Common creation

The New Possible: Visions of Our World beyond Crisis is full of wonderful examples where people are creating and living the next future (see post here>).

In The Commons as a New Paradigm of Economics, Politics, and Culture, one of its chapters, David Bollier dives into working examples and beyond problematic, centralized government power and capitalism.

David explains: one need only look at community-supported agriculture (CSA), community land trusts, and local currencies to find examples of effective strategies for re-localizing value chains. Through an ecosystem of local or regional commons, it’s possible to de-commodify our productive assets by removing them from the circuits of capitalist exchange. We can make them less dependent on volatile, expensive global markets (land, labor, technology), and we lessen dependence on outside finance by recirculating value locally (food provisioning, services, currencies, etc.). 

Socially necessary

CSAs are a time-proven finance technique for upfront sharing of the risk between users and producers. We know this as an agricultural finance tool, but it can be utilized in many other contexts as well. In my region, many jazz fans subscribe to a series of jazz performances by paying upfront fees, CSA-style. Community land trusts (CLTs) are also a great way to de-commodify land. They take land off speculative markets permanently and mutualize the control and benefits of real estate. CLTs keep land under local control and use it for socially necessary purposes (for example, growing organic food locally) rather than for purposes favored by outside investors and markets. 

The potential runs wide: open source software communities have demonstrated new modes of production that are readily applicable to other realms. … such as motor vehicles (Wikispeed car), furniture (Open Office), houses (WikiHouse), agricultural equipment (Farm Hack; Open Source Ecology), electronics (Arduino), and much more. Public Lab is a citizen-science project that helps address environmental problems by providing open-source hardware and software tools, such as monitoring kits. Although at present they are often fledgling systems, cosmo-local forms of production have enormous potential to minimize the carbon footprint of conventional production while reducing transportation and intellectual property costs. 

Platforms

A related form of innovation is platform co-operatives. Internet platforms don’t need to extract money from a community the way companies like Uber and Airbnb do. Rather, they can be vehicles for empowering workers and consumers. They can spur group creativity, reduce prices, and improve quality of life when they are designed and owned with the values of the commons in mind.

Platform co-ops can improve operations and distribute market surpluses for the mutual benefit of participant-owners, instead of for absentee investors. We see examples of platform co-ops being used by taxi drivers in Austin, Texas (ATX Coop Taxi), food delivery workers in Berlin (Kolymar-2), delivery and messaging workers in Barcelona (Mensakas), and freelance workers in Brussels (SMart). 

David’s full chapter (pdf) is here> and is shareable under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License. See Resources for The New Possible book links.