facing the market. They do not seek to escape the force field of markets and conventional credit itself (competition, profit, growth), nor do they seek to support commons as commons.
Why not establish forms of credit that allow commons to function well on their own terms, not as ethically minded junior players in the great market system? What might this look like? The administrative barriers to accessing credit would have to be kept low, beginning with a noncompetitive approach in the granting of funds. Granting public funds and granting private credit is not just about approving the financials. It should be an open, trust-building conversation designed as a learning process for all actors involved, not just a dismal ritual of needy applicants begging an imperious loan committee for approval or satisfying empty metrics and superficial indicators of “success.”
There are even better options: commoners themselves could be the source of credit — lend to each other, or to the collective — as old-time mutual credit societies in the nineteenth century used to do. Monitoring the repayment of funds could be managed by commoners themselves, along the lines of microcredit systems, but without the need to pay onerous sums of interest to external sources of capital. Of course, in all such schemes, there must be effective internal tools to monitor and assure transparency.
There is a great deal of promise in such forms of self-financing, and pay-it-forward schemes as ways to help commoners secure greater long-term independence from the market/state. We saw how this works in Mietshäuser Syndikat’s pooling of funds from members, which is then used to buy additional rental housing. The Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative is another example in which donor governments and international organizations jointly finance basic research and development into new drugs for neglected diseases. (More about DNDi in Chapter Ten).
Commons and Subsidiarity
A key factor in advancing any of these initiatives is organizing political support — and then ensuring that state power does not overwhelm or debase the commons with its own interventions. This is complicated territory. While some form of state entanglement with commons is unavoidable, if only to decriminalize them and provide legal stability, active state involvement can introduce a range of messy political dilemmas. There is a fine line between facilitation and interference.
For this reason, it is important that the state’s role be minimal and general. This allows commoners to have maximum discretion and authority in devising their own rules and governance, consistent with the principle of subsidiarity. This principle is widely mentioned in Ostrom scholarship, Catholic social thought, and even in the Lisbon Treaty, which provides the constitutional basis for the European Union. In actual practice, unfortunately, subsidiarity is more often celebrated than practiced. That’s because, in most circumstances, Governing-through-Money and top-down management are allowed to override local empowerment. The dismaying history of subsidiarity as a grand aspiration, but rarely achieved reality, prompts us to conclude: there is no real subsidiarity without commons! The two have the same scope, the same boundaries; they are coextensive because commoning is inherently a distributed form of governance, and provisioning is not beholden to outside sources of power. The same cannot be said of traditional, hierarchical tiers of government (federal, provincial or state, and local).
If we are serious about subsidiarity, then commoners must have the legal authority and protected space to devise their own rules, consistent with the general principles of a state polity. This virtually requires that commoners first organize themselves, then federate at the meso-level (the spaces among individual commons) to support each other in building commons despite the looming presence and meddling of state power. This is how they can become a political force to defend true subsidiarity. While such an agenda will initially be seen as political because it challenges the status quo, over time the goal is to make acts of commoning utterly normal.
What about Fundamental Rights 
Guaranteed by the State?
To talk about rights is to look to state power as ultimately guaranteeing those rights. While the assertion of human rights, due process, and various civil rights represents an enormous advance in human history, the actual enforcement of these rights, and therefore their lived reality, remains a more problematic issue.
One reason that lawyers had to come up with a second generation of human rights (access to food, shelter, human care, and education),57 and then a third generation (the right to a healthy environment, to participate in one’s cultural heritage, and intergenerational equity),58 was to prod states and international bodies to meet these ideals. Admirable as this is, it skirts the question of whether state bureaucracies are structurally capable of fulfilling these rights, not just as a matter of law in a given case, but as a society-wide reality. It is not uncommon for law to be used as a vehicle for aspirations and symbolism, in the way that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris climate agreement set certain targets for performance at a national level. However, given the limited ability and interest of states to transform themselves, one should not put too much faith in the effectiveness of treaties or national laws. Such enactments can be mere gestures; enforcement can be problematic; and organized industries and investors in practice are usually granted a veto.
Commoners do not generally speak about “rights” because rights depend on some external institution guaranteeing them. They imply an alien political and social order, one of isolated-I’s petitioning a remote, powerful Leviathan. And yet, in assuring access to basic means of subsistence, many commons are arguably achieving much more than the high-minded goals nominally embraced by states and asserted in legal documents.59 While fundamental rights do not truly provide everyone with access to the means of subsistence, most commons consider subsistence their core priority. At the same time, it is clear that many traditional commons in rural India or Asia do not embrace the worldview of individual rights, aspire to gender and ethnic inclusion, or even the adjudicatory authority of the modern liberal state. In short, the commons and the modern state represent an unresolved clash of worldviews and systems of governance. It is beyond our capacities here to prescribe a grand reconciliation of the different philosophical approaches. It is enough to say, for now, that the state retains the upper hand, if only because of its coercive power.
But as numerous states are discovering, there are functional legal means by which state sovereignty can be blended with the sovereignty of commons. Indeed, some states accommodate (at least in part) the demands of Indigenous peoples — the Maori, the First Nations of Canada, Native Americans. Other states recognize the power of open source communities and social networking. Still others, India or states in Africa, acknowledge the ecological and social appeal of traditional subsistence commons. Many possibilities exist; they just haven’t been actively explored.
* * *
We now have a much clearer sense of the relationship between state power and commoning. But we also have a greater sense of the opportunities that may exist for state institutions to strengthen commons. Opportunities may arise unexpectedly through the vagaries of cultural moments when a specific initiative unexpectedly unleashes new energies among people for change.
While there can obviously be no omnibus, master strategy for gaining state support for commoning, there are some highly promising ways that commoners can build their capabilities and power and, in the process, become significant forces in the mainstream political economy. In Chapter Ten, we explore some of them.

10. Take Commoning to Scale

Since commoning is so associated with small-scale provisioning and governance, skeptics often wonder how a commons can possibly function at larger scales and have transformational effects. In this chapter we explore this question. The premise is that commons cannot play a significant role in addressing climate breakdown and other ecological problems, Peak Oil, poverty, inequality, and countless other problems because they are too small. Massive global problems require massive solutions, goes the thinking, which then requires nation-states to come up with something. By this logic commons have very little to offer.
This framing is precisely part of the problem, however, because it fails to consider that all kinds of solutions, big or small, may be failing precisely because their foundational parts are flawed. A building with an inadequate foundation for its size is destined to crumble. A society based on unfettered individual freedom should not be surprised if its citizens eventually over-exploit the Earth and destroy necessary social norms. The truth is that large systems often cannot be fixed at scale; repairing them may require revisiting and reinventing the system’s smaller component parts and sub-assemblies. In addressing the pathologies of the modern market/state, that is our theory of social and political change.
To be sure, there are many worthwhile reforms that one can attempt by working within the system at scale. That is essentially the approach that social democrats and progressives pursue. They focus on creating new institutions like co-operatives, for-benefit corporations, land trusts, and public banks, or on creating new programs such as universal basic income, environmental regulation, and income-redistribution schemes. Such reforms may or may not lead to larger transformation —
and that is our point. We wish to suggest how commoning can be transformational in positive, durable ways by protecting its structural and cultural integrity even as it expands its reach.
On too many occasions, progressive initiatives have been captured or co-opted by investors and corporations, among other forces, preventing them from inducing systemic change. We have seen, for example, how the Couchsurfing website, a gift economy of lodging for travelers, morphed from a hospitality commons into a commercial travel service several years ago. Its managers concluded that the website needed more funds to maintain itself, and so they accepted venture capital funding and the shifts in priorities that entailed. Similarly, we have seen how Silicon Valley has co-opted other websites dedicated to sharing and collaboration, turning them into lucrative micro-rental markets (for lodging, transport, and piecemeal labor, among other things). The state itself, working with influential industries, has often made it more difficult for commons-friendly systems to grow. This has been the experience of organic farming, open source software, and open-access scholarly publishing, for example.
The future demands that we break these patterns of co-optation and resistance. Commons need the means to grow, individually and as federations, on their own terms, and to be able to flourish even within the mainstream economy. This requires that they have a hardy internal culture and governance that can function as a fierce immune system to protect them from external invaders (figurative viruses, bacteria, and parasites). Imagine if commons had the benefits of state support in meeting this challenge — funding, technical assistance, public outreach, and policy support. Imagine if commons enjoyed full legal recognition and financial resources to support their work.
We see great promise in three distinct strategies for expanding commons as a social form in societies otherwise designed for the market/state. It is important to: 1) Develop community charters as tools for constituting commoning; 2) Build and use distributed ledger platforms that can provide remarkable new affordances for cooperation on digital networks; and 3) Design commons-public partnerships that can leverage state power for the commons. Our vision for building out the Commonsverse through these means is necessarily speculative. Many approaches are still fairly new, and so there is not an extensive track record to study and learn from. Still, we believe that commons charters, distributed ledger technologies, and commons-public partnerships offer great potential for helping commons thrive despite their immersion in the dominant political culture.
Charters for Commoning
One of the most powerful tools for Bringing Diversity into Shared Purpose and constituting a community of commoners is a charter for commoning. Sometimes known as social charters and community charters, these documents set forth the founding goals, practices, and principles of their particular commons. In a way, the charter functions as a constitution. Prepared after extensive discussions, negotiation, and reflection, a charter articulates foundational commitments. It serves as a touchstone for a group as it encounters novel opportunities, choices, and setbacks. A charter is also an aspirational institutional statement that declares how commoners wish to govern themselves and what kind of culture they wish to create.
Charters are not meant to be fuzzy mission statements filled with fancy rhetoric. They are fairly specific about the identity and operational practices of the group. The WikiHouse open source design community (see pp. 21–22) declares in its charter that its participants share design globally and manufacture locally, use open standards and modular design, and design for the whole life cycle of the house, including the ability to make repairs.1 The permaculture world has embraced a set of twelve ethical and design principles such as “produce no waste,” “use small and slow solutions,” and “use and value diversity.”2 Members of the French stewardship organization Terre de Liens, which acquires land to preserve for agriculture, are committed to “decommodify land in perpetuity,” “enhance the development of grassroots farming,” and “foster collaboration around land use as well as pool together tools, funds, and experiences.”3
“Given the uniqueness of every commons,” writes James Quilligan, “there is no universal template for social charters — but a baseline is emerging.” He argues that a social charter “should include, at minimum, a summary of traditional or emerging claims to legitimacy; a declaration of the rights and entitlements of users and producers; a code of ethics; elaboration of common values and standards; a statement of benefits; a notice of claims to reparations or re-territorialization of boundaries; and a practical framework for cooperation.” Of course, the elements in such a checklist could vary (should a code of ethics mean a statement of values or specific operational patterns?), but the point of a charter is to help peers align themselves in grappling with recurrent problems. Most charters do mention the nature of their Peer Governance as a form of democratic participation and transparent decision-making. There is often an attempt to ensure that administrative power is decentralized, which helps a community ensure its access to, and sovereignty over, its shared wealth.4
The Charter for Building a Data Commons, developed by a group of digital mappers of alternative economies, advises its network of participants to “reflect your ambition together,” “separate commons and commerce,” “design for interoperability,” and “document [working processes] transparently,” among other things.5 It may be debatable whether the guiding principles for the annual Burning Man festival constitute a commons charter, but its ten principles function in much the same way. The 60,000 participants who trek to the Nevada desert every November define their ethos and culture through a commitment to “radical inclusion,” acts of gift-giving, decommodification of culture, radical self-expression, and immediacy of experience as core values. The charter not only clarifies the identity of the massive pop-up community that is Burning Man, it guides the year-round work of the “Burners” network in the Bay Area.
Commoners do not generally seek to secure state recognition for their charters because, in truth, most states offer no legal means for doing so. (A nonprofit may resemble a commons in its actual functioning and ethos, but legally and organizationally it is quite different.) In any case, commoners generally do not want courts or government agencies to enforce the terms of a charter. They look to each other. The charter functions as a social compact. Its authority derives from members’ explicit declaration of mutual intent and ongoing commitment to fulfill the terms of the charter. Its power derives from the breadth and depth of support that a charter commands in everyday practices. When such vernacular practices and social loyalties reach a sufficient intensity, they give rise to what James Quilligan calls “commons rights” based on natural law:

Commons rights differ from human rights and civil rights because they arise, not through the legislation of a state, but through a customary or emerging identification with an ecology, a cultural resource area, a social need, or a form of collective labor … Social charters generate an entirely new context for collective action. Instead of seeking individual and human rights from the state, people may claim long-term authority over resources, governance, and social value as their planetary birthrights — whether at a community or global level.6
Commons rights may indirectly challenge state sovereignty and “the divine right of capital” (Marjorie Kelly), and thereby be seen as politically contestable. When people step up to take direct responsibility for a piece of land, a river, or urban spaces, they will ruffle the feathers of state and corporate authorities. So even though a charter is an important tool for conscious self-organization, it may prove equally useful for getting the attention of unresponsive government bodies and forcing them into a more serious political dialogue,
In this spirit, commoners embrace charters as a way to take action on problems the market/state is ignoring, as Scottish activist Isabel Carlisle notes. A number of movements — especially fights against mining and hydraulic gas fracking — are using charters as a focal point for political action. These movements include Carlisle’s own Community Chartering Network in the UK, Lock the Gate in Australia, the Community Bill of Rights effort in the US, the global peasant farmers network La Via Campesina, and the Transition movement. Charter movements typically try to assert a positive, long-term vision. Carlisle writes:
What communities lack is a way of convening around a rights-based vision of what their communities are for [in terms of] sustainable agricultural systems, sustainable energy systems, sustainable economies, real environmental protection, and improvement of health, safety, and welfare in the community. People on the ground are the ones best placed to understand systematically what is beneficial to their local economies and ecologies.7
When mining interests in Scotland moved into Falkirk and surrounding towns to extract coal bed methane (a process similar to fracking), people in the region came together in 2013 to develop the first community charter. The document states: “We declare our Cultural Heritage to be the sum total of the local tangible and intangible assets we have collectively agreed to be fundamental to the health and well-being of our present and future generations.”8 People refer to a clean environment, food security, and what they call “a healthy economy” as key priorities for their community. The Falkirk Charter helped persuade the Scottish government to declare a moratorium on drilling for unconventional gas. Other British communities — Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dartington Parish in Devon, St. Ives in Cornwall — have also developed charters as a way to host a genuine community dialogue, mobilize citizens, and set forth a vision for local self-determination.
But aren’t municipal governments the more appropriate hosts for community charters? After all, isn’t that the very role of government? In theory, yes. But even though municipal governments are smaller and closer to their citizens than, say, regional or national governments, they too are prone to the perils of centralized administration and politically driven behaviors. Community charters introduce an independent social energy “from the street” that can foster distributed decision-making. Initiatives can unfold on their own terms, with established grassroots engagement and leadership — i.e., as commons.
There are some interesting experiments using charters to reinvigorate municipal governance. After helping elect an activist mayor in May 2015, the organization Barcelona en Comú (Barcelona in Common) created a series of documents that set forth a new vision of municipal politics, governance, and ethics. While not formally a charter, the four documents — a code of ethics, “shock plan” (for assuring basic social rights), administrative program, and citizen participation process9 — outline bold ambitions to “do politics differently.” The documents were written to have a similar impact as community charters: to open up a new space for the “co-production of politics” among participants — in this case, between the city government and residents.
A number of large governmental bodies have developed what they call social charters. Regional blocs such as the European Union, the South Asia Association for Regional Cooperation, and ASEAN have actually developed charters on behalf of their national citizens. But these approaches tend to be problematic, as James Quilligan has noted. National or regional charters “are typically generated by clusters of individual governments in consultation with a narrow cross-section of interest groups. Social charters generated by states often disempower those who use and manage a local commons. State-written social charters put the locus of power in government and function more as a complaint mechanism or quality control procedure than as a means of honoring the rights of people to their commons.”10 State-drafted charters also mean that the judiciary becomes the locus for resolving disputes about the commons — and thus state judges and legal experts assume greater authority than commoners.
Distributed Ledgers as a Platform for Commoning
There is a long history of hobbyists and tinkerers pioneering the development of new information technologies as amateurs. Once the potential has been demonstrated, major corporations then step in and take control of the systems to turn them into lucrative markets. Law scholar Tim Wu has called this “The Cycle.”11 Passionate visionaries attempt to usher in a grand social emancipation through a new technology — radio, television, cable TV, the web, open source software, the blogosphere, WiFi, wikis — but each time capitalists generally succeed in domesticating the technology to serve their market interests. The technology is revamped so that businesses can attract and retain an audience, monetize that audience through advertising or data mining, and then lock in the profit stream. In Wu’s reckoning, business retains “exclusive custody of the master switch.”12 In our time, this has meant that a handful of corporate leviathans — Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon — has used their centralized commercial platforms to manipulate the news we each see, host the spread of lies and disinformation, force-feed more advertising into the public sphere, and make us more vulnerable to identity theft.
We are now on the cusp of another turn of The Cycle, this time driven by a powerful networking software known as the blockchain. While the blockchain and Bitcoin are closely associated in the public mind, and even confused as the same thing, the blockchain is in fact just one version of what is sometimes called distributed ledger technology. Distributed ledgers are significant for the commons because they have the potential for providing a powerful software architecture to support commoning on open networks, going well beyond the limited modes of cooperation and security that are currently possible on the web. Distributed ledgers could be vehicles for enabling social emancipation.
As the first significant version of this technology, the blockchain has been hailed as a breakthrough because it has proved the feasibility of secure peer-to-peer communications on the internet. This was an epic achievement because it enabled the invention of a secure, wholly digital currency that can be exchanged on vulnerable open networks without the backing of a state or banks. In the jargon of the tech world, Bitcoin is “self-sovereign” because it autonomously verifies the integrity of any individual bitcoin used in a transaction. When someone uses a bitcoin to make a purchase, the specific bitcoin used is recorded on a single digital accounting ledger (the blockchain), which exists on thousands of computers at the same time. This peer-to-peer methodology is remarkably effective because, while it may be possible for a counterfeiter or thief to attack one bank’s computer, it is impossible to attack and alter the same accounting ledger on thousands of computers. The network itself becomes a robust authentication system for any bitcoin transaction, without the need for a third-party guarantor.
One proof of the power of the blockchain is that by late 2018, ten years after the introduction of Bitcoin, the aggregate value of all bitcoins was more than $65 billion — and yet no one has succeeded in hacking the bitcoin code. (There have been hacks of commercial brokers who exchange bitcoins for dollars, euros, and other currencies, but Bitcoin itself has not been counterfeited.) Oddly enough, while Bitcoin is utterly secure as a store of value, its renown stems from its value as an object of speculation. The price of a bitcoin has gyrated wildly over the years, with investors making or losing enormous sums of money in short periods of time. Naturally, this has discouraged most people from using bitcoins as a way to actually buy or create things of value, let alone build a new community of shared purpose.
Inspired by the success of Bitcoin, software programmers have been trying throughout the 2010s to adapt digital ledger systems for a variety of other purposes, mostly commercially motivated. Some ventures are selling their own “tokens” through a so-called ICO process, or Initial Coin Offering, to finance new businesses and products. Others are trying to develop legal contracts that can be automatically implemented on digital networks — “smart contracts” — as a way to make market transactions more versatile and efficient than those using conventional money.13 The general point of ledger systems is to use peer-to-peer networks to verify the authenticity of a unique digital object. Community members can then rely on that object as a token of value (money), an indicator of personal reputation, a recognized legal agreement among parties or a group, or a tool for voting and other decision-making.
Why are distributed ledger technologies important for commoning? Because they potentially offer a way for commoners to wrest control of the “master switch” in digital technologies away from capital, and instead empower and protect collective action. The technology creates new affordances that can, with the right design, greatly facilitate commoning in the digital age. Distributed ledgers can enable the creation of community currencies that enable people to coordinate the terms of their cooperation at scale, without the threat of enclosure. The technology does not automate or supplant the need for a group to common, but it does help people cooperate in more creative, flexible ways than are possible under conventional property law, money systems, and analogue organizational structures (nonprofits, trusts, cooperatives). Instead of making decisions through rigid hierarchies with centralized direction and relying on property rights vested in a few people, a peer-to-peer (P2P) platform can make it easier for people to cooperate and evolve the social system.
Although Bitcoin has captured a lot of attention as a drama of capitalist speculation, the more important story here is the role that distributed ledger technologies will play in the future. One of the most ambitious, potentially transformative suites of software platforms and institutions is being built around a novel set of networking protocols called Holochain. The technical details can quickly overwhelm the layperson, so we won’t dwell on them, but they matter because they affect the future affordances and scalability of the platform. Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum (the two most prominent digital ledger technologies), Holochain is far more energy efficient and flexible in the way that it authenticates digital objects on networks. Rather than relying on a single ledger — a “heavy” solution that requires the work of countless computers on the network — Holochain is a simpler, lightweight approach that lets every user have his or her own secure ledger and distributed storage system to store their personal data and digital identities. Its P2P architecture brings to mind the Federated Wiki platform described in Chapter Eight; both are based on a relational ontology, but Holochain has much greater versatility. As with Bitcoin, no one using Holochain need rely on a centralized source of authentication of data and digital identity, such as a Facebook or Google. This agent-centric approach means that users are far less vulnerable to identity theft because their data is strewn (or “sharded,” in tech lingo) across multiple servers on a network, and not consolidated on a single, centralized database that represents a tempting data treasure house for hackers. The distributed architecture of data on Holochain networks prevents tech giants and third parties like Cambridge Analytica from controlling (and abusing) our data.
As importantly, the Holochain architecture of protocols aims to provide the framework for building a new generation of distributed, privacy-respecting apps and services. It is a lighter, more versatile set of software protocols than the blockchain. By preventing any company from owning your data by default, the Holochain protocols are designed to enable multiple types of service providers to arise and co-exist within the same economy. Having open source infrastructure with customizable adaptations of the Holochain is critical. On the web, a single set of proprietary protocols tends to result in a winner-take-all marketplace dominated in each sector by a handful of large companies like Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb. By contrast, Holochain protocols are part of an open data architecture, and so they can be adapted for specific purposes by different players.

RECUADRO
A Brief Explanation of Hash and Hashchain, Blockchain, and Holochain
To encrypt data, programmers often create a hash (to hash = to chop), which is the value (“hash-value”) created when large amounts of data are entered into a computing system and sent through a so-called “hash function” that makes the output digitally readable and greatly shortened. Data in different forms such as full-length names are to some extent chopped up and “cooked down,” i.e., reduced to a short value in a uniform format. The result is a kind of digital fingerprint, an almost unambiguous identification that makes a digital object identifiable. A good hash function ensures that two different inputs reliably produce two different output values, and that no outputs can be inverted to obtain input data.
A hashchain is a sequential computing process that applies a cryptographic hash function to data again and again, generating one-time keys to unlock encrypted data and allow them to be validated quickly. After several passes, a kind of “digital fingerprint” for a specific entry is created.
A blockchain is a computing process that encrypts data by creating a series of “blocks” containing cryptographic hashes of preceding blocks, with a timestamp on all transactions between parties. A long string of blocks constitutes a record of all prior transactions and provides a very secure way to verify the identity of a digital object (such as a bitcoin). This is why blockchain technology is popular as a way to develop currencies that can be safely traded on open networks.

IMG HOLOCHAING VS BLOCKCHAIN

Holochain is a set of network-based computing protocols that lets people create their own customized, distributed records for keeping track of value. Because there is no single ledger (as in blockchains), Holochain enables a richer diversity of systems for representing value. In this sense, Holochain is a tool based on a differentiated relational ontology (each user can express value in different, particular ways when interacting with people) while blockchain as a tool ultimately reflects an undifferentiated ontology (each user must accept the prevailing standard of the system). (See Chapter 2).
FIN DEL RECUADRO

Holochain could thus be used by people to create both monetary and non-monetary currencies that embody new patterns of coordination for social organisms. Instead of privileging market valuations through prices and income, for example, Holochain could make visible reputation, skills, performance levels, or other flows of value within a community. This would enable distributed, peer-to-peer communities to build and share productive value on their own terms, including models that Relationalize Property and limit capital accumulation. Arthur Brock, one of the cofounders of the MetaCurrency Project, which has developed Holochain, explains that the real purpose of a currency should be to make the flow of value visible, as in a “current-see.” Conventional money, as designed and used, cannot express important types of value, which Brock and his associates regard as a profound problem of the modern age. Dollars, euros, and other state currencies don’t let us see the flows of value that matter most — ecological flows, the social relationships of gift economies, people’s contributions to commons. It is envisioned that Holochain-based currencies will be used by communities to make visible the community-minded acts that build a reputation, for example, and to create mutual credit monetary systems, without simply establishing new forms of speculative, profit-seeking trade. The capital accumulation and Governing-through-Money that is routine in the capitalist economy could be re-engineered to set community limits on private accumulation and assure basic fairness in economic exchange. Holochain-based currencies are more equipped to actualize commons-friendly types of systems because they are based on a principle of mutual sovereignty — shared control by both the individual and the communities to which they belong. This means that very idea of the Nested-I and Ubuntu Rationality, interdependence, and mutual accountability are built into the system.
For more than ten years, Brock and the Holochain development team have been imagining and building out the open-ended Holochain protocols as an infrastructure upon which an alternative, autonomous social economy and currencies might be built. This is obviously a formidable, complicated, and uncertain proposition, since Holochain is not intended as a business model but as a vehicle for enabling social transformation. Still, the Holochain visionaries have persuaded an impressive number of tech developers, investors, and others to build not only Holochain applications, but a suite of initiatives — that is, a group of different players using the same software protocols to interact.
A 2019 release of the Holochain code aimed to demonstrate the feasibility of agent-centric control of data and identity, which means that individuals would directly manage the security and authenticity of their personal data without any need for third-party intermediaries. Holochain coders also aim to let app developers create their own distributed sets of protocols, and not rely on a single set of protocols controlled centrally by a given tech company. This means that P2P communities can control their own apps and data without needing to rely on data-sucking corporate giants like Google, Apple, and Facebook.
A key vehicle for launching the Holochain system is a business called Holo, a distributed hosting cooperative that will oversee the first large-scale use of the Holochain. The goal of Holo is to enable anyone with a computer to “rent out” their unused computing capacity using Holochain-based software, and in return, receive Holo Fuel currency. Holo Fuel, in turn, will allow people to make exchanges with others within the network and kick-start a new parallel economy of services based exclusively on the currency. (People can also buy special Holo Ports that make it easier to rent out computing hosting capacity to users — in other words, a device expressly designed to earn Holo Fuel for a person.)
Unlike many currencies, Holo Fuel is backed by a productive asset, the computing/hosting power of participating computers. One’s acquisition of Holo Fuel is linked to the amount of engagement one has with the community, so it functions as a “proof of service” token — a confirmation that one has contributed a certain unit of computing power to the network. Technically, Holo Fuel is a mutual credit system14 in which debtors and creditors are essentially the same people, albeit within a large, multilateral system. Although Holo Fuel could in principle be exchanged for dollars, euros, and other conventional currencies — potentially making it an object of speculation, as is Bitcoin — a mutual credit currency backed by an asset (computing power contributed to the community) is more likely to be treated as a stable token of value over time, and therefore actually used for exchange and a store of value.
The Holochain team hopes that similar mutual credit currencies will be created based on the productive capacities of growing food (such as CSA farms), providing transport (ride-sharing among peers), generating energy (solar), or eldercare services. As more enterprises come to use Holo Fuel and back its value with actual assets and services, a commons-based economy will emerge. To help this process along, the Holochain group is developing a Commons Engine that aims to contribute to the rise of a commons-based culture from which thriving economies can emerge. The goal is to help communities and organizations develop Holochain-based apps (“hApps”), design currencies, undertake open source and cryptoeconomics projects, and advance the social norms of commoning. The Commons Engine has a special focus on projects involving water, energy, food, land, knowledge, and community building.
In this process, it is envisioned that Holochain will be used to build decentralized applications for diverse types of cooperation — “governance, collaboration, organizational tools, social networks, social media, vendor relationship management, platform cooperatives, sharing economy apps, supply chain solutions, community resource management, as well as tokenless mutual-credit cryptocurrencies and reputation systems.”15 All of the elements of this alternative economy would rely on shared currencies and function in synergistic ways, while remaining independent of conventional banks and investors. As this quick tour of the envisioned Holochain universe suggests, a distributed ledger system along these lines would have far more versatile applications than the blockchain on Bitcoin or Ethereum.
For Eric Harris-Braun, executive engineer of Holochain, the ultimate purpose of Holo Fuel and other Holochain-based currencies is to help people “actually see and represent all different types of value inside of a commons framework, and to have a stable language to develop that value, at scale.” In other words, the Holochain protocols would function as a grammar for the system, or language for building apps that name flows of value within a community, such as social contributions, reputation, work performed, care work, even community sentiment. Harris-Braun claims that Holo Fuel will not simply be a substitute form of money that will end up replicating capitalism, but will instead propagate a “different grammatics of value.” Just as a different grammatical structure in a human language helps us to articulate different ideas and realities, the Holochain grammar is intended as a tool to express social forms of value — flows — that market prices are incapable of representing. Instead of market-exchange being the dominant form of value, it is envisioned that Holochain-based apps will enable other forms of value to be expressed and circulated within networked communities — in other words, not just the money values represented by prices. Instead of seeing the isolated individual as the only source of agency and value, Holochain makes the OntoShift and in effect embraces the “Nested-I.” Harris-Braun told us:
Our model is built on “mutual sovereignty” in which the mutuality is between the individual and collective. Neither is put aside from the other. The actor or agent can say whatever he wants, but the collective [using the Holochain “grammar”] checks to see what is sent, or sees that the “move in the game” matches the collective rules. So there are all these linkages between the individual to the collective, and from the collective to the individual, to assure the social coherence of the group.

In the real world in which we live, everything is actually “agent-centric” in that reality is always informed by perspective. What we do is create a shared reality by taking on a shared grammar with which to interpret reality — and then we check each other and hold each other to account in light of that shared grammar. That’s what Holochain is designed to do.

By recognizing the mutual sovereignty of agents within a system, Holochain aspires to enact a “living systems of wealth” model that is committed to “the integrity of flows.” “As a society, we have a pretty good understanding of objects and how to manipulate them, but we’re not as good with flows,” says MetaCurrency project founder Arthur Brock.16 Holochain is about using different “patterns, principles, and protocols for how we use currencies (think ‘current-sees’) to share, measure, and enable all kinds of currents.” Key ideas in this vision are “distributed, equitable, and regenerative.” Harris-Braun told us, “I’m not at all interested in the monetization of value! For me, I am building toward a post-monetary world. I’m very interested in the formalization of embodied systems that allow us to ‘see value.’ But that is not the same thing as monetization.”17 The goal is to try to use alternative “current-sees” to avoid the pathologies of extractivism, private accumulation, and the disruption of ecosystems.
This commitment to seeing value in new ways is apparent in Holo’s self-capitalization strategy. The business was initially financed through an Initial Community Offering that gave investors Holo Fuel in exchange for their dollars, with all returns on investment also made in Holo Fuel. The idea behind this is for the value of the investment returns to grow in tandem with the value of the Holo web-hosting network and the larger Holo ecosystem. “It’s all about growing this pattern of self-replication of productive capacity into a commons,” said Harris-Braun — meaning, the community will invest in its own infrastructure and economy, and recirculate the value it creates. It is an intoxicating vision, the idea of self-capitalization and development of commons, at scale, without the extractive imperatives of the conventional market/state system! But there is persuasive evidence — working code, strong early investment, app developer interest in Holochain, and potential participants in the Holo Fuel economy such as CSA farmers and cooperatives — that this vision will be able to grow without being compromised by the usual capitalist pressures.
Of course, in the end, any number of problems could intervene to derail Holochain’s progress. It may or may not unfold as its tech sponsors hope. That is partly because Holochain technology can also be used to serve the ever-evolving purposes of corporate capitalism and its thirst for ever-more private control and profit, as Fernanda Ibarra, co-director of the Commons Engine at Holo has noted.18 The invention of the printing press enabled the Bible and great literature to be widely distributed, but it also made possible tabloid journalism and propaganda. What matters about distributed ledger technology is the new and different affordances that it enables. It’s an open question who will be first and most influential in leveraging those affordances.
But one thing is certain: the world is inexorably moving to distributed ledger systems because they are likely to overcome the many problems associated with centralized corporate data systems — the lack of user freedom, serious privacy violations, security risks, and the withering of creativity because people do not have individual or collective agency. So it is imperative that commoners develop this tech architecture to facilitate their goals — the creation of protectable commons — and to limit the ability of capital to marginalize commoning on these systems, as capital so brilliantly did in commandeering open source software, the web, and social networking to serve corporate purposes.
Holochain is an attempt to secure an important beachhead for commoners, even if it will also be used, inevitably, for less elevated purposes. The appeal of ledger technologies, whether Holochain or others still in the works, is their potential to create durable new affordances for commoning.
Commons-Public Partnerships
Given the state’s close alliance with the corporate sector, it should not be surprising that the two often enter into so-called public-private partnerships, or PPPs. These are often good-faith attempts to address pressing social problems through contract-based collaborations between businesses and government. PPPs are typically vehicles for developing infrastructure for water supply or sewage management, or building roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, prisons, or public facilities such as swimming pools and playing fields. Through a separate legal entity (which can take different legal forms), state agencies and businesses negotiate the terms for financing, construction, and/or management of a project over a specific period of time.
Public-private partnerships are typically portrayed as win-win scenarios that address social needs, strengthen the economy, and reduce state expenditures in one fell swoop. Businesses supposedly provide public services at lower costs than the state because of more flexible work rules and efficiencies, and therefore the state is presumed to save money. However, this scenario often does not play out in practice because PPPs are based on fundamentally incompatible objectives — the state’s obligation to protect the public good and private businesses’ desire to maximize profits. In practice, many public-private collaborations function less as partnerships than as disguised giveaways.
In effect, a PPP can let a company acquire equity ownership of public infrastructure such as roads, bridges, and public facilities for a long period — fifteen, thirty, even ninety-nine years — and then manage them as a private market asset. In Chicago, for example, the city government actually sold the management of its thousands of parking meters to a private company, resulting in higher parking fees, worse service, and public outrage. In many PPPs, the government reaps a big one-time payment, which makes politicians look good for keeping a lid on government spending and avoiding public debt. But the hidden, long-term costs make many PPPs a bad deal. Businesses usually raise fees or charge for what was previously financed more efficiently through taxes. They cut corners on public safety and quality, and reduce upkeep and maintenance.19 The state and the corporate sector both pretend that PPPs are a healthy, wholesome arrangement that benefits everyone and solves the lack of public funds. In truth, a great many PPPs amount to a marketization of the public sector that extracts more money from citizens, surrenders taxpayer assets to businesses, and neutralizes public accountability and control.
PPPs are not the only feasible way to build infrastructure and manage projects, however. But before we can consider alternatives and outline a different vision, some different questions must be asked, such as who needs what services and infrastructures in the first place? And for what purpose? Are new infrastructures needed to boost economic growth and transport-intensive international trade, whose benefits chiefly accrue to the investor class? Are the partnerships a way for companies to minimize risk and maximize revenue without competition? Consideration of any partnership must always ask: What is really needed on the ground? What really ensures quality service and quality of life without a loss of control to investors and volatile global markets? Couldn’t we build a commons-friendly infrastructure that escapes the traps of economic growth, footloose international capital, and centralized administration?
The answer is yes! It is entirely possible to meet essential needs through a constellation of localized, distributed commons-public partnerships. Consider the way that firefighting is organized in Germany, where a remarkable ninety-seven percent of all firefighters are volunteers, not professionals. Nearly one million ordinary people — teachers, farmers, shopkeepers, craftsmen, drivers (mostly men) — are ready to step up if the need arises to join with other community members to fight fires. All over Germany there are only 107 Berufsfeuerwehren — professional firefighting brigades — exclusively in mid-size and large cities. Everywhere else, in Germany as well as Austria and Poland, volunteer brigades are the norm. Even in the bastion of global market culture, the United States, an impressive sixty-seven percent of the country’s 1.1 million firefighters, or about 815,000, are volunteers.
Firefighting is, of course, part of the basic obligation of the state to protect public safety. But unlike in so many other areas of public need, the German state does not hire state employees or contract with businesses to fight fires. It has organized systems to enlist citizens to do the work themselves. Thus, the term “voluntary” is a bit misleading because it is not completely voluntary that people come together as fire brigades. It is a federal legal obligation for each community to organize them. If this is not successful on a voluntary basis, the municipal government can recruit citizens on a mandatory basis, much as US courts mandate participation on a jury. The whole system is structured to support citizens in taking responsibility to organize themselves. State authority is ingeniously blended with peer mobilization and management. “Every community or municipality is obliged to provide, maintain, and finance a fire department that meets the needs of the local situation,” as the Law of Fire Fighting in the State of Baden Württemberg states. The state provides firefighting equipment, fire-extinguishing foam, training, communication infrastructure, education, work space, insurance for firefighters, and financial support, among other things — but the community members themselves manage the fire department.
One might call this a “public-civic” contract or partnership. The state creates a legal and administrative framework to bring into being a vast corps of volunteer firefighters. Besides supplying resources, the state makes volunteering possible by prohibiting employers from cutting an employee’s paycheck while doing fire department work. Once assembled, fire departments self-organize to teach firefighting and medical skills, assign job tasks, and in other ways serve as an effective emergency team.
Let’s note that this is not really a partnership with a commons, but a limited delegation of state power and responsibility to citizens that they cannot reject. In a limited sense, this kind of volunteering for firefighting resembles a commons. But volunteering is different from commoning. While both involve individuals choosing to participate, volunteers work under terms set by a sponsoring organization whereas commoners initiate and manage a project themselves, on their own terms. What we call “volunteering” usually occurs after work and often has a charitable character, whereas commoners generally choose to do something for its own sake or to meet needs outside of the market in a process that they control.
If you take the success of volunteer fire departments as an inspiration, you can imagine possibilities for meeting needs if the state’s structural support and delegation of authority were made broader and less conditional. If, in addition, you let commoners actually instigate, manage, and steer the project, then you would have a commons-public partnership. Sounds utopian? This is what we could have said 150 years ago about the modern organization of firefighting.
When founded in Berlin in 1851, the German fire department was comprised of professionals. But by the 1920s, the tradition of volunteer brigades had taken root. A century later, there are more than 22,000 volunteer fire departments in Germany. Collectively they provide fire protection for virtually the entire country. In 2017 — and this is more than remarkable — there were only four instances in all of Germany in which enough volunteers could not be recruited. In such cases, the county government mandates the formation of “compulsory fire departments.”
While the modern mind tends to see “mandatory” and “voluntary” as binary opposites, these polarities become blurry as soon as a concern is connected with intrinsic motivations and existential questions, as in this case. The state may require local communities to have fire departments, but at the same time local communities have significant autonomy to organize themselves. Actually, citizens freely volunteer; they usually don’t feel pressured to join. When people experience freedom-in-connectedness, “free choice” versus “required” is an inappropriate framing of the situation. Responsible parents don’t think about “choosing” to take care of their children or not; it is both a pleasure and a responsibility. Similarly, able-bodied community members don’t regard “volunteering” as an imposition. It is just what needs to be done. Participants often take pride in doing what is important for the well-being of the community — and explicit acknowledgement is always welcome. People generally enjoy belonging to the fire department just as commoners enjoy the sense of belonging that comes from commoning. They Ritualize Togetherness through dinners and show off their firefighting equipment at open houses for the community. Volunteer fire departments are such a community tradition in Germany that some 250,000 young people belong to youth fire brigades that supplement the fire departments’ work and serve as a source of new participants.
It is precisely this multifunctionality stemming from its self-organized character that makes volunteer firefighting so effective and pleasurable. Market-based approaches cannot elicit such commitment and provide such satisfaction. Another advantage is that the tasks are not formally defined by rigid, enforceable job descriptions. Duties can be therefore more flexible and adapted to circumstances. While professionals generally bring skills and experience that volunteers don’t have, hiring professionals for the entire country would be unthinkable. It would cost about 24 billion euro per year if everyone were paid the starting wage of a soldier in the German army. Even at minimal wages, a professional force would be very costly because full-time firefighters spend a lot of time just waiting for fires to happen. They are paid for their readiness, and their skills can be overly specialized (and thus more expensive) relative to the many basic tasks that must be done.
What interests us here is the potential of public-commons partnerships as an important alternative to public-private partnerships. A public-commons partnership is not about commanding people to do x or y. It is about creating conditions so that people want to contribute their personal energies and talents. This is critical in enabling commons at scale. Governments can achieve this only by aligning collective needs, the common good, and individual interests in addressing on-the-ground realities. The key is not offering the “right incentives” or salaries. It is about giving people real authority to manage their own operations — and supporting them with the right infrastructure, equipment, and funds. People are willing to participate so generously as volunteer firefighters because they are given the freedom to organize themselves and proper tools to meet an important community challenge.
A more conventional policy approach is to treat public services as line items in a government budget and the service providers as employees. This mindset misses the point. It fails to recognize that a volunteer fire department can elicit many energies and talents precisely because there is no formal employer-employee relationship here. To rely on the power of self-organization to fight fires not only serves an essential public need, it produces a special sort of social glue among people. Firefighters, relatives, friends, rescued fire victims, and community members are brought together by the process. To be sure, volunteer firefighters endure some serious hardships — mobilizing at any hour of the day or night; clearing fallen trees from roads after storms; dealing with medical emergencies. But these sacrifices are tolerable and even satisfying amidst the camaraderie of doing important work. It is even a point of pride as the news media and fellow citizens express their gratitude.
To be clear, this volunteer firefighting is not entirely a matter of commoning. The state remains the senior partner facilitating participation and supplying resources. But on the other hand, neither is this a classic case of “citizen participation” in a government process, either. The state is not asking citizens to show up to join its process and render its outcomes legitimate. The state has delegated significant authority and committed resources — with few strings attached — to empower citizens to fight fires and manage themselves, as commoners.
The success of volunteer fire departments suggests the great potential of commons-public partnerships driven by the needs of people, not business interests. A commons-public partnership (CPP) is an agreement of long-term cooperation between commoners and state institutions around specific functions. It is about providing stable, secure ways for people to work together, often locally, to provide services to each other and to the broader public through commoning. A CPP is also about creating the infrastructures, spaces, and conditions for self-organization to occur. With modest support, people can be empowered to make their own decisions and customize solutions for their own needs and circumstances. For example, Guifi.net, the commons-based regional Wi-Fi network, does not need — nor want — to cater to outside investors or maximize returns at the expense of its users. As a commons, it can stay focused on long-term stability and service rather than get lost in the financial gamesmanship (mergers and acquisitions, creative financial instruments, etc.) that investors often favor. For these reasons, CPPs should be immensely appealing to regional and local governments: commoners are far more likely to “stand and deliver” than fickle investors whose loyalties are shallowly focused on the highest investment returns, not necessarily regional well-being.
In other words, a CPP pivots away from the approach of PPPs, which tend to shovel money, financing, subsidies, and legal privileges at businesses and markets. It can be designed instead to cultivate creative state collaborations with commoners in providing essential services and building open, nondiscriminatory infrastructure. CPP solutions tend to be less expensive than PPPs because they are not profit-driven and therefore can have a more flexible institutional logic and distributed social participation. A CPP can avoid the immense costs and complexities of administering a centralized system because it can leverage bottom-up contributions and creativity, open source-style. There are all sorts of self-organized peer communities that are currently meeting urgent human needs for a fraction of the cost of conventional bureaucratic “service delivery” systems, and they do this work with great human care and attention. What if governments were to provide basic infrastructure and support to the community-based insurance system Artabana, for example, whose small groups generate pools of money to self-insure each others’ social and medical well-being? What if there were minimal infrastructure support for peer-governed networks such as Vipassana, whose work provides a vehicle for self-healing for thousands of people in highly effective ways — based on Freely Contributed, decommodified work? It would not only lower the costs for healthcare, it would, at the same time, co-create communities and a sense of belonging.
A key threshold challenge for any commons-public partnership is getting the state to recognize a group of commoners as a legitimate partner. State bureaucracies are accustomed to dealing with conventional legal entities — corporations, nonprofits, universities — that have presidents and hierarchical governance structures. A group of commoners may be seen as too unstable and loosely organized to be a worthy partner. But as we have seen with the Buurtzorg homecare organization, which provides peer-organized nursing care on a neighborhood scale (pp. 20–21), it is entirely possible for governments to enter into binding agreements with self-organized groups of commoners. Another innovative CPP is the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons, which established a system whereby the city bureaucracy provides legal, financial, and technical support of specific projects initiated by commoners. This innovation has been further developed by the Co-City Protocols, a methodology developed by the Italian think tank LabGov for guiding co-governance initiatives.20 The protocols are based on five design principles: “collective governance, enabling state, pooling economies, experimentalism, and technological justice.”
Organizational development expert Fréderic Laloux has argued that every new stage in human consciousness has been accompanied by breakthroughs in our ability to collaborate, which is reflected in new organizational forms. As human economies moved from horticulture to agriculture to industrialization, for example — and as tribes became kingdoms and nation-states — different worldviews gave rise to novel, unexpected organizational paradigms. In his book Reinventing Organizations, Laloux sees the stage of human consciousness now emerging — and therefore the new breed of organization — as based on the search for wholeness and “self-management for evolutionary purpose.”21 This means that, unlike fixed, hierarchical forms of the past, organizations in the future will function as living entities driven by distributed leadership and “inner rightness and purpose as a primary motivator and yardstick.” Based on his color-coding of stages of consciousness in organizations over time, Laloux calls the emerging stage of organizations “Teal.”
There are striking parallels between Teal organizations and commons-based ones. Teal organizations are characterized by self-management that “operates effectively, even at a large scale, with a system based on peer relationships, without the need for either hierarchy or consensus.” Such organizations strive for “wholeness” through “practices that invite us to reclaim our inner wholeness and bring all of who we are to work, instead of with a narrow ‘professional’ self.” Teal organizations also have “a life and sense of direction of their own. Instead of trying to predict and control the future, members of the organization are invited to listen in and understand what the organization wants to become, what purpose it wants to serve.” Teal self-management practices include such things as fluid and granular work roles for people, ad hoc coordination and meetings as needs arise, transparent real-time information-sharing, radically simplified project management with minimum plans and budgets, and formal, multi-step conflict resolution processes. Organizations that embody Teal principles include the Buurtzorg neighborhood nursing enterprise, Patagonia sportswear, Sounds True media, and the Heiligenfeld mental health hospitals in Germany.
Many lessons of Teal organizations lie at the heart of commons-state partnerships. The only real problem seems to be that CPPs are not a familiar archetype with known protocols. If state agencies were to open their imaginations, they could realize that the internal governance and social life of commons are not liabilities, but a potential source of creative, bottom-up energy. To learn more, the City of Ghent, Belgium, commissioned an intensive study in 2017 of scores of commons-based projects within its borders. It wanted to learn how it might augment the work of a neighborhood-managed church building, a renewable energy co-op, and a temporary urban commons lab that provides space to many different community projects.22
In developing a CPP, it is not enough for the state to explicitly authorize a commons; state bureaucracies must have a genuine commitment to the power of commoning. The Indian government made a bold attempt to assist village forest commons when it enacted the Forest Rights Act in 2006. The law explicitly restored the autonomy of forest dwellers to govern their community forests in traditional ways, with decentralized, democratic participation.23 Implementation of this policy shift has been complicated, but in general it has strengthened livelihoods, regional food security, and ecological stewardship. Unfortunately, the entrenched bureaucracy has often resisted the law and not truly helped tribal communities.
Even though CPPs seem especially appropriate for the munici­pal/local level, their use need not be confined to small-scale or local endeavors. They can be achieved at the global level by states interacting with commons federations or coordinating bodies. A good example is the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi), a nonprofit organization that works in cooperation with various states, research institutes, and donors to overcome the broken drug development system.24 Technically, DNDi is a commons-public-private partnership (CPPP) because it works closely with a variety of players — governments, private research enterprises, communities affected by diseases, and all types of donors. The partnership works because it Brings Diversity into Shared Purpose and guarantees everyone’s involvement throughout all stages of the research and development (R&D) process. This “shared purpose” consists in banning commercial interests from controlling the drug research and production process, and aligning research priorities with human need.
This is vital for treating diseases that afflict the poor; tropical diseases, for example, mainly afflict people with low purchasing power. Large multinational drugmakers consider the potential “consumer demand” too weak to justify significant research investments into sleeping sickness; mycetoma (a disfiguring disease that results in deformities and amputations); leishmaniasis (a parasitic disease of the tropics); malaria (a mosquito-borne infectious disease); and pediatric HIV.
Focusing drug R&D on human need is not just important in tackling common diseases in the Global South, however. DNDi-style research about cancer, heart diseases, and diabetes can get us beyond Big Pharma’s tendency to conduct intensive research into superficial variations of existing drugs rather than riskier, more medically significant basic research. DNDi points out that between 2000 and 2011, there were 850 new therapeutic products approved worldwide, but only four percent targeted neglected diseases, and only one percent were “new chemical entities” (NCEs) offering novel treatment possibilities.25 DNDi aims to overcome these problems by sponsoring drug research and development that the drug industry has declined to pursue.
Based in Geneva, Switzerland, and with nine offices around the world, DNDi forges creative partnerships with governments, research institutes, health organizations, and the pharmaceutical industry to raise funds, conduct medical research, and administer clinical trials of new drugs. In 2015, DNDi delivered six new treatments and raised 350 million euro. By 2023, it hopes to develop sixteen to eighteen treatments on its total budget of 650 million euro.26 This R&D work with over 160 partners worldwide means that an HIV positive mother in South Africa, a young woman with Chagas disease in Bolivia, and a working man with malaria can get affordable treatment. DNDi can save one life for $1, as the title of a film about DNDi puts it,27 because no single company or research body is allowed to own any drug developed through DNDi. This means that drugs can be produced at minimal cost in locations where the diseases are prevalent, which in turn makes it easier to reach more people with the drugs they need.
As a CPPP, DNDi helps states avoid spending money on wasteful subsidies and “incentives” to induce businesses to produce what is needed. Instead, by sharing risks and infrastructure development, commons-public partnerships can radically reduce overall costs while meeting needs that markets would otherwise ignore. For example, based on a recommendation by the World Health Organization, and working with many partners, DNDi developed an affordable, fixed-dose drug that simplifies the treatment of malaria. It worked with the drugmaker Sanofi to put two active ingredients, artesunate and amodiaquine, into a single pill known as ASAQ. Then, working with Doctors Without Borders and others, DNDi oversaw pharmacological and clinical development of ASAQ in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and tested its effectiveness and tolerability in children. By 2010, the World Health Organization approved ASAQ, opening the door for production and distribution. The development and implementation costs over eight years were a relatively small twelve million euros. Distribution costs were greatly reduced because ASAQ cannot be patented. A single treatment is available at the cost of production, or less than US$1 for an adult, and less than US50¢ per child. In its first four years of availability, some 500 million treatments of ASAQ were administered to more than 250 million people in over thirty African countries.28
DNDi is able to achieve such radical efficiencies by assuring that the drugs it develops and licenses will be perpetually royalty free and non-exclusive. (Drugs are available to many producers, with the option of sublicensing rights for specific areas where a disease is prevalent.) Worldwide research and manufacturing rights are guaranteed. These provisions help make technology transfer and production less expensive. Instead of relying on just one factory, there can be multiple sources of production, which can help make drugs more accessible in regions where they are needed. Partners commit to making the final product available at cost, plus a minimal margin, in all endemic countries regardless of their income levels.
Reaping the benefits of a CPP (or CPPP) requires a structural rethinking of the policy process and administrative mindset. It first requires an understanding of the values and dynamics of commoning, and an appreciation for the potential of federating diverse cooperating partners. In real life, people’s needs are local and specific; a national apparatus that seeks to impose a standard delivery mechanism in every locality will inevitably be cumbersome, inefficient, and rigid. A CPP can meet needs in more human-scale, localized, and distributed ways, with respect for the generativity of a commons. A CPP addresses elemental needs over institutional or power imperatives. It respects the need to organically grow a commons over time, and to rely on distributed infrastructures that invite multiple uses. Adaptation is easier because production and assembly revolve around modular elements. The proper role of the state in supporting CPPs, then, is to help bring together potential partners and federate CPPs, accelerating co-learning and translocal collaboration.
This obviously poses new challenges for state institutions. Bureaucracies are accustomed to directing other people’s activities, not deferring to them. While it may be difficult for state institutions to accept the value of commoning, this recognition will have benefits: State bodies will earn greater trust from the populace. They will be able to address needs through money-lite commoning. And they will be able to mobilize creative energies, citizen commitment, and the use of situated and embedded knowledge that would otherwise remain dormant.
Commoning at Scale
Taking the practices of commoning to scale is a new frontier, but not an impossible goal. There are many real-life examples of commons, of course, but no standard template for developing them at large scales. A standard template cannot exist because each commons must be organically connected to its specific context. Passing a new law or implementing a new regulation might be helpful, but it will not be enough to “scale the commons.” Policy solutions have very limited impact if they do not engage with real people and support their intrinsic motivations and self-determined initiatives. In short, policy cannot be divorced from commoning itself.
What is most needed, therefore, is a bold rethinking of the design and structures of policymaking itself and the premises of majority-rule politics. As currently structured, party politics is a competitive scramble to win 51 percent of the votes as the condition for wielding power. This means that the majority can largely ignore or minimize the concerns of the minority until the next election, effectively disenfranchising the minority of 49 percent. Commoning is an attempt to assert a different ethos for politics in which ideological posturing and political power plays are replaced by dialogue and negotiation about practical solutions. More to the point, commoners seek to develop new institutional forms that can honor and support the practices of commoning — a shift that over time can create a new framework for politics. The goal must be to reorient political activity so that it can nourish new types of institutions and intercommoning. Organic structures integrating the micro, meso, and macro (rather than having them collide with each other) can be built, based on the ideas outlined in Part I. This idea is illustrated by our image of the OntoSeed (p. 50), which attempts to show how our understanding of being itself affects how we imagine and build the world. This insight lies at the heart of the debate. From a core ethos and sensibility, a commons ethic branches and sends out shoots that grow outward in unpredictable, adaptive ways. The living process of commoning brings its operational and ethical logic to every level that it reaches.
We have come to the conclusion, after much research in this area, that there is really very little that cannot be reimagined, redesigned, and rebuilt from a commons perspective. So many of the commons that we have encountered in this book were, at first encounter, absolute surprises! A commons for neighborhood nursing? Buurtzorg. For regional fresh produce? Cecosesola, Park Slope Food Coop, CSAs. For housing? Mietshäuser Syndikat. For the intergenerational protection of farmland? Terre de Liens. For new house construction? WikiHouse. For machines? Open Source Ecology and Atelier Paysan. For textbooks and teaching materials? Open Educational Resources. For project financing? Goteo. A commons-friendly alternative to the blockchain? Holochain. And so on.
How have all these commons been realized? By people taking seriously the idea that their collaborations must be free, fair, and alive. Rather than clinging to ideology or mechanical blueprints for what supposedly must be done, they were brave enough to plunge into the messy realities of a situation and take the views of everyone into account. Rather than blindly adopting centralized systems of power and organization, or getting hooked on self-deluding notions of “rationality” and efficiency, the organizers of a commons have been able to see that everyone could potentially contribute to a solution, and help sustain it over time. They enacted a culture of commoning. Words and intentions are not enough.
We have tried to distill the core dimensions of commoning in our Triad of social life, peer governance, and provisioning — the universe of patterns through which the commons culture is built and made alive, even at large scales. While law, tech protocols, infrastructure, and other structures can play valuable roles in guiding the energies of commoning, ultimately it is our imagination and commoning itself that drive everything. This is precisely why, if you think like a commoner, it will be hard to align yourself wholeheartedly with a political party, especially in a context in which politics itself is conceived as a competition. In this kind of politics, parties are too deeply committed to their own programmatic and ideological principles (selectively applied and abandoned, of course!) to embrace the commons. Politicians and parties in today’s world are generally more oriented to political power itself and to the concerns of the professional political class, than to those of us who question the capacity of representative, majority-rule democracy to bring about transformational change.
After reading this volume, you may still regard commoning as unlikely to achieve our grandest ambitions for change. Maybe you still think commons are too small, too disaggregated, too unorthodox, or too marginal to make a difference. Or maybe you think a commons asks too much of us to truly work, or takes too much time for results to emerge. But the insurgent power of the commons — the desire for a world that is free, fair, and alive — is no quixotic dream, as the preceding pages have shown. This power is quite real. Its achievements are substantial. It’s just that the political mainstream and general culture have other priorities for now, as they cling to their imploding fantasies. Making the jump to the Commonsverse requires that we learn to see the world through new lenses and describe this reality with new terms. This is how we begin to enter into commoning, this is how we build an Ubuntu culture. The journey ahead may mean leaving our familiar political homes. But it also means joining a movement to build a new world, and worldview, that can actually work for centuries to come.