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Peter, on the editorial board of Jacobin and the author of Four Futures: Life After Capitalism. “Property and Theft.” Jacobin. 9/1/2013. https://jacobin.com/2013/09/property-and-theft // QUEERAMID

We have here something a bit like the old “reform or revolution” dichotomy, which arrays the advocates of smashing the existing system against the timid meliorism of those who only want to make it more humane. But the contrast fails here just as it did in the larger drama of twentieth-century socialism, where revolution and reform both ultimately led back to capitalist restoration and neoliberal retrenchment. We need another path — one that recognizes the necessity of reformist struggles within capitalist institutions, while still attempting to move toward a break with the system and the creation of a fundamentally new kind of economy and society. André Gorz called this the “non-reformist reform”: a project of “reforms which advance toward a radical transformation of society” by making a “modification of the relations of power” which could “serve to weaken capitalism and to shake its joints.” What would constitute a non-reformist reform of intellectual property? The revolutionary overthrow of all intellectual property, even if it were possible, leaves unanswered the question of how to ensure that those who create knowledge and culture are provided for, and how to control the exploitation of the cultural commons by digital capitalists. The anarchist championing of online piracy only allows for some resistance around the edges, without posing a fundamental challenge to the system. And yet the idea of reforming IP into something better and more egalitarian, something that truly rewards all who participate in the work of creation, seems like another iteration of the naïve dream of a just and democratic capitalism. Anne Elizabeth Moore and Sean Andrews approach this bundle of contradictions in different ways. For Moore, the central point is that IP is now and has always been gendered, and therefore any path toward its transformation and abolition must explicitly work toward addressing inequities that are embedded in our notions of culture, even if that sometimes means more IP rather than less. “An across-the-board loosening of IP protection,” she fears, would “lead to the increased piracy of those cultural productions already less protected, worsening the economic gender gap.” The task is to “correct for generations of cultural misogyny,” which entails fundamentally rethinking what counts as IP, beyond an isolated male inventor in his study, the image of whom forms the explicit or implicit basis of much of our current regime. Insofar as the socialist perspective is taken to be hostile to the existence of intellectual property and private property more generally, Moore’s argument might be taken as a challenge to it. But this is to confuse a socialist approach with a libertarian one. The libertarian absolutist case against IP is consistent with the movement’s anti-statist trappings, and depends on the inference that because intellectual property is a debased, false form of property, it therefore does not fall within the purview of the state’s property-defending mission. A socialist, however, can recognize that law and the state are contested terrain, and that replacing the regime of capitalist private property requires erecting, at least in the interim, an alternative form of socialized property, in order to defend the commons against the persistent efforts of the capitalist class to enclose and appropriate it. The struggle over traditional physical property provides many examples of this. Land trusts that are available to the public are an alternative to private ownership. Worker coooperatives and B Corporations, which are dedicated to a social purpose rather than only maximizing profit, are being pursued as alternatives to the traditional corporate form. This is an appealing model for a potentially non-capitalist approach to the cultural commons that isn’t simply hostile to the legal system, but attempts to use it as a mechanism for contesting the narrow capitalist definition of property. But as we attempt to forge new property forms, new contradictions and unintended consequences will arise. In embracing a superficially appealing new licensing model, we could end up accidentally imprisoning ourselves in something just as bad as or worse than what we have now. Take, for example, a project that Andrews mentions, the Creative Commons license. This is, as he notes, a legal property form just as much as traditional copyright. However, where copyright gives an owner the right to keep knowledge closed, Creative Commons is designed to facilitate creators who want to ensure their creations remain open, while at the same time making sure that they receive credit for them. One of the more common versions is the CC BY license, which allows unlimited distribution and repurposing as long as the original creator receives credit in any new version or copy. Another, CC BY-SA, adds the provision that those who redistribute or remix something must “license their new creations under the identical terms,” a provision with the potential to virally spread Creative Commons protection to other non-covered work. Going further in a superficially anti-capitalist direction, CC BY-NC-SA also prohibits commercial use, while CC BY-NC-ND also prohibits the creation of modified and derivative works. These licenses might seem like a promising ways to protect the rights of creators and keep work out of the hands of corporate content monopolists. But they also pose contradictions and compromises for those who would like the commons to be as open and accessible as possible, but who recognize that a short-run strategy of total IP rejectionism is susceptible to exploitation by capitalist interests. Creative Commons demonstrates this, as does the simpler GNU Public License (GPL) for software. The attribution and share-alike components of Creative Commons are the least problematic, since they enforce an ethic of author credit and mutual sharing that is fundamental to the operation of a non-capitalist commons. The non-commercial and no-derivatives provisions, however, turn out to have some problematic unintended consequences, as explained in a set of two critiques published by the Free Culture Foundation. Marking a work for non-commercial use sounds like just a way to draw a line between capitalist exploitation and socialist sharing, and the no-derivatives clause can be defended as a way of protecting the integrity of a creator’s work. But NC licenses don’t distinguish between a small-time DJ sampling a song and a massive streaming service making millions from advertising. Moreover, they replicate traditional copyright’s grant of a commercial monopoly to the original creator. The ban on derivative works, meanwhile, is only justified if IP law is regarded as a safeguard on the natural rights of the creator, rather than a utilitarian and pragmatic mechanism for ensuring a free and open cultural commons. Another issue is that new licenses and property forms may not take into account all of the people who have a need for rights with respect to a given cultural object. Several years ago, a Texas family sued the Creative Commons Corporation along with Virgin Mobile Australia, charging them with libel and invasion of privacy. Virgin had found a CC-licensed image taken by a youth counselor, which included an image of the family’s teenage daughter, and used it in an advertising campaign without the family’s permissions. In this case, the CC license replicated a problem that Anne Elizabeth Moore identifies in traditional copyright: the rights of (disproportionately male) creators of images are protected, while the (more often female) people who become the content of the image are not. The tensions inherent in new intellectual property forms are closely related to a tension running through all discussions of intellectual production — and indeed, production generally — between the rights of the producer and the rights of the user or consumer. In a recent essay on the tech guru Tim O’Reilly, Evgeny Morozov explains how this distinction plays out in the world of software development, in the late-nineties split between the free software concept developed by Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation and the rival notion of open source software promoted by the libertarian Eric Raymond. Stallman was and is preoccupied with the rights of users to examine and modify the software they use; Raymond, in contrast, was more interested in protecting the rights of developers to control the terms on which their software is distributed. The distinction between the rights of the user and the rights of the developer resembles, but does not neatly map onto, a more traditional political distinction between the rights of consumers and the rights of producers. The analogy is not exact, because users who modify and repurpose software can also be thought of as producers, and because the category “developers of software” is ambiguous between the software engineers who actually write the code and the capitalist enterprises that frequently employ them and retain the licenses to the software they produce. A similar ambiguity exists in the contrast between the creators and consumers of cultural objects like books or songs. In considering various “copyleft” alternatives to the existing IP regime, there is a danger of being seduced by a facile identification with the moral priority of creators over consumers. It’s the same impulse that leads to the slippage between emancipatory critiques of capitalism and a more politically ambiguous producerism, which attempts to divert society’s bounty away from unproductive parasites and toward those who are allegedly the direct producers. But the point of defending the commons isn’t that producers and creators are better than users and consumers — a moral economy more suited to Ayn Rand than Karl Marx. Rather, it is that we are simultaneously creators and consumers, and that we should strive for legal forms that keep us from being exploited or manipulated in either role.

A key driver of this economic growth and prosperity has been a healthy competition among countries to create the best possible policy economic environment. Many economies have recognized the importance of freer trade, reducing barriers to conducting business, responsible spending, and cutting taxes while emphasizing greater transparency and accountability. The powerful forces of economic freedom have indeed fostered the spirit of entrepreneurship and competitive innovation that creates more jobs, spreading the benefits of a economic dynamism around the globe. There is another benefit of such competition, too: A diverse world economy has more flexibility and resilience to withstand any challenges that come along!

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Compeerists of the World Unite!” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 185-189. /LJS

Regarding the prefigurative level, we would do well to remind ourselves that compeerism is fundamentally grounded in a (r)evolutionary vision where the economy is run by and for the people (not capital or the state), hence cementing the bottom-up impetus of the compeerist outlook. As such, the progression of compeerism, if it happens at all, will be propelled in fits and starts by the impactful events and innovative economic/social experiments unfolding locally as lines of flight (Dyer-Witheford, 2012; Bauwens and Gerhardt, 2020; Wright, 2021). These lines of flight are also immensely important in that they represent what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) refer to as ‘micropolitics’, which, by being ‘molecular’ enactments of a desired future to come (Holloway’s ‘doing’), foster an ethos of ‘becoming-revolutionary’ (Reyes, 2020). The becoming-revolutionary quality here is essential, as it serves not only as a force that undermines capital, but also as an inoculation against capital’s coopting powers. In addition to these isolated lines of flight, cracks, or micropolitics, compeerism also insists on a trans-local, meso-level political activism centred on achieving a greater solidarity among commoners themselves. We have referred to this throughout the book as various instantiations of boundary commoning, and these, following compeerism’s strategic outlook, would need to see a massive expansion via a blossoming of commoner consciousness and a subsequent movement of movements. One of the key aims of boundary commoning is to cohere the lines of flight into a more concerted force to deal directly with capital. These efforts often have a primarily economic impetus, such as the sharing of resources and information, yet when these also include a push to establish a peer-property regime that intentionally excludes capitalist actors, the prospect of contestation and, hence, politics is not far off. This reality, then, leads to a secondary purpose behind boundary commoning, which is the combining of commons-based interests into organized groupings, such as guilds or cooperative alliances. Here the aim is much more directly political as these entities seek to leverage the power of commoners to contend with contextual challenges, which, in the end, will need to be pursued via the existing governance/government arrangements in place. Indeed, the acknowledgment of the power that state-based assemblages/ apparatuses have over compeerists ability to realize their goals leads directly to the embrace of ‘molar’ forms of political engagement, or macropolitics (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). This macro-level of activism broadly denotes those efforts that directly seek to interact with and ultimately influence and shape government. It should be noted that beyond the P2P approach, this embrace of macropolitics as a supplement to the micro has also become adopted in some autonomist literature, from the ‘harm reduction’ espoused by the Midnight Notes Collective (2009) to the law-focused pressurization on the state backed in the later work by Hardt and Negri (2012). More specifically, and following Kioupkiolis (2020b, p 178), the ‘alternative politics’ involved in such a macro focus would need to orchestrate ‘broad-based political alliances which aggregate their forces, coordinate their action around a common political plan and a new collective identity, and make a concerted effort to reshuffle the decks of power so as to restructure dominant social relations’. In this sense the embrace of the macropolitical is a clear rejection of the assertion that any engagement with the state, or other reified assemblages/ apparatuses, inevitably end up bolstering the very forces that are being targeted for change, as per Holloway (2010). Instead, compeerism’s position holds that any such complicity can be overcome if the ethos of ‘becoming-revolutionary’ manages to also infuse the molar outlook of the movement of movements, meaning that the pursuit of state concessions (such as labour unions demanding a higher minimum wage) are not seen as ends in themselves (Merriman, 2018; Gerhardt, 2019). Rather, such demands must be consciously embraced as means to a much larger end, namely the establishment of a post-capitalist, compeerist society (Firat, 2020). The perceived need to engage the state in this tactical way aligns well with Slavoj Žižek’s provocative argument that refusing such engagement is ultimately a form of capitulation. In a controversial piece entitled ‘Resistance is Surrender’, Žižek (2007) takes to task the increasingly submissive and resigned attitudes he perceives on the political left. His point is that resistance to capitalism and the state has devolved into a retreat, where the political-economic structures are seen as essentially unassailable, while at the same time viewing engagement with the state as inevitably leading to cooptation. With such a starting point, Žižek argues, we end up with the left making lofty moral arguments that have no chance of actually penetrating state power. Those in charge can thus point to the peaceful, disengaged, and noble dissent on the left as an indication that the system is working, only to proceed unhindered in pursuing devastating economic and geopolitical interests. For Žižek this arrangement is a cynical and destructive win-win, where the dissenters save their souls while the state (and the capital interests it represents) maintains its unchecked power. Žižek (2007, np) goes on to argue that if you believe a different world is truly possible, as compeerism does, then the thing to do is to actually fight for this world, not by making ‘“infinite” demands we know those in power cannot fulfill’ but rather ‘to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands’, as these cannot be so easily dismissed. This is what we can call a ‘hit-andrun’ tactic, where the state (and its undergirding assemblages/apparatuses) is recognized as a critical fulcrum of power relevant to the prospects of the commons-based subeconomy. At the same time, this engagement is also understood within a deeper ‘becoming-revolutionary’ stance, committed to the eventual dissolution of the state’s current arrangement with capital. It is clear from Žižek’s comments that his focus was primarily on the national level of politics. Yet, before addressing hit-and-run tactics at this scale, we must acknowledge that compeerists would be inclined, first and foremost, to secure support and buy in on the local level, where ‘the state’ is often considerably more receptive and penetrable. Such ‘municipal activism’ is what Bookchin ultimately called for as the most appropriate and effective form of anarchist political action (Bookchin and Vanek, 2001). P2P scholars have similarly homed in on the importance of localized engagement, for instance, calling for the formation of ‘assemblies of the commons’ where commoners can meet with the aim of supporting locally governed commons, and a ‘chamber of the commons’ that can lobby for commons-friendly municipal policies (Bauwens et al, 2019). Indeed, such municipal activism is already crystallizing the world over as urban-centred commons movements are increasingly framing their actions as a strategy to ‘change the world one city at a time’ (Utratel and Troncoso, 2017, np). An encouraging sign of the potential in such an approach is the considerable expansion of the urban commons and the growing number of pro-commons municipal governments (Thompson, 2020; Vesco, 2020; Zechner, 2020). The Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons is an oft-cited example that exemplifies this trend. David Bollier (2015, np) explains this project as follows: Instead of seeing the city simply as an inventory of resources to be administered by politicians and bureaucratic experts, the Bologna Regulation sees the city’s residents as resourceful, imaginative agents in their own right. Citizen initiative and collaboration are regarded as under-leveraged energies that – with suitable government assistance – can be recognized and given space to work. Government is re-imagined as hosting infrastructure for countless self-organized commons. In this way over 90 collaborative agreements have been met in Bologna between citizens and the local government, focusing on everything from childcare to urban agriculture. Nevertheless, the struggle to expand the commons along compeerist lines will inevitably also push up against larger scaled assemblages/apparatuses, which demand more macro-level hit-and-run efforts. To be effective, however, any such engagements with the national state must be well organized and ultimately well-funded. Bauwens and his collaborators, as part of a growing awareness within P2P approaches for the need to engage government, make a compelling case for the commons-based subeconomy to actively support a ‘counter-power’ to the existing political order at various scales (Bauwens et al, 2019). There are numerous ways this counter-power could be pursued, including through lobbying campaigns, infiltrating political parties, running independent candidates, establishing commons-oriented parties (along the lines of the Pirate Party or a more intentionally counter capitalist version of the British Co-operative Party), and, not least, creating policy-oriented think tanks and relevant academic fields of study to shape and popularize compeerist-oriented discourses (O’Neil and Broca, 2021). In a moment, we will turn to how a compeerist counter-power could be put to use to directly pressure and influence government. Yet, the latter point just noted regarding the broader shaping of discourse, and hence public opinion, is worth briefly homing in on. While discourse alone cannot lead to systemic change, it nonetheless makes up a critical component of the overarching superstructural hegemony, or counter-hegemony, that undergirds or challenges any particular political-economic arrangement (Gramsci, 2011). As such, the role of discourse in forming attitudes and manipulating policy decisions should not be underestimated. Indeed, the rise of neoliberalism, at least in terms of the needed execution of its defence, has been linked precisely to the methodical building up of free-market philosophies and narratives emanating from economics departments and a slew of think tanks created precisely for this purpose (Harvey, 2006; Plehwe 2017). It stands to reason that for a compeerist trajectory to unfold, a similar infrastructure would also be needed – the creation of the P2P Foundation is certainly a promising start, but much more would be needed. As an example of a compeerist-aligned discourse that could have far-reaching impact, we can point to the efforts linked to challenging and rethinking the taken-for-granted use of economic indicators (such as GDP, productivity, unemployment) as the primary gauge of a nation’s accomplishments, self-worth, and most critically, overall wellbeing. Making the limits and possible alternatives to these econocentric measures a real topic of debate could prove to be a potent, self-reflective exercise for individuals and society, who may end up demanding the use of more holistic and pertinent indices covering such things as happiness, health, and sustainability (Jackson, 2017). If such non-capitalist indicators were to become fundamentally embedded in the strategic mission and vision of the state, then the capital-oriented hardwiring within its various departments would likely be, at least partially, short-circuited.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Compeerists of the World Unite!” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 177-181. /LJS

In line with De Angelis and Holloway, compeerism embraces the possibility of an outside to capital while acknowledging that this exterior is always contested and vulnerable. Compeerism also views the emergence of a different consciousness – the explosion of De Angelis’s middle class – as a necessary component of this ‘outside’. We can call this self-reflective, commons-oriented form of seeing and thinking ‘commoner consciousness’, which will find different sources and iterations depending on a person’s particular experiences and mental processes in their engagement with the capitalist mode of production. Yet, in an effort to avoid the overt vagueness for which some autonomist approaches have been critiqued, we can nonetheless attempt to offer a bit more specificity regarding what a commoner consciousness would entail, and, even more critically, the role of such a consciousness in the creation of a broader political mobilization. To begin, and in line with Holloway and De Angelis, compeerism does not see the essence of being a ‘commoner’ as rooted in some form of intellectual illumination; it is rather through acts of non- and counter-capitalist ‘doing’ and ‘commoning’ that commoner consciousness is brought about and sustained. Such doing could involve, for instance, volunteering at a soup kitchen or refugee centre; helping to organize a community maker/repair space; or building and contributing to the open-source designs of an offgrid tiny house that is intended to facilitate an exit from the demands of a never-ceasing earn-and-spend culture. As such, commoner consciousness is also not contingent on a conscious ‘class position’, but rather on the establishment of common interests and subsequent common organization in the face of capital’s exploitative/extractive nature more broadly (Hardt and Negri, 2005; De Angelis, 2010; Wright, 2021). Importantly, and following from this focus on doing, for commoner consciousness to be truly active it can never rest idle; commoning must continuously and intentionally be reengaged and reinvented to not be coopted. In other words, static and unreflective ‘anti-system’ positions, for instance choosing to be vegan, will not suffice; capital will simply respond with the McVegan burger at McDonalds and a vegan section at the local Walmart. Yet a key question that must be answered here is how the intentionality and depth needed to continuously challenge capital can be brought about, which would also go a long way to explain how a lasting and impactful counter capitalist movement of movements can be galvanized and sustained. Regarding such political mobilization, we can point out that many autonomists and anarchists, especially those falling in line with the thinking of Hardt and Negri (2017), would here refer to the spontaneous, decentralized, and intentionally amorphous multitude as the needed motor to propel any large-scale anti-capitalist activity and organization. The view here is that nothing can match the power of an anarchic swarm, leading to the ideal of the ‘headless’ movement, as exemplified in the Occupy Wall Street protests. Yet, it is precisely this thinking around the multitude that has also been dismissed as overly nebulous, and hence ineffective in explaining, let alone bringing about, progressive systemic change (De Angelis, 2007; Mouffe, 2009; Rancière, 2016). Indeed, with the Occupy movement increasingly in the rear-view mirror, it is not unfair to conclude that there were few lasting gains or concessions achieved. All the while capitalism marches on. The compeerist position, therefore, loosely shared by a smaller cohort of autonomists who are more critical of Hardt and Negri’s approach, is that greater unity and strategic intentionality is needed in the disparate and latently powerful forms of counter-capitalist consciousness already emerging (De Angelis, 2010; 2012; 2017a; Dyer-Witheford, 2015; Toupin, 2021). In compeerism, specifically, achieving this political cohesion is seen as ultimately depending on commoner consciousness embracing a malleable, but still broadly shared, morally informed political-economic outlook. This is decidedly not a vanguardist proposal for a grand and dogmatic ideology or a prescriptive agenda of specific actions that must be taken; indeed, the hierarchical power arrangements inherent in vanguardism are fundamentally counter to the compeerist preference for decentralized and egalitarian crowdsourcing. Rather, it is a call for a flexible yet cohering outlook and state of mind, which is seen as already being innate in most commoning-type doing, that can help commoners coalesce their efforts to actually achieve real systemic change (Bauwens and Ramos, 2018; Bollier and Helfrich, 2019; Kioupkiolis, 2020a; Ramos, 2020). Hence, in terms of its foundational, ethical core, the commoner consciousness espoused by compeerism is rooted in the broad value of human equality. As such, any form of oppression is rejected and resisted, including, for example, the use of identity-based bias and discrimination to exploit commons-based labour or to block or restrict access to the commons and commoning (Federici, 2012; 2019). Furthermore, the compeerist aspired-to commoner consciousness entails an embrace of justice and solidarity, rooted in a rejection of an ontologically posited, autonomous and individual subject. Instead, our social/psychological reality is better conceived as fundamentally inter-subjective and interdependent, giving rise to values such as openness, sharing, and collaboration (Bauwens 2005; Hyde, 2012; Bollier and Helfrich, 2015). It is this same inter-subjective outlook that lies behind the recognition of humanity’s geographical and hence ethical interconnectedness across distance and time, as emphasized in Chapter 6 with regard to the concept of power geometries (Massey, 1996). It follows, therefore, that the pursuit of an expansive and non-discriminatory commons is embraced as a global effort, requiring transnational mutual aid and camaraderie (Esposito, 2013; Dardot and Laval, 2014; Schismenos et al, 2020). At the same time, while the ethical and strategic embrace of inclusivity is seen as foundational, a well-honed and intentional commoner consciousness will also recognize that inclusivity cannot be infinite. Following Ostrom (2015), boundaries and regulations are still required for effective commons governance, especially when it comes to more physically limited, and hence rivalrous resources. Thus, the complex and contested nature of the commons reminds us of the quarrelsome politics that will always be a part of their governance. It is in light of the inevitability of politics, and indeed contestation, where the importance of more particular commons-centred dispositions come to the fore. It is these dispositions, which would ideally also be shared across commoner consciousness more broadly, that are needed to ensure the commons can, in fact, become the basis of a more just and sustainable prospering for everyone. Details of what an execution of such a mentality would entail are well expounded in the work associated with the Heteropolitics project initiated by Alexandros Kioupkiolis (2017). Here, political theory and commons practices are combined to articulate an ‘alternative’ politics that would be needed to intentionally align the management of the commons with the ideals of egalitarianism, fairness, and resilience. The result is ultimately an ‘agonistic’ form of commons-oriented politics that, in the words of Kioupkiolis (2020b, p 73), is rooted in ‘openness, diversity, elasticity, inclusivity, grassroots autonomy, participation, assemblies, process, horizontality, prefiguration, work in everyday reality, networking and action over fixed ideologies and closed identities’. These intentionally non-vanguardist, yet also purposedriven governance principles align well with the ideals compeerism adopts in its approach to commoning. However, compeerism is not just concerned with prefiguring or envisioning the commons, it is also, critically, about overcoming capitalism. This is where compeerism sees the value in commoner consciousness also maintaining a broadly shared, more macro-oriented political-economic outlook, which could function to tie commoners together within a powerful movement of movements. In terms of what the substance of such an outlook would entail, compeerism’s starting point aligns well with Michael Hardt’s (2010, p 353) basic premise, traced to the early Marx, that the ultimate aim of societal struggle is the ‘autonomous human production of subjectivity’. In other words, it is a broad and flexible embrace of the inherent value of pursuing, on our own terms, our self-determination as individuals and communities. Clearly, such a never-ending process of self-determination will vary over time and between people(s). Yet, from the compeerism perspective, a unifying ground to be found here is in the shared desirability to expand and wisely govern the material and digital commons needed to pursue our own and collective self-determination, and hence, thriving. As such, and keeping in mind the ‘middle class’ outlook that is to be ‘exploded’, a commoner consciousness would preferably evolve to entail a shared acknowledgement of the unsustainable, unjust, and squandering nature of our current organization of labour and resources. Further building on this insight, then, would be the conviction, given our technological endowments, that the principles of cooperation, collaboration, and mutual assistance are much more sensible principles for organizing our societies than those of cutthroat competition and targeted exclusion. Compeerism ultimately addresses these overarching internalizations by pursuing a replacement of capital by commonifying the means of production. Yet, at the same time, there is an intentional openness as to how these processes must unfold. For instance, private and/or state property are not presented as inherent evils needing absolute dismantlement. Instead, the degree to which these forms of property should be maintained, within the larger context of pursuing a vibrant and accessible commons, must be determined primarily by and for the people that are most impacted. It is in this light that we can also understand compeerism’s commitment to greater economic and political decentralization as a deliberate facilitation of localized self-determination, albeit within the confines of respecting the interests and concerns of legitimate external stakeholders (Bollier, 2017). This opening up to socioeconomic-political diversity, in essence, is what is meant by a post-ideological ideology, or post-ideology. It is an acceptance that communities may pursue divergent prioritizations, and find different answers to the same problem, while still being bounded within a set of overarching aims and principles.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Theorizing Capitalism and its Demise.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 22-25. // QUEERMAID

Having established a basic outline of how contemporary capitalism works, the next question has to be how it can be challenged and overcome. Communists and anarchists of old would tend to answer this question with the call to ‘revolution’, even if their ideas of what happens afterwards varied. As the 20th century unfolded, however, insurrectionary tactics were increasingly abandoned. While revolutionary Marxists persist, often in the limited realm of academia, their numbers have significantly dwindled; and on the anarchist side the singular focus on class and the need to rise up in revolt has given way to more countercultural areas of attention and the aim to ‘prefigure’ systemic change from within (Cornell, 2016). The increasing unpopularity of revolutionary demands to ‘smash the system’ coincides with a theoretical shift in ontological thinking (the basic assumptions of what reality is) rooted in the post-structural dismissal of deterministic, inflexible frameworks. In this view the Marxist reification of monolithic structures such as ‘capitalism’ or ‘the state’ are viewed as fundamentally wrongheaded. It is not possible to topple capitalism by capturing the state, because ‘capitalism’ is not a ‘thing’ that can simply be undone, nor is the state. These so-called ‘systems’ are better understood as complex phenomena composed of numerous interacting parts, both physical and mental, with which we, as subjects, are intimately intertwined. Directly related to this assessment, critical scholars and activists have also challenged classical Marxist thinking for being inherently disempowering (Gibson-Graham, 2010). In other words, when capitalism is conceived as a colossal, reified thing with a more or less determined trajectory, it leaves people with little sense of agency; revolution becomes a waiting game for the all-encompassing system to reach an apex of inevitable internal crisis. While such crises are often presented by Marxists as imminent in economic downturns, when capital then nonetheless regains its footing, these same prophets succumb to dismay and resignation. Consequently, there has been a concerted turn in recent decades towards approaches and conceptualizations that posit a much more indeterminate and malleable reality, one that leaves more room for political action here and now. One way to capture this flexibility is through the concepts of ‘assemblage’ and ‘apparatus’ (Foucault, 1980; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Agamben, 2009; Legg, 2011). While the terms have been used in disparate ways, an assemblage/apparatus can here be understood as the never fully stable arrangement and articulation of multiple animate and inanimate forces and potentials that interact to achieve specific outcomes. Importantly, this conceptualization of reality is one of flux, determined by the relations between things rather than by their essences. Yet, at the same time, assemblages/apparatuses still manage to bring about a distinct order, as, in the words of Agamben (2009, p 14) they maintain ‘the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings’. In terms of conceptualizing capitalism, a productive use of assemblage/ apparatus can be found in the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) who present the various defining features of our socio-economic condition as being continuously de- and reconstructed to ensure the overarching logic of capital accumulation. Especially instructive is their rethinking of Marx’s (1993) trinity formula as the ‘three-headed apparatus of capture’ (three apparatuses in one), understood as the intertwined forces that manage to continuously reinvent the governance of land (property), labour, and money in the service of profit. Thus, in its original iteration commons land and serf labour were set free from their positionalities within the feudal mode of production, only to be recaptured and reconstructed through the mechanisms of rent and wages to become the privately owned factory and the industrial worker. Underlying all of this, however, is money, which enables the commodification of property and labour in the first place. Money is brought under control via the assemblage/apparatus behind the execution of taxation, where the obligatory payment of a specific tender grounds this money’s worth and gives it the power to become the de facto measure of exchange-value in the market more broadly. Hence, in Deleuze and Guattari’s approach, Marx’s conceptualization of a capitalist mode of production, and more particularly the submission to an exchange-value framework, as captured in the idea of commodity fetishism, is still present, yet the underlying forces creating this reality are now seen as being part of a more indeterminate process of deconstruction, recapture, and reconstruction. This ‘process’ of capitalism, furthermore, is continuous, as we can see, for example, with the industrial worker (labour) and the factory (land) being de- and then reconstructed as the gig worker and the server farm. Or, for that matter, how money was de- and reconstructed to become an unbacked fiat currency that could expand exponentially in the pursuit of growth via fractional reserve banking. Returning, then, to the question of achieving systemic change, we can make use of two further concepts from Deleuze and Guattari, namely ‘lines of articulation’ and ‘lines of flight’. Lines of articulation can be understood as the way assemblages/apparatuses channel inherent potentials to maintain the functioning of a given organizational stability. Lines of flight, in turn, have been described as ‘bolts of pent-up energy that break through the cracks in a system of control … they reveal the open spaces beyond the limits of what exists’ (Rayner, 2013, np). Deleuze and Guattari suggest that lines of flight may combine with others to ultimately bring about the destabilization of an entire ‘system’, referring to this as ‘a whole generalized conjunction that overspills and over-turns the preceding apparatuses’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p 452). On a large enough scale, then, such a generalized conjunction could, theoretically, spell the end of the capitalist mode of production, at least as it is currently conceived. Arguably, the most critical lines of articulation within capitalism are rooted in the apparatus of capture, where the commodification of everything, including labour, pulls subjectivities into the overarching logic of exchange value calculations and hence capital accumulation. Lines of flight, in turn, can have various expressions, including haphazard ones, but from the perspective of actively pursuing systemic change, the most relevant lines of flight take the form of prefigurative acts of resistance – where prefiguration is defined as ‘those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal’ (Boggs, 1977, p 100). In essence, prefiguration is an action of being the change you want to see, which, by being embodied and performed, creates a line of flight that makes a different world suddenly seem possible. Significantly, however, Deleuze and Guattari see these rebellious lines of flight, including intentional forms of prefigurative resistance, as remaining mostly imperceptible from within the status quo. In other words, those controlling and embracing the currently dominant operating procedures and discourses are blind to these prefigurations, either because they are intentionally hidden from view, or because their logic makes no sense from the given set of assumptions within the current assemblages/ apparatuses at work. For those familiar with Star Trek, this is akin to the Borg, a hive collective of cybernetic beings who do not acknowledge outsiders beaming onto their spaceship until they are explicitly identified as posing a danger. In the case at hand, lines of flight can be seen expressed in the various forms of commons-based peer production, and commoning more generally. Until quite recently, these lines of flight have largely gone unnoticed, operating in the shadows, overlooked or seen as hardly noteworthy. Yet, to bring about change will eventually require coming into the light. Indeed, the point of the prefigurative is not, as Thomas Nail (2015, p 99) helpfully explains, ‘to relish the theory of an impossible and invisible revolution, but rather to “bring the imperceptible to perception” by changing the dominant conditions for visibility’. In this sense, lines of flight are like rockets seeking to break free from the fetters of gravity; they are continuously pulled on until they fall back to the ground, unless they have the power to break out of the conditions of visibility that define our world. What this means in terms of achieving a commons-based mode of production is the need to overcome the nearly inescapable apparatus of capture, which comprises the dominant conditions for visibility that render transgressive lines of counter-capitalist possibilities, like the commons, not only invisible, but largely dysfunctional, especially at larger scales. But what would a generalized conjunction of lines of flight that could topple the apparatus of capture actually look like? Is it even possible? The answer to these decisive questions hinges on how the alternative economic activities and relations being posited (the lines of flight) are understood in relation to the currently dominant capitalist mode of production. When considering the commons and commoning as this alternative, we find a number of conflicting approaches.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Coping With Money’s Monopoly on Value.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 181-184. /LJS

Compeerists seeking a large-scaled political movement of movements to help drive a systemic commons transition will naturally seek to spawn, solidify and tie together a commoner consciousness as outlined in the previous section. Yet, as was also made clear, such a consciousness, despite its idealized presentation, is far from monolithic. Instead, it will exist as variously coherent and internalized iterations, finding expression and definition from within a broad range of activities and efforts, many of which we have covered in earlier chapters. It is from within these actions, many having grown into micro-movements in their own right, that we find the most fertile ground from which a compeerist-oriented movement of movements could form. Building on the commoner consciousness that is there, the compeerist aim thus becomes to tie the various commons-oriented forces into a larger whole by creating a basic political consensus around the broad aim of expanding the commons and commoning as an alternative to capital. In this sense, ‘the commons’ becomes the ‘empty signifier’ noted by Laclau and Moofe (2014) as the amalgamating idea and discourse that can unify a large, diversified group of people by being able to encompass all of their various concerns, imperatives, and context-specific outlooks (see also Walljasper, 2010; Dardot and Laval, 2014). In the digital realm, then, promising initiatives to be brought into the fold of a broader mobilization would include hacker and pirating efforts; the production of free, open-source software; reclaiming data; establishing platform co-ops; and the various work geared towards decentralizing and democratizing the internet. Also included here are the broader demands being made for the revision or outright abolishment of copyrights and patents and the push to dismantle the monopolistic/oligopolistic power of the tech giants. In the material realm, common cause can be found in the numerous environmental and justice-oriented efforts seeking a sustainable and fair use of our global material commons; the pursuit of off-grid resilience capabilities; and the various initiatives to expand the urban commons, including the cooperativization and municipalization of key infrastructure. In the actual making of stuff, in turn, obvious synergies exist with the DIY, maker, open-hardware, and open-design movements, which are each motivated in different ways by a desire to exit materially based dependencies on capital with the help of an open-source digital commons. Not least, within the market-engaged production of material goods and services, important allies can be found in commons-oriented cooperatives, open-value-networks, and non-profits across key economic sectors. In employing the commons and commoning as an underlying ‘empty signifier’, compeerists hope that the various commoners involved in these visions and actions could be convinced that their work not only has macro-level political insinuations – in that they favour more commonsfriendly political-economic conditions – but that their (latent) policy preferences are also shared by a host of compatriots involved in disparate yet similar commons-related doing. Once these aligned political positionalities become self-evident, especially in the face of inevitable clashes with powerful capitalist interests, it becomes possible to see, at least for some, how a wide spectrum of commoners could coalesce into a movement of movements committed to a commons-based future beyond capitalism. Such a hopeful outlook is, of course, not shared by everyone, and many would dismiss such conjecture as being fundamentally out of touch with the socio-political realities on the ground. While difficult to assess such cynical claims in any objective way, compeerists could push back by first pointing to the vibrancy of the many commons oriented micro-movements that already exist. They could further draw attention to the numerous inroads achieved by commons-based political initiatives, particularly in municipalities across Europe; or note the macro-level waves of counter-capitalist uprisings in the last few decades – from the anti-globalization movement in the 1990s to Occupy Wall Street in the 2000s – which offered a glimpse of the tremendous, albeit still mostly diffuse and untapped, people power that seems to lie just beneath the surface. Also notable has been the strong showing since the turn of the century of upstart political parties and candidates taking a more adversarial stance to capital, as for instance in Greece and Spain (and to some extent Britain and the US). While these formal, electoral efforts (which, we should note, were not explicitly compeerist), ultimately failed to bring about paradigm-shifting policies, the fact that they garnered the support that they did points to underlying counter-capitalist sentiments and an openness to forging a different way forward. Lastly, it is also important to recognize that the nascent, compeerist-aligned forces that are taking form have the potential to significantly expand as the capital-state nexus flounders to deal with a host of culminating crises rooted in the dominant assemblages/apparatuses of the current political-economy (Varvarousis, 2020). These emerging dysfunctions offer compeerists fertile ground for expanding commoner consciousness and, more specifically, forcing an internal reflection of the repressed irrationalities inherent in the ‘middle class’ justification of the status quo (De Angelis, 2010). Taking these various points together, compeerism maintains that the eventual formation of a commons-centred, counter-capitalist movement of movement is by no means a far-fetched proposition. Critically, however, in considering the growing disillusionment towards capitalism’s hegemony, we must also acknowledge that compeerism will not inevitably be the embraced response. Indeed, the escalating symptoms of a capitalism in crisis (faltering wellbeing, failing governance regimes, wage stagnation, and rising precarity) could quite readily also give rise to sentiments that are inherently neo-fascist (anti-democratic and xenophobic), which is a trend that is already apparent the world over (Dyer-Witheford, 2015). The challenge facing compeerists here brings to mind De Angelis’s insistence that working in common is not the same as commoning, as the latter entails a certain form of commoner consciousness, as outlined earlier. As such, faced with the very real prospect of neo-fascist competition, compeerism must clearly stake out its position with the aim of winning out in the arena of public opinion and, ultimately, politics. This position will revolve around two intertwined points of contention, reminiscent of the clash between fascists and anarchists of old. The first centres on the question of decision making and how it is best governed. Here the neo-fascist’s preference of a patriarchal model of top-down authority is in stark contrast to the compeerists’ preference of diluting decision-making power, including in the economy, through maximal distribution. The second is the fundamental moral clash over who should be included in the universe of persons considered worthy of our concern and care, or put in more stark terms, who truly counts as human? This latter question hits on one of the key irrationalities suppressed by De Angelis’s middle class, namely the ‘othering’ that is internalized to blame a particular, generally powerless grouping of human beings for the loss of any wellbeing and/or security within the community. In doing so, responsibility on the part of the actors within capital and the state, that are actually culpable, is deflected. As long as this ‘othering’ is maintained, regardless of whether this is in a strictly capitalist or neo-fascist state, any transition along compeerist lines will be thwarted. For compeerists, then, the undemocratic, neo-fascist framework will need to be effectively debunked as illiberal, patronizing, dishonest, and parasitic; its primary aim being nothing more than the amassing of power (and wealth) in the hands of the few. The compeerist alternative, in turn, must come to be understood as a win-win option that could benefit the so-called 99 per cent of the entire globe, thus making such a pursuit not only empowering, fair, and rational, but also potentially cathartic in its ability to bring about a feeling of being in common, or what Hardt and Negri simply referred to as the ‘economic power’ of ‘love’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009, p 180). Yet, for such a discourse (and feeling) to take hold – given a broader context shaped by historical injustices and deeply ingrained sentiments centred on competition and mistrust – will undoubtedly require the patient application of compeeristaligned care and goodwill. This effort, furthermore, will have to emanate from the bottom up, that is, from the many commons-oriented initiatives and micro-movements on the ground, which is also where any formal, populisttype politics embracing the compeerist message would need to be rooted. Building on this point of a needed material groundedness from which change must emerge, we should keep in mind Chantal Mouffe’s (2005) reformulation of Carl Schmitt’s ‘friend-enemy’ dichotomy, where she makes the convincing case that we can never achieve a discourse-based, enlightened end of history. There will always be declared enemies that cannot see eye to eye, where the limits of rational discussion are laid bare. Consequently, compeerism’s prospects for outcompeting a neo-fascist alternative will also come down to its ability to deliver equitably and collaboratively governed commons realms that offer real contributions to overall wellbeing. This includes not only concrete material gains but also the social and psychological rewards that come with being able to take part in social relations involved in commoning. Only by offering such tangible benefits will larger segments of the population begin to open up to the compeerist message more broadly. In light of this demand, then, an overarching imperative for compeerists must be to establish a positive, snowballing feedback loop in which gains in the commons-based economic realm are leveraged to garner social mobilization and political clout, which is then applied to create even more robust compeerist-aligned economic capabilities and hence yet more social and political power. The effective execution of such a feedback loop as capitalism’s challenges come to a head is the only way the compeerist post-capitalist vision can both supplant capital while also ensuring neofascist alternatives do not get the upper hand. For such a spiralling process of compeerist economic and social usurpation to materialize, however, will necessitate deft, multi-scalar, political engagement and organization, including, crucially, in relation to ‘the state’.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Coping With Money’s Monopoly on Value.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 143-146. /LJS

It is in light of the shortcomings entailed in the tactics of exit and gifting that the need to engage markets becomes apparent. John Restakis, approaching this issue from the perspective of cooperatives, argues: ‘To cut off a collective, whether a commons, co-operative or the wider social economy, from the world of markets and money is self-delusional and ineffective, it undermines the purpose of these organizations, which is to socialize and democratize the economy’ (quoted in Bollier and Conaty, 2016, p 11). Building on this line of thinking, the compeerist framework holds that market engagement by formal commons-oriented actors makes up a critical source of wealth that is needed to expand the commons and ultimately challenge capital, especially since the feasibility of a revolutionary, forced commonification is rejected. The fundamental proposition here is that compeerist-aligned organizations and enterprises, with the support of tailored emerging technologies and an increasingly commons-centric socio-economic political environment, could usurp the current mode of production by outcompeting capital within the market itself. Despite having market generated revenue, these entities would still be part of the commons realm because of the non-capitalist values they embrace and operate by. We have seen these values play out, for instance, in the way profit is made subservient to the pursuit of the commons and commoning, the focus on worker empowerment and fair remuneration; and the efforts made to include the community as a stakeholder with legitimate claims to economic democracy and revenue sharing. Following from this, the earnings generated should not be understood as ‘profit’ in the traditional sense, but rather as a transvestment of wealth from capital to the commons. Furthermore, and in distinction to gifting, the market engagement that is the source of this transvestment is simultaneously seeking to displace capital in the market of goods, services, and labour, hence offering a fully-fledged alternative to the organization of our productive capacities. The major question begged in this proposal, however, is whether such a compeerist form of production could ever truly thrive to achieve significant scale. On the one hand, following Rosa Luxemburg (2011), there is the issue of non-capitalist economic endeavours failing to achieve critical mass as they refuse to take advantage of extractive/exploitative operational tactics. On the other hand, the obverse corollary of this point (often emphasized by anarchists and autonomists) is that if scale actually is achieved through market engagement, it generally comes at the cost of the motivating values being espoused. The increasingly profit-oriented attitudes and actions of large cooperatives, like the Mondragon Corporation, are here often referenced as a case in point. Nonetheless, the previous chapters have attempted to show that a commons-based trajectory out of capital’s dominance in various economic sectors is conceivable, but it would by no means be given or easy; the inability to match capital’s market-capturing tactics, or becoming corrupted in the process of trying, are both immense challenges. In response to the former, compeerists are tasked with finding non-extractive/exploitative sources of market competitiveness that can match those of capitalists. As we have seen, the focus in such a pursuit has generally fallen on the imperative to leverage boundary-commoning advantages, like peer-property regimes, while additionally seeking government-sourced policies/interventions to establish more commons-friendly market conditions. The critical need to bring about alternative financial/monetary arrangements in such efforts, in turn, is a key focus in this chapter and in the next. Yet the latter challenge identified, pertaining to the corruption of compeerist ideals, has not yet been fully addressed, especially in those instances where it cannot simply be traced back to market exigencies. Indeed, in the case of the Mondragon Corporation covered in Chapter 5, it is, in the end, difficult to assess the degree to which market pressures forced the mega-cooperative to abandon its worker co-op commitments when shifting manufacturing overseas. Given its market positions and overall revenue, it could be argued that such a capitulation to exchange-value driven rationales was not necessary, and hence that this move can be traced to an internal loss of direction. We can, hence, briefly review a number of compeerist-aligned business practices and strategies that can ultimately be adopted to avoid such potential internal digressions, which pose a legitimate threat to the compeerist vision of achieving a post-capitalist future via market engagement. A first critical step here would be for compeerist-aligned enterprises to establish a public mission, vision, and values statement as well as intentionally formulated and legally binding bylaws regulating operational procedures. These foundational documents would include norms against abetting extractive capital actors while supporting the aim of inclusive, boundary commoning. Also, in line with Ostrom’s insights concerning effective commons governance, they would reflect a commitment to openness, inclusion, and democracy both in terms of internal operations and stakeholder relations. Indeed, exclusionary or discriminatory practices, which can also be found in commons production, are not only viewed by true compeerists as inherent ‘bads’ that vitiate the vision of a better, commons-based future, they are also recognized as being antithetical to the overarching strategy of expanding and hence fortifying the commons (Stavrides, 2016; 2019; Pentzold, 2021). In other words, it is only through an intentional openness that the commons can be expected to gain supporters, grow, and hence ever achieve a release from exchange-value’s monopoly on economic organization. In applying this philosophy to stakeholdership relations more broadly, we find there is significant room to expand inclusion within existing cooperative arrangements. Hence, while commons-based worker cooperatives and open value-networks are well placed to look after the interests of their workers, preferably, they would also recognize the community and end-users linked to this production as ‘invested parties’ with rights to participate. Similarly, non-profits, member-cooperatives, and municipalities engaged in commons oriented service provisions should ensure that their members and constituents, as well as the workers themselves, have a say in how these services are generated and delivered. An important consequence of broadening democratization in these ways is that it helps prevent a corruption of values, ensuring that the relevant entities remain focused on serving the community. While establishing an expansive formal commons-based subeconomy operating according to the ideals noted here will undoubtedly take time, the logistical execution of such governance regimes is becoming ever more feasible. For instance, the Loomio app developed by the New Zealand based Enspiral collaborative is designed to help organizations achieve buy-in and manage decision making using various functionalities like proposal-making tools, poll taking, feedback forums, and secure voting (Loomio, nd). As discussed in Chapter 2 when considering the potential of such technology for open-value-networks, it is likely that we will soon see even more capabilities to control operational procedures via the use of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), where the rules and procedures of an economic entity are coded directly into its internal decision-making mechanisms. In sum, then, if compeerists can pursue both the right external and internal tactics to gain market competitiveness without becoming corrupted, then the market engagement response to the monopoly of exchange-value with which we started the chapter, represents a further strategic route to be pursued beyond that of exit and gifting. Yet, the advantage here is that market involvement offers commons-oriented actors both an option to access the resources they need while also directly challenging capital’s grip on consumers and labour; this makes it the lynchpin of compeerism’s overall evolutionary approach to achieving a post-capitalist mode of production.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Coping With Money’s Monopoly on Value.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 147-148. /LJS

Hence, in the here and now, compeerists are faced with the challenge of circumventing capital-based credit by establishing their own commons-based arrangements around finance. One of the most basic forms of internalized, commons-based banking is ‘cooperative accumulation’. Such cooperative financing efforts were established, for instance, in the 18th-century British and Irish ‘terminating building societies’, which would pool money to make low-cost credit available to help members purchase critical assets for their household or business. Today the Swedish JAK banks are replicating this model, with 30 local branches accumulating the savings of members to offer interest-free loans for everything from mortgages to community projects. Loans average US$23,000 but reach up to $1 million and the default rate is only 0.05 per cent (Bollier and Conaty, 2016). Other, more targeted forms of cooperative accumulation include the pooling of funds to save a particular community asset such as a pub or soccer club, or to expand community-oriented capacities, for example by supporting investments in local renewable energy or agriculture. A good example is the Slow Money Movement, a non-profit focused on organizing zero-percent interest loans intended to support farmers and initiatives committed to sustainable, community-centred food production. In this way dozens of local groups have formed since its start in 2010, mobilizing more than $79 million in loans to hundreds of local food system initiatives (Slow Money, 2017). Digital technology has also been harnessed to facilitate much broader lending pools via P2P lending or crowdlending. This platform-based system functions essentially the same way as crowdfunding, with the expectation that funds are repaid. While a circumvention of established banking institutions is a significant draw here, the most established P2P lending sites such as Prosper and Zopa are generally still controlled by capital-based middlemen, and participation by lenders is mostly done with a considerable focus on returns. More commons-oriented approaches to P2P lending, however, can also be found. Kiva, for instance, is a non-profit that links funds offered by the public to micro-loans to specific projects in the Majority World. Once the loans are paid off, the returned money can be committed to another project or reclaimed by the lender. Since its inception in 2005, Kiva has granted more than 2.1 million loans, totalling over US$1.72 billion (Kiva, 2016). In 2011 Kiva began offering US based P2P loan mediation with zero-per-cent interest, offering what is essentially a more expansive, online based version of the Swedish JAK banks. Boundary-commoning approaches to addressing credit needs between commons-based entrepreneurs can also be found, as noted in a number of cases covered in previous chapters. Along the lines of cooperative accumulation, many of the early member co-ops often worked together to combine extra revenue from their operations to form a cooperative bank, which, over time, would administer an ever-growing equity fund to service the needs and expansion of the cooperative economy. While there has been a waning in the intentionality and mutual support within some cooperative sectors, the tightly-knit cooperative alliances evident in France and northern Italy still participate in such arrangements. More recently, finance-based boundary-commoning initiatives are also being employed in open-value networks or similar forms of digitally networked production. The New Zealand-based, commons-oriented Enspiral network, for instance, responsible for the Loomio app noted earlier, maintains a financial entity within its collaboration-focused production organization that actively diverts a chunk of earned revenues (averaging around 20 per cent) to be managed and utilized internally in the pursuit of its mission to facilitate a transition to a ‘post-capitalist, sustainable economy’ (Enspiral, 2021, np). The banking entity overseeing this task, named ‘my.enspiral’, oversees the collection and allocation of these funds, hence overcoming any need for external banking. The setup is explained as ‘a bank for a “microcosm economy” protected from the outside world by the walled garden of a limited liability corporation’ (quoted in Bollier and Conaty, 2016, p 32). Importantly, allocations of funds, while overseen by my.enspiral, are based on a democratic process, enabled by the Loomio app, where the voting power of a member is proportional to the contributions that have been made to the network.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Reinventing Money’s Role In the Economy.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 162-172. /LJS

There is no doubt that a move to sovereign money by the state would be a monumental shift with enormous implications for the capitalist mode of production, while at the same time opening up significant opportunities for commons expansion. Still, given the uncertainty of whether or when states would be prepared to trigger such serious monetary reforms, we must also consider efforts for finding a wholesale exit from, and replacement of, the monetary-banking apparatus that could be pursued via bottomup mobilizations. One of the things that has characterized past complementary currencies and alternative trading networks is their focus on a relatively limited economic space. This was partly due to an ideological focus on localism, but it was also the result of limited technological means to expand such efforts. Yet, in the previous chapter, we saw how cryptocurrencies have enabled much more expansive transactions, for instance to incentivize compeerist-aligned behaviours. Now a growing number of projects, albeit many still conceptual, are also using cryptographic and blockchain technology to pursue entirely new means-of-exchange money that can help facilitate and support a growing and more delinked commons economy (Fritsch et al, 2021). In other words, these currencies strive to become units of account used in actual transactions, as opposed to simply a store of value that is mostly held as a speculative investment, as most cryptocurrencies still are. The enticement of a non-state means-of-exchange tender from a compeerist perspective is that it could potentially endow the issuer with similar advantages to that of a state managing its own sovereign currency. This is, however, assuming the currency allows for some form of intentional control, which is difficult to achieve in blockchain based cryptocurrencies due to the intentional decentralization of their validation and issuance procedures, as with Bitcoin. Still, even if an alternative design could be developed along abstract hacktivist principles, hence allowing the currency to be used more intentionally, managing to successfully launch and then reap the benefits of such an alternative money is still fraught with sizable hurdles. Undoubtedly the greatest challenge is that of creating enough buy-in to make the currency viable. Cryptocurrencies are known to be particularly vulnerable to speculation and subsequent valuation swings based on herdlike movements within the volatile world of cryptocurrency exchanges. Such instabilities are particularly untenable for means-of-exchange tender as it makes it difficult to price goods and services, hence significantly damaging such currency’s appeal. While much of this instability could be remedied if the intended unit of account actually denoted a sizable economy of things to be bought and sold, the big question is how to get to that point when this money starts off as unstable, unwieldy, and impractical. We should add that if such a currency were, in fact, to ever achieve viability, the utmost care would then need to be taken to not over-issue it, as this could quickly lead to devaluation and abandonment, with very few means to remedy the problem. Currently there are still no instances where an expansive, non-state-based currency of account has effectively been implemented. Paradoxically, the closest example is Bitcoin. Although treated primarily as a speculative store of value today, Bitcoin was originally intended to be a means-of-exchange money that could compete with state-based tender, hence the much-told story of the first pizza bought with Bitcoin shortly after its launch (the amount paid for two pizzas at that time is worth about US$150 million as of this writing). Since then, Bitcoin has, in fact, steadily been making inroads as a legitimate unit of account, with a growing number of big vendors accepting Bitcoin payment and the prospect of more Majority World countries – following El Salvador’s example – adopting the cryptocurrency as legal tender (Bernstein, 2021). While Bitcoin is not a sovereign currency (due to its in-built decentralization), if a sovereign, means-of-exchange crypto token/coin were to actually reach Bitcoin’s overall valuation, the concomitant economic power bestowed on the issuer would be significant (Fama et al, 2019). Bitcoin may currently only be the equivalent of 0.1 per cent of the world’s overall accessible money supply (known as broad money), yet this still signifies a third of the money supply of Kenya (US$10 billion) and ten times that of the Seychelles. Indeed, a sovereign, alternative currency that denominated $10 billion worth of value within a commons-based subeconomy could be leveraged in various ways to boost the commons and commoning. There are currently several nascent efforts pursuing such a goal, usually adopting one of two main strategies. The first is an exit-centred effort in which crypto tokens are issued with the aim of achieving a viable commons based network of exchange that could support a guaranteed basic income. The second is a more radical project where an alternative money form is created to denominate what is to become an expanding commons-based economic realm that can compete with (and perhaps even replace) the dominant capitalist economy and its adopted state-based currency of account. We can start with the former. In basic-income type cryptocurrencies, such as SwiftDemand, Mannabase, and Circles, the aim is to establish a means-of-exchange money that is accepted by enough people to enable its incremental release as a form of free income. Focusing on just one example, Circles, which runs on Ethereum’s blockchain-based xDai sidechain, is pursuing a guaranteed income currency by creating relatively closed, trust-based networks comprised of individuals and businesses who agree to accept each other’s Circles tokens as tender to be used for any goods and services they bring to the network (Circles, 2020). A key challenge facing such basic-income cryptocurrencies, however, is that many may be interested in free money, but few will be thrilled about denominating their assets in such a currency if there is little expectation that doing so will be reciprocated. In Circles this issue is decentralized, leaving it up to the various trust networks to establish systems of accepted reciprocity; only if you are invited into the network can you receive your steady stream of Circles currency. While this may lead to a slow start, it also creates more confidence and security in the currency. With time, then, the aim is to have the trust-based networks begin to interlink, expanding them from very small complementary economies to ever more expansive and diversified ones. The expansion of Circles networks also means that the inflationary pressure of a continuous issuance of guaranteed income money can be partly offset. At the same time, inflation is also not fully shunned in the Circles project, which strives to maintain a set level of seven per cent yearly inflation to dissuade its use as a store of value. In the Circles whitepaper, the currency is clearly envisioned as a currency of account that is meant to be used for economic interactions. Thus, the pursued level of inflation serves as an intended demurrage, ensuring that the Circles money stays in circulation as a means of exchange (Circles, 2020). Yet, while inflation poses an ongoing challenge to be managed, the Circles currency also comes with the benefit of avoiding sudden and unpredictable fluctuations in its value. This is because the Circles currency is not set up for external trading; it is an internalized system where each Circles participant is given their own individualized crypto tokens to be used in a closed, mutually agreed upon network or group of networks. In such an arrangement, there is no easy way, even for an individual, to sell their Circles money outside of the network. Importantly, while the individualized approach to Circles money issuance prevents any entity from gaining a singular sovereign control over the currency, the Circles monetary arrangement can still be leveraged to achieve commons-based, use-value centred ends. In other words, the currency’s power is devolved to the Circles communities themselves who can decide on what can be denominated in Circles tokens and hence what counts as ‘valuable’. In this way, these networks can use the Circles system to foster intentional economies that are not driven by purely exchange-value determinations. In the longer term, then, if the Circles networks were to significantly grow and interconnect, these economies could offer ever more options to exit capital and, as per their main aim, find a significant reprieve from the apparatus of capture via a guaranteed income. The second approach to pursuing a more expansive, commons-based currency of account centres on establishing a money form that can be used by the issuing entity to directly subsidize a commons-based subeconomy. The aim in such a project is ultimately to assist in the compeerist goal of a transvestment of capital-controlled wealth to the commons by engaging state-based money. In other words, such a currency strives to be more than simply complementary. In the most ideal scenario, then, a highly competitive commons-based subeconomy using its own sovereign currency could establish current account (trade) surpluses with market-based economies. The resulting boost in access to state-based currencies could then be used to acquire critical assets held by capital, including land, infrastructure, and means of production. While there are not many, one example of a project that roughly adopts such a vision is the anarchist-inspired FairCoop and their FairCoin currency. The aim of this project is to create a FairCoin denominated marketplace that would ultimately confer quasi-sovereign currency privileges to FairCoop (König et al, 2018). More specifically, FairCoop has here taken control over a significant chunk of initially created FairCoin (estimated to be about 20 per cent of the total) while the rest of the currency was either gifted to other actors or was created as part of the cryptocurrency’s decentralized, proof-of-cooperation mining process. Yet, with the FairCoin that were internally held, FairCoop has pursued various commoning efforts, such as the funding of Freedom Coop, which offers legal and banking services to self-employed individuals looking to make a living outside the exploitative grip of capital or the state. Importantly, with a cryptocurrency that is designed to engage other forms of money in the open market, the challenges that emerge are distinct from those faced by basic-income crypto projects, like Circles. To begin, we should note that FairCoin, at least, is not burdened with the need to continuously release its currency, hence dampening inflationary pressures. Instead, the issuing of currency can be more intentional and limited with the aim of controlling its overall value. In line with this reasoning, after an initial airdrop (free distribution) of coins and a limited period of mining, FairCoin put a cap on currency creation. Such a cap makes sense given that a decay of FairCoin value would undermine the likelihood of its adoption as well as the wealth position that FairCoop has created for itself. Nonetheless, if the currency’s value significantly increased, a fork in the blockchain could be instigated to allow for further money issuance, an option that has not been ruled out (König et al, 2018). A much more far-reaching and complex problem, however – one that the Circles currency manages to circumvent – pertains to the danger of succumbing to speculation, hoarding, and value fluctuations, as FairCoin is not shielded from being treated primarily as a store-of-value asset. This issue comes especially into play because FairCoop has not achieved a big enough economic realm denominated in FairCoin to establish an autonomous, externally backed pool of market value. In response to FairCoin’s wild fluctuations, and in an effort to ensure the currency can function as an effective means of exchange, a minority of FairCoop stakeholders have proposed pegging FairCoin to a more stable, state-based currency (Barinaga and Ocampo, 2019). Achieving such a fixed exchange rate, however, is not tenable if FairCoin is to remain a tradable, means-of-exchange form of money, as this would require costly currency market interventions to maintain the targeted currency value. More specifically, such interventions require large sums of valuable state-based tender that are generally not available. The dominant view within FairCoop, therefore, is to continue allowing the market to determine FairCoin’s price. Supporters of this line of thinking argue that swings in value must be accepted as an inevitable component of the strategy they have adopted (FairCoin, 2018). In fact, the market-oriented strategy adopted by FairCoin entails a recognition that value fluctuations can cut both ways, and thus have the potential to be exploited. As such, we can see that an underlying, initial aspiration within the FairCoin project was to essentially hack the unstable cryptocurrency markets by playing the store-of-value game, even if the eventual goal was to become an expansive currency of account (not unlike Bitcoin’s potential trajectory). Initially this appeared to be a promising strategy. In 2017, riding a wave of Bitcoin fuelled upward speculation, FairCoop was able to garner a significant amount of state-based reserve currencies for its FairCoin holdings as the coin’s value reached €1.2. In the end, however, there was ultimately nothing FairCoop could do when the bubble popped and FairCoin’s price came crashing back to earth, demonstrating the extreme difficulty in replicating Bitcoin’s route to widespread adoption based on its acceptance as a store of value. After hitting rock bottom, the FairCoin project has begun picking up the pieces in a bid to re-establish its worth. As of this writing FairCoin’s exchange rate stands between €0.05 and €0.08 euro cents. At this juncture, arguably the only way FairCoin could truly alleviate the challenges it faces is if it could significantly broaden the microeconomy it denotes. How big is big enough remains an open question, but it would be wrong to assume outright that a commons-based economic realm could not reach the needed scale. Take the example of the Seychelles again, which maintains the smallest economy to employ a free-floating independent currency. This economy maintains a GDP between US$1 and $2 billion per year and has managed a remarkably stable currency over time. Then, consider that the total sales of the Mondragon mega-cooperative is well over $10 billion. Clearly, there could be commons-aligned economies that are big enough. Following from this, then, rather than trying to build up a commons-based currency from the bottom, with dreams of hacking the cryptocurrency market, as with FairCoin, a more promising approach would likely be one that was more orchestrated and started big. This would mean launching a means-of exchange currency with the backing of an already well-established pool of market value. Such an initiative could be spearheaded by a massive cooperative like the Mondragon Corporation, or through a broad alliance of cooperatives, non-profits, and open-value networks, which could account for an even larger economy to be denoted by the new currency. Of critical importance here, however, is that the currency is launched with all of this backed value from the outset. The organizational effort and far-sighted intentionality required to launch such a large-scale, commons-based cryptocurrency would, without a doubt, be considerable. The odds of success, furthermore, would be greatly dependent on the broader monetary context. This context, of course, is primarily controlled by the state. Lest we forget, it is the state that maintains ultimate authority over the legal status and allowances afforded any alternative currencies. Presently, in the most liberalized capitalist economies, cryptocurrencies are legal and increasingly subject to codification and control. Somewhat paradoxically, the more states seek to restrict cryptocurrencies via regulations and limiting laws, the more they seem to gain recognition and stability as a viable asset. How far these states are willing to allow cryptocurrencies to function as actual means-of-exchange tender is another matter, however. While Bitcoin’s impact on national economies and their money system is understood to be mostly negligible for the time being, there is no saying that this would continue to be the case if cryptocurrency adoption and use, especially as a unit of account, were to significantly increase. A basic concern here is that the state’s monetary and fiscal tools to shape the economy could become fundamentally hampered (Claeys et al, 2018). Undoubtedly the biggest possible potential threat in this regard is that posed by big corporations, who could also benefit from establishing some form of centralized means-of-exchange tender for themselves. We can point here to the big US airlines’ rewards programmes as a precursor to such currencies, where the points that can be redeemed for air travel have become a financialized micro-economy in their own right, becoming a leading source of revenue for these companies (Genter, 2022). Currently, large tech firms are exploring similar possibilities with the help of crypto-based technologies; while Meta (Facebook) has thus far been stymied by regulators in pursuing their vision of the ‘Diem’ currency, Amazon is forging ahead with a more careful exploration of their internally used Amazon Coin. If regulatory limits were removed, it is not difficult to imagine how the massive amount of value that is funnelled through such corporations could quite easily be leveraged to launch an immediately sizable, sovereign cryptocurrency. Once established, corporations could then use such currencies as units of account for their goods/services and as the de facto money used for intra-company transactions, possibly including the payment of wages (depending on laws). Additionally, massive initial (and subsequent) coin offerings could be initiated to access state-based tender. Importantly, the significant state-based currency reserves controlled by these large companies would also enable them to engage in currency market interventions to partially control their own currencies’ value. Not least, if the corporation’s private tender were to become broadly adopted, it could even garner seigniorage privileges, meaning that the issued money could be used to purchase goods and services without it returning to make claims on the corporation’s assets. The fate of commons-based sovereign cryptocurrencies, then, which are unlikely to match the power of those linked to big corporations (at least in the near term), will likely depend on how states respond to such monetary developments. A state largely in the grasp of capital-oriented interests could theoretically be persuaded to cede even more of its monetary power to corporate actors, opening up a complex monetary environment characterized by a multitude of interacting and competing state, corporate, and possibly some minor commons-based currencies. At the same time, a nationalist turn could lead to the outright banning of all non-state-based monies as the state seeks to re-establish its own power over the monetary realm; China, for example, along with a handful of other countries, has already adopted this approach by outlawing the use of Bitcoin. From a compeerist perspective, therefore, the most favourable scenario would be one in which the state significantly restricted the development of expansive means-of-exchange tender controlled by profit-seeking capital, while leaving commons-oriented crypto projects largely untouched. Yet such a policy adoption would, naturally, depend on the state finding common cause with commoners. Indeed, in the final analysis, and in taking the top-down (sovereign) and endogenous, bottom-up (crypto) approaches to exiting the monetary banking apparatus together, the likelihood of success for either hinges, as with so many other compeerist initiatives, on the continuously evolving relation and power dynamics between the state, capital, and the commons. It is the charge of compeerists to greatly increase the power of the commons in this dynamic if the envisioned transition out of capitalism is to ever transpire. To succeed in such a task will ultimately necessitate a widespread socio, cultural, and political upheaval demanding that the rationality and practice of the commons and commoning be embraced as a political-economic alternative to capital. The question of how such an upheaval could come about, and what it could result in, is the focus of the final part of this book.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Coping With Money’s Monopoly on Value.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 150-154. /LJS

In this sense, the more formal ‘alternative’ banking arrangements available today still demonstrate some significant limitations from a compeerist point of view. To unleash their full potential would require moving them even further away from their revenue-generating focus, essentially making them more akin to upscaled forms of the cooperative accumulation covered earlier, as in the Swedish JAK banks. To achieve such upscaling, however, also requires more access to savings, meaning commoners of all stripes must themselves rise to the occasion and pursue an exit from their own investment mentality. In other words, a mass divestment is required from the capital-controlled financial institutions peddling returns sourced from extractive/exploitative activities, with savings funnelled, instead, into more solidaristic, boundary-commoning initiatives that offer low or no monetary growth. Only in this way would it be possible to establish a more robust and expansive, commons-oriented circulation of money, at least within the standard dynamics of our current monetary/financial arrangements. Alternative forms of money The just noted ‘standard dynamics’ referenced in relation to our current organization of money highlights the potential of finding additional, nonconventional ways with which to grease the wheels of the commons and commoning, particularly through alternative forms of tender. The use of currencies that exist alongside official, state-based money has long been a tool used to stimulate economic exchange, mobilize resources, and incentivize certain activities. In some instances, where such currencies are widely adopted, they can also bestow a significant level of financial power to the issuing entity and establish a degree of protection from any negative developments within the broader economy. The most heralded, affirming case of the economic potential of a complementary currency can be found in the experimental issuing of so called ‘freigeld’ (free money) during the Great Depression by the mayor of the small Bavarian town of Wörgl (after which the currency was named). As is often the case with freigeld, the Wörgl was linked to a demurrage function, meaning that the money had a built-in expiration to prevent hoarding and encourage circulation. As a result of the Wörgl’s introduction the town was able to sustain robust economic growth and employment while the rest of the country was experiencing deep decline. A more recent, pioneering example of a complimentary currency, focused particularly on boosting commoning and not just economic activity, is the Toreke currency issued by the city of Ghent. Toreke money can be earned by contributing labour to various service projects in the impoverished Rabot neighbourhood. The value of the currency, in turn, which incentivizes such labour, is rooted in the fact that it can be used to rent coveted, municipally owned gardening space in the neighbourhood (Telalbasic, 2017). With the advent of blockchain-enabled cryptocurrencies, there is now a growing interest in how the commoning potential of alternate forms of money can be expanded and deepened. Some of the most ambitious efforts have even set their sights on offering a commons-based money that could provide a viable alternative to state-based tender, that is, one that can function as a widely-adopted means of exchange and currency of account (for the actual buying and selling of goods and services within a broader economy). We will consider the steep uphill climb facing such initiatives in the next chapter, which deals with the more far-reaching aim of actually replacing the existing monetary-banking apparatus with a commons-friendly substitute. Most commons-based cryptocurrency efforts, however, are more limited in scope, but also more immediately achievable. Their potential and the challenges they face are worth considering. The Toreke concept, for instance, has been embraced and furthered in a number of cities with the help of blockchain-based ledgers. One example is the English city of Hull, where certain community-centred volunteer work is paid in HullCoin, which can then be redeemed at participating retailers (Sylvester-Bradley, 2019). Blockchain capabilities here work to maintain a record of rewarded activities and currency issuance and use, thus allowing for user-friendliness, transparency, and security within a commons crediting system that is significantly more complex than the Ghent example. We can note that the reliance on participating retailers in this case, however, ultimately makes this currency dependent on a form of capital-linked gifting. A further locality-focused currency is that of city-cryptos, where the issued crypto coins can be used to pay for specifically designed digital processes and smart-contracts, as Ether is used to run Ethereum-based ‘DApps’. Yet, being a cryptocurrency that depends on proof-of-work ‘mining’, as Bitcoin is, some of the earnings of this mining activity are shared with the sponsoring city. As such, while city cryptos are generally capital owned and initiated projects, they still maintain a promising B-Corp component to them due to their commitment to the municipality. MiamiCoin, established in the summer of 2021, was the first large scale city-crypto implemented, with 30 per cent of mining revenue (issued in tradable MiamiCoin) going directly to the municipal government (Volpecelli, 2022). In this way the city of Miami garnered over $7 million in just the first few months, and while MiamiCoin’s value has plunged since its inception, there are many who still believe the promise of such city cryptos is just beginning (Brown, 2021; Volpecelli, 2022). Still, from a compeerist perspective, to truly work in support of commons-based aims, city-cryptos would preferably be organized along cooperative or non-profit lines, where there would be direct buy-in from the municipality and civil society, and where most revenue was earmarked to support the urban commons. While certainly conceivable, however, such a commons-based city-crypto has yet to be executed. Another crypto-based initiative pursued by compeerists is the creation of an alternative form of money that can help generate funds and incentivize behaviour to achieve a specific, usually trans-local aim. Arthur Brock (2018), mentioned in Chapter 4 as the co-founder of the Holochain project, has argued there is room for a large number of such crypto-based currencies; the key to their viability, however, is that they actually denote something of value. Consider, for instance, the Fishcoin project which seeks to incentivize fisherfolk in Southeast Asia to record essential data from their catch for the purposes of sustainable resource management. The fisherfolk are awarded Fishcoin crypto tokens for providing the data and uploading it to a database. The data itself, which is of interest to a wide range of stakeholders, including environmental NGOs, governments, and users/consumers, can only be bought with Fishcoin, which provides its foundational value (Gerhardt, 2020). Due to this value the currency maintains a certain level of worth in exchange markets, which is also why the fisherfolk view it as an adequate reward for participating. Not least, by being linked to an actual value generating endeavour (and hence representing more than just crowd-based speculation), Fishcoin was able to generate significant funds from the getgo through an ‘initial coin offering’, hence garnering critical capital for its early stages. In the absence of any foundational, undergirding value, however, incentiveoriented cryptocurrencies remain mostly speculative with little prospect for growth. SolarCoin, for instance, seeks to incentivize solar investments by awarding anyone producing solar energy with their crypto token. Yet, these tokens maintain limited appeal as there is very little of value they can be used for. Thus, to significantly improve the prospects of SolarCoin, the issuers could, hypothetically, follow Fishcoin’s example by selling energy data collected from project participants, where SolarCoin would be required for the purchase. Alternatively, the currency could seek to become an accepted form of payment within participating electricity cooperatives. Unlike the gifting noted in the HullCoin example earlier, in this case the gift would not be directly dependent on capital, but rather it would come from a commons oriented enterprise offering an alternative mode of operation. Boundary commoning synergies such as this will likely be critical if cryptocurrencies are to play a significant role in boosting commoning incentivizations. Based on the various examples just offered, we can see how commons oriented, crypto-monies have the potential, if well-designed, to help fund and foster the commons and commoning with very little initial capital. Yet there are also noteworthy challenges. Apart from issues related to finding willing partners to build the value of a commons-based cryptocurrency, not to mention the volatility and speculation associated with crypto markets, we should lastly also emphasize the inherent challenge of working with blockchain technology. This code, which was born out of and designed for the libertarian principles of independence and a lack of trust, is not conducive to the types of money compeerists seek to create. As such, alternative currency projects are tasked with not only hacking blockchain’s intended application, but also, especially in the longer term, with fundamentally redesigning, repurposing, and re-governing its underlying code to ensure that the compeerist-aligned functions being pursued can be effectively performed. While no easy task, we have, nonetheless, already seen some promising executions of such abstract hacktivist thinking, for instance how Holochain has completely reworked the fundamental structure of blockchain to create a more expansive digital ledger optimized for collaborative, commonsoriented transactions. In terms of governance, furthermore, where many cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are characterized by top-down, opaque, and highly guarded decision-making structures, commons-based efforts have pursued an intentional balance between an emphasis on technical skill, on the one hand, and open, inclusive decision making, on the other. A good illustration of this is the ambitious, means-of-exchange FairCoin cryptocurrency (covered in more detail in the next chapter); while FairCoin is maintained by a limited number of code administrators, the overall intentions and strategies associated with the project are determined democratically in a ‘general assembly’ of stakeholders (König et al, 2018). In the end, however, and looking back to the entirety of efforts reviewed in this chapter that seek to address the commons’ fraught dependency on money, we would do well to remember that these are all essentially coping strategies. They are intended to help commons-oriented actors find the means to swim in the taken-for-granted water of exchange-value monopolization. Yet compeerism is critically aware of this assumption and has begun to actively question it, just as the mature tadpole begins to see the possibilities that lie beyond the water’s embrace. More precisely, compeerism acknowledges that the longue-durée goal is not simply creating better conditions for the commons to contend with the dominant monetary-banking apparatus in place, rather it is to fully usurp and replace it. Only in this way can the compeerist vision of a world beyond capitalism have any chance of coming to fruition.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Reinventing Money’s Role In the Economy.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 161-165. /LJS

The contemporary capitalist state’s refusal to play a more integral role in the governance of money has not always been a given and continues to be questioned by some unorthodox economists. Probably the most obvious exception to the complete submission to the monetary-banking apparatus is the use of the state’s central bank as a source of free loans to the government. Essentially the central bank can here be used to create money, buy up government bonds, and then, because the bank is beholden to the state, repatriate the interests on the bonds back to the state, in essence providing interest-free lending. This practice has become increasingly relied on in recent times to deal with significant financial crises, for example via so-called ‘quantitative easing’ meant to inject liquidity into the economy by buying government bonds with money created with a few taps on a keyboard. Some economists and monetary activists, however, are making the case that such ‘interest-free’ lending could be made use of more actively to help governments expand their budgets and be less on the hook for interest payments to various, and increasingly foreign, creditors. Canada is often pointed to as an example where the central bank was actively involved in funding the government from the 1930s up to the 1970s, at which point a growing, neoliberal consensus – along with monetarist views on the cause of inflation – led to a disavowal of internal government funding sources. In response, a concerted movement has emerged to rejuvenate the Bank of Canada’s role in supplying internal credit for public programmes and projects, hence releasing the government from its dependency on usurious debt (Ryan, 2018). Beyond the Canadian case, however, there has recently been a significant increase in the development and embrace of a number of even more ‘radical’ heterodox economic theories. In essence, these suggest a monetary rearrangement is possible that would give states direct control over the money supply, thereby circumventing the need for loan intermediaries altogether. In such an instance, the state can create and then release money into the economy directly in pursuit of its policy goals. One popular theory in this vein is that of modern monetary theory (MMT), which puts the state, as opposed to the central bank, in charge of pursuing full employment (Kelton, 2021). Here, in times of high unemployment, the state can use internally created fiat money to generate the stimulus needed for the economy to recover. In other words, the state is empowered to unilaterally spend money into existence, thus establishing a ‘sovereign money’ regime. In this arrangement, taxes and bonds are viewed as mere tools to be used to control the quantity of money; and this, according to MMT, becomes an issue only after full employment has been reached. We should note here that MMT still leaves private banks and debt-based lending in place because, according to its reasoning, these banks would now be primarily at the mercy of state spending, which would become the driver of monetary expansion. It is this unwillingness to challenge fractional reserve banking, however, that has led some to seek even more far-reaching monetary reforms (Zarlenga, 2002; Huber, 2014; 2017). In these proposals, and in line with the thinking of Irving Fisher and the Chicago Plan of 1933, a demand is made that banks can only loan out what they have in their account, thus drastically reducing the growth of the overall money supply. State-issued money, in turn, can be released in various ways, including socalled ‘helicopter money’ made accessible directly to the public, as well as targeted loans and government spending on specific programmes (opening up the compeerist-aligned option, for instance, of funnelling investment towards the pursuit of use-value rather than exchange-value). In such a monetary context, generating funds via the state to address society’s most critical needs, while also overcoming the debt-driven, runaway, and unsustainable growth imperative, suddenly appears like a real possibility. We will consider one specific, albeit hypothetical application of such a sovereign money regime in Chapter 10. Yet, it should also not come as a surprise that most contemporary, mainstream economists tend to scoff at such heterodox positions. When any such notions cross their path, it does not take long before references to Weimarian wheelbarrows full of useless money enters the discussion. The ultimate fear here is a scenario where money is used to demand much more from the economy than the economy can deliver, leading to crippling inflation and ultimately a complete loss of confidence in the currency and the ability to conduct exchanges. While such inflation concerns cannot be dismissed, they must nonetheless also be put into perspective. In the end, there is a complex array of factors, particularly with regard to consumption and production, that come into play in determining inflation. For instance, a society that is highly dependent on a critical commodity that is inelastic in responding to demand, like oil, will be much more susceptible to inflationary pressures. Yet, when supply has the capacity to be more reactive to consumption, any increase in money supply tends to lead to increased economic activity, hence neutralizing inflationary pressures (within obvious limits). Following from this, then, it is also possible to see that the use of sovereign money on ‘non-productive’, use-value focused investments, such as ecosystem service restoration or a universal basic income, can still be monetarily viable. While such initiatives do not appear to add immediate, additional market value (needed to prevent inflation), the money added to the system and used to pay for supplies and labour can still lead to an overall increase in such value over time as this money works its way through the economy – especially if newly unleashed demand is not heavily focused on inelastic goods. Furthermore, in the case of investments aimed at improving apparently non-commodifiable endowments, an increase in market-based value often also ensues with time; for example, replenished ecosystems can lead to all around higher production and the creation of new economic activity, ranging from agriculture on reclaimed land to a boost in (eco)tourism. In short, we should recognize the malleability and longer-term dimensions of economies when worrying about ‘non-productive’ money entering the system. We would, in fact, do well to keep in mind here the millions of so-called ‘bullshit jobs’ within capitalism – identified by David Graeber (2019) to include work in unneeded bureaucracy, advertising, lobbying, and ego stroking – that also fail to directly contribute to an increase in exchange value based goods and services. Indeed, our current economy has been more than capable of absorbing this superfluousness for decades, with no one harping about possible inflationary pressures. In a similar way, then, a state in possession of sovereign money should be able to pursue significant (use-value) investments considered to be ‘gratuitous’ without automatically triggering the collapse of this money’s worth. Still, we would also be imprudent if we completely ignored the impact that the money supply can have on prices. It is therefore incumbent on any state that has embraced a sovereign tender to establish a sound monetary policy that ensures currency issuance is in line with the actual supply of goods and services it denominates. Most fundamentally, and particularly given that economic growth rates are to be significantly reduced, this means states must also find ways to reabsorb much of the money that has been released, thereby taking it out of circulation. To begin, one advantage for the state controlling its own currency is that it has become the primary lender of credit, meaning that any interest collected would essentially entail a decrease as opposed to an increase of the money supply. Next, where additional shrinkage is necessary, along the lines of MMT, a state can resort to targeted taxation/fees and the sale of state-derived goods and services as ways of taking liquidity out of the system. Lastly, and most critically, if any emerging inflationary pressures were detected, the state presiding over a sovereign currency could respond directly by curtailing monetary outflow, which is significantly less tortuous than the predominant reliance today on steadily increasing interest rates. A more radical option worth noting here would be to place a demurrage function on the sovereign currency. Due to its built-in devaluation, the state would hence be absolved from having to retrieve money from the economy. Such a currency would serve primarily as a tool to facilitate exchange and would no longer function as a useful store of value. Yet the challenges in such a move for the state are significant. The subsequent hoarding of certain goods as a way to pursue savings, for instance, would have to be addressed. International trade could also be significantly impacted, as the value of a demurrage currency would likely be quite low due to its fleeting worth. We will return to how a demurrage currency could potentially be adopted by a partner state within a post-capitalist context in Chapter 10, but its viability in the near term is doubtful. Even with sound monetary policies, however, sovereign currencies will likely still face inflationary pressures from time to time just as bank-issued currencies do today. As such, any budgetary ‘belt tightening’ on the part of a state would need to proceed carefully to ensure that the most critical economic interactions remain active. One particularly powerful economic stabilizer in this regard would be a guaranteed income, which, due to the maintenance of basic consumption that it enables, would prevent a precipitous economic retraction in the most critical areas of the economy. The role of a vibrant commons-based sector in helping to weather difficult economic adjustments is also worth noting here. For instance, if the state’s curtailment of money circulation led to a squeeze in household budgets, any ensuing difficulties could be minimized by leaning on the commons, which, if having been fostered and allowed to flourish, would have found some autonomy from the formal economy and its money system. In this way, a family dealing with an income reduced to the UBI could use the commons to access free, cheaper, or bartered goods and services that they previously acquired in the private sector. This household could then reengage the market economy when the opportunity arises, or, as the optimistic compeerist would argue, the experience may lead them to stay and commit to the commons-based economy for good. Given the emphasis on sound monetary management, a final concern that needs to be acknowledged pertains to the ability of the state, which is viewed by many with great suspicion, to effectively execute such responsible stewardship. Critics here point to our deeply imperfect political systems and humanity’s well-established corruptibility. In short, politicians will be tempted to abuse their power over monetary management, pursuing short-term wishful thinking or selfish desires rather than decision making based on objective, detailed analyses and long-term planning. Monetary reformers are cognizant of these concerns, which is why they generally suggest that monetary governance should be left to an independent body of persons committed to act in an informed and nonpartisan way. Most proposals emphasize public input and transparency as well as clear barriers between monetary managers, who determine the money supply, and the executive and legislative branches of government, who then decide on fiscal priorities, that is, how this money should be used. The National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act, a US House bill, is often pointed to here as an example of actual (although dormant) legislation that would establish sovereign money (Kucinich, 2011). In this proposal, the independent body charged with monetary policy would consist of nine members serving sixyear terms, where each member would be appointed by the President and approved by the Senate, but no more than four members could be of the same political party. While such an arrangement could undoubtedly be made even more apolitical and bound by oversight, it is, at least, not a bad starting point. Nonetheless, even if such an independent and accountable monetary governance authority were established, there would remain ample room for internal clashes of opinion regarding policy, which is inevitable when dealing with extremely complex systems entailing many unknowns. This is where emerging technologies could be of significant assistance. As Paul Mason (2016) has argued, it is high time that the incredible capacity to model complexity that we already have at our disposal be actively applied to the realm of economics, which has thus far largely avoided such tools. Indeed, if this modelling potential were to be fully tapped, especially in light of its growing power via the use of big data crunching AI systems, it could be possible to establish a relatively clear picture of the current and future impact of any specific release of money, for instance in the form of a UBI or as larger, targeted investments. Given a broadly accepted, transparent, and effective modelling system, like that for projecting hurricane trajectories within meteorology, debate over monetary and fiscal policy could mostly avoid disagreements over the reality of certain processes and outcomes, as these would now be largely understood and acknowledged. Focus could, instead, turn to the imperative question of what we want the economy to do for us, as opposed to the current, obverse emphasis on what we can do for the economy. Importantly, any such data analysis and modelling should also be released to the digital commons, allowing for greater oversight and informed input from civil society and the populace. This is where the onus would fall on compeerists to demand comprehensive and deep analyses that are not limited to using only exchange value as an assessment metric. Indeed, compeerists are of the conviction that any well-rounded, long-term modelling based on big-data and effective AI processing would ultimately validate and bolster their policy positions.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “The Digital Commons’ Elusive Potential.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 43-44. /LJS

In short, the vision of a commons produced solely by volunteers ignores the impact of the apparatus of capture, that is, the commodification of everything and the subsequent need to sell one’s labour. What the culture of commons production really reveals, therefore, is a dependence on people that have the luxury to contribute their time because they can find access to market-acquired money elsewhere, usually a ‘day job’ linked to capital. This form of the digital commons, then, does not represent an alternative to capitalism, rather, it is a relatively small, subservient economic activity, squaring with the original formulation of commons-based peer production maintained by Yochai Benkler. Hence, from a compeerist perspective, the result of casting the digital commons outside the realm of money/markets is that most of the digital productive capacity held by capable workers, who must pay their bills, will be sucked into capitalist forms of production. As such, while compeerism accepts that volunteer labour can be an important means to boost the commons, there is also a tactical acknowledgement that it should not, if the commons are to truly expand, be the only source. The issue of remunerating creative/cognitive work by and for the commons must therefore be addressed. We revisit this matter as part of a more in-depth consideration of the challenges and options entailed in contending with the overarching dependency by the commons on market-based resources in Chapters 7 and 8. Nonetheless, it is helpful to offer a brief overview here of the specific funding realities involved in pursuing an expanded and vibrant digital commons. We will do the same when covering other sectors of the economy throughout the book. To begin, and in line with the more purist views of the commons, various forms of freely donated monetary support can be pursued to pay for some labour and other expenses, as is often done within non-profit organizations. As per the Fast Forward’s ‘non-profit tech directory’ there are hundreds of digital value producers registered as non-profits, driven by the aim ‘to scale social impact’, and many of these will undoubtedly be reliant on some form of donation model (Ffwd, 2022, np). Wikipedia, however, remains the classic example of the donation approach to expanding the digital commons, managing to garner over US$150 million in revenue each year, with an average contribution sum of $15 (Wikimedia, 2022). Wikipedia then uses this revenue for operational expenses, including the payment of over 500 staff members, but, importantly, not content suppliers.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Contending With the Limits of Our Natural World.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 130-134. /LJS

Even with significant inter-commons and state-centred initiatives to boost the pursuit of a DG-FL model, we cannot ignore the reality that inherent limitations to the localization ideal persist, as they do with the other material economies explored thus far. Climate realities, in particular, are difficult to overcome as there are always limits to what can be grown in any given region. Yet it is hard to imagine that the Minority World would be willing to give up on bananas, cocoa, or coffee; or, for that matter, for the Majority World to forgo its acquired taste for northern grains. It follows that some continuation of the pursuit of natural comparative advantage in agriculture, with the aim to trade, even at significant distances, is likely. The same predicament, it should be noted, pertains to non-renewable resources and even, to some extent, manufactured goods (where economies of scale are adopted), for which the following discussion is equally relevant. While trade is economically rational and has the potential to establish significant win-win relationships, it is a process that nevertheless also complicates the localization ideal in the DG-ML/DG-FL models and brings to light numerous additional challenges for the compeerist. In addressing these, we will limit ourselves to a compeerist vantage point from within the Minority World. We can here distinguish between export- and importbased issues. Turning first to export, the primary producer’s relationship with the community immediately becomes more difficult as the benefits, for instance by exporting the land’s harvest or mineral wealth, do not necessarily trickle down to the local community. In other words, it is not a symbiotic relationship in the way it is when the primary producer, like the local farmer, services local demand. In a trade-based scenario, then, a commons-oriented governance arrangement would, ideally, entail a community say in the decision to produce for export, where consent could be linked to a number of conditions, like sharing in any earned revenue. On the most basic level, efforts could be made to establish farms that, as with manufacturing cooperatives, adopted governance procedures where decision making was significantly democratized to include meaningful input from workers and the stakeholder community. To further concretize such relations, an additional step could be to amend property rights to where ‘ownership’ was actually made conditional. This could mean, for instance, that the use and profit from a piece of land was tied to legally binding usufruct requirements, like the adoption of commons-based governance protocols that ensured a certain level of community empowerment. Yet, seeing that such a far-reaching democratization of the land would require a significant, compeerist-aligned societal and political transformation, immediate goals would likely focus on more limited policy aims. This would include, as outlined in the previous section, pursuing the support of locally oriented, cooperative production arrangements, while holding non-cooperative ones to account when it comes to the most pressing interests of the community, for example by imposing redistributive taxes and establishing regulations around issues of labour and the environment. We will, however, revisit what an alternative property regime could look like in a fully developed compeerist society in Chapter 10. Turning then to the import side of trade we are confronted with distant production systems, both with renewable and non-renewable resources, that are generally managed by actors far removed from one’s locality. As such, it is not difficult to step away from any sense of implication or responsibility for what happens there. Compeerism nonetheless recognizes that many of the hurdles to a more just and sustainable future are geographically complex, entailing what Doreen Massey (1996) termed ‘power geometries’, which describe how any particular locale is intricately entwined with many distant ones via uneven power relations. Critically, this relationality between places does not only pertain to the present, for instance how purchasing distant commodities ends up supporting the economic, political, and environmental processes involved in their production; it also includes past unequal relations and interactions that are largely responsible for how and why these processes have been adopted. These power geometries thus also clearly come into play on the export side, with issues pertaining to how any specific export arrangement with a distant place, and the price dynamics involved, have come to be established. In this sense, compeerism’s understanding of trade inevitably gives way to questions related to the complex power geometries involved, or, in other words, it becomes an issue of international relations and the global world order more broadly. As such, we are confronted with the question of compeerism’s trans-local and ultimately global outlook, especially with regard to Minority–Majority World relations. It is a topic that deserves some fleshing out. We can begin by establishing that compeerism considers the power geometries of greatest concern to be those that link the Minority World to the most dire forms of economic and political stagnation/dysfunction in ex-colonial, Majority World societies in the south. This is why the term ‘postcolonial’ is helpful, as it points to how these societies have been, and still are, fundamentally impacted by a global political-economic (and cultural) arrangement that favours the wealthy Minority World in the north. It is a condition that is well documented and presented within a range of critical theoretical ‘schools’ dealing with the issue of ‘development’, from the earlier, economically focused ‘world systems theory’ and ‘dependency theory’ to the more recent and culturally centred work on postcoloniality. Minority World compeerists in the north, then, who find themselves looking south to trading partners in the Majority World, see variegated but often deeply contested economies, particularly in the primary sector. In agriculture this plays out as an ongoing struggle over land use, that is, whether to prioritize productivity and export crops in a bid to modernize and access valuable foreign currency, or whether the land should remain, or be reverted to, small-holder plots focused on broad subsistence capabilities and basic food security. As with the Majority World’s efforts to benefit from their mining sector, however, neither of the noted land use options offers a path for bringing about real prosperity as long as the involved societies remain fundamentally hobbled by their historically rooted, economically compromised position in the world. Given this underlying context, some in the Minority World have pursued interventions that would allow Majority World societies at least a partial exit from their constrictions, especially when it comes to trade. An initial model can be found in the Fairtrade movement, which aims to guarantee a minimum price for key cash crops to participating farmers, thus creating greater economic stability for these communities. The use of certifications and labelling is again important here. It should nonetheless be noted that Fairtrade and other similar initiatives are still reflective of postcolonial relationships and a capital-dominant economy. More specifically, Fairtrade arrangements are largely shaped by for-profit companies committed to maintaining an unequal division of labour, where production of mostly non-lucrative raw materials is left to the Majority World while profitable added value is claimed by the Minority World in the north. In light of these shortcomings, a more far-reaching framework and strategy worth noting here is that of ‘cosmo-localism’ promoted by some P2P theorists. Similar to the DG-ML model, the cosmo-local idea focuses on the global digital commons as a means to localized empowerment and development, yet now with a particular focus on the Majority World. As such, it represents a type of commons-based, and digitally mediated technology transfer intended to bolster not just the traditional primary sector, but also manufacturing and services. In this sense, the aim is more far reaching than Fairtrade as the actual subservient trading position of the Majority World is being addressed. One of the first attempted enactments of the cosmo-localism model was the Free Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK) project launched by Michel Bauwens via the P2P Foundation in 2013. The FLOK project, in quasi-coordination with the Ecuadoran government, was aimed at rethinking the country’s economy along digitally enabled, peer production lines as a way to remove it from its still heavy dependence on colonial-style extraction (Commons Transition, 2014). As Bauwens later acknowledged, however, significant power interests linked to the existing extractive economy were still entrenched in the government, thus fundamentally limiting the project’s potential (Bauwens and Gerhardt, 2020). Consequentially, Bauwens ultimately concluded that it was not, in fact, possible to ‘hack a country’ with the intent of bringing about a new, commons-based economy, without the concomitant ‘political will’ and ‘social basis’ for such a transition (P2PF Wiki, 2021, np). While this is certainly a valid insight, compeerism nonetheless sees the challenges involved here as being more deeply rooted. To begin, despite some bright spots, the digital commons/commoning on which the cosmo-local idea hinges is still too limited in its capabilities to offer a viable path out of the chronic disadvantages the Majority World faces. This is because the general intellect that is to be captured and shared in the digital commons has not yet been adequately liberated, primarily due to capital’s continued command over the apparatus of capture. Furthermore, as we have seen, even with a vibrant and rich digital commons, there still needs to be a material foundation with which to access and make use of this digital value, and here much of the Majority World is in woefully short supply, especially when it comes to domestically owned assets. As such, the Majority World remains stuck in its efforts to break free from its postcolonial disadvantages, unable to escape its dependence on foreign, capital-sourced investments, which remain primarily focused on exploiting and extracting distant labour and resources. Of utmost importance in all of this, however, is that global capital’s predatory arrangement with the Majority World continues to be abetted by the most powerful Minority World states. The reason for this synergy, furthermore, ultimately lies in a deeply embedded ‘us versus them’, winlose rationality that can be traced back to these states’ colonial histories. In applying this rationality to their respective postcolonial, geopolitical/ geoeconomic gazes, these states see a natural alliance between themselves and the globally active capital that is headquartered within their borders. Consequently, these states continue to do this capital’s bidding when it comes to their outward looking strategies, with very little effort made to actually reform the global order in a more equitable direction. In sum, then, there truly is no hacktivist, back-door path to rapid economic and human development in postcolonial societies. This does not mean that bolstering the global digital commons or supporting local commoning efforts within the Majority World are futile. With time, they can still play an important role in helping these societies achieve greater wellbeing and resilience. Arguably, however, the most direct route to improve the outlook of the Majority World would be by fundamentally breaking the capital-state nexus in the Minority World, especially as it pertains to foreign relations. Only in this way could the problematic power geometries linking the Minority and Majority World, and their concomitant trade relations, be redressed and equalized.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Contending With the Limits of Our Natural World.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 117-121. /LJS

Even with the use of new material highly curtailed, as just described, some recapture and reuse associated with the latter stages of the circular economy will, nonetheless, still be needed. The processes involved here ultimately go beyond the immediate purview of the DG-ML model, yet the overall mission of creating an economy where ‘whatever is heavy is local’ still remains relevant (Kostakis et al, 2015, p 128). Indeed, the reliance on distant raw materials, which invariably are also dominated by large-scale, extractive capitalist actors, clearly flies in the face of the compeerist ideal. Hence, in seeking to stay true to the preference for local, democratic economies, it becomes imperative to focus on the ‘urban waste mine’ as a raw material commons from which to source our non-renewable resource needs (Krook and Baas, 2013). Most experts concede that almost full waste recapture and reuse is technically possible with the right infrastructure, logistical organization, and product design (hence pointing again to the promise of a global design commons) (Piques and Rizos, 2017). To achieve such a feat, manufacturers, households, retailers, and recyclers would need to be tied into a cohesive system of incentives and enforceable mandates, that is, a macro-level governance system overseeing the urban waste commons that is in line with Ostrom’s principles. Currently, however, such macro-level assemblages/ apparatuses are largely lacking in most of the world, where recycling is characterized by haphazard coordination, limited buy-in from key actors, and the dominance of exchange-value rationales responding to the fluctuating market price of recyclables. Thus, even if the amount of recycled raw materials used in manufacturing has significantly increased, it is still far from supplying most of the non-renewable resources being used. In some cases, furthermore, as with the many rare-earth minerals on which our expanding range of electronic devices depend, there is no recycling done at all, leading to an almost complete dependence on just a few, distant sources. In the short term, compeerists are left with no choice but to navigate this imperfect environment, using boundary commoning between commons based actors to engage in the recovery and reuse of critical materials where possible (Gutberlet, 2019). Still, such localized or regional efforts remain isolated and largely insignificant as they find themselves swimming against the current of broader market and big-capital dynamics. More specifically, linear, cradle-to-grave product pathways remain not only cheaper than circular ones, but they also ensure the continued need for the profitable production of more raw materials and products. This is why the promise by the plastics industry to finally make plastics recycling effective on a large scale is highly doubtful, since a truly functioning recycling system for plastic would spell the end to their industry. As in other sectors, the results-oriented compeerist committed to the longue durée is therefore compelled to supplement on-the-ground initiatives with more macro-level efforts aimed at the state. In the pursuit of a truly circular economy, governments, for instance, could be pressured to issue mandates requiring designs that follow certain modularity and recyclability requirements. The state, at various scales, would also be the natural entity to spearhead efforts at reaching 100 per cent capture, reuse, and recycling of all waste via a multi-stakeholder system, driven by decrees and supporting funds for the required infrastructure. An important component to these efforts would most likely be the imposition of ‘extended producer responsibility’ (EPR), where manufacturers are made responsible for organizing the recycling of the products they produce, as is being increasingly explored and implemented in Europe (Marques and da Cruz, 2018). Recycling requirements, furthermore, would need to be extended to all materials involved, including vital rare-earth minerals. Critically, the implementation of such top-down reforms would not need to be done by state-run entities; instead, much of it would likely fall to compeerist-aligned actors, as cooperatives and non-profits are already significantly involved in, and adapted to the recycling/reuse economy. Indeed, with a serious government commitment to circularity, compeerists would naturally pursue commons-centred control over the management, processing, and reuse of the recaptured raw materials of the various urban waste mines. Managing to get the state engaged on such a level undoubtedly hinges on the ability to foster and tap into the environmental awareness and commitments within the populace more broadly. On this front, at least, there are some encouraging signs. For instance, in a massive UN poll of over one million people across 50 countries, two thirds of respondents considered climate change a global emergency (Flynn and Yamasumi, 2021). There is also evidence people are becoming more intentional in their own actions. For instance, in the US, which is by no means at the forefront on such matters, over 50 million households participate in kerbside recycling without monetary benefit or punitive threat, which represents about a 70 per cent participation rate where such services are available (Mouw, 2020). One development that could boost this growing environmental consciousness even more, while simultaneously empowering users/ consumers to vote with their pocketbooks, would be the establishment of much greater transparency and communication regarding the details of a product’s environmental impact and credentials. Compeerists could here make the mandated documentation of blockchain-enabled product sourcing and other qualities a key demand on government, including visible certifications of a product’s ecological footprint and, as is being pioneered in France, its overall repairability (Gerhardt, 2020; Stone, 2021). Offering clear product evaluations to users/consumers in this way can again significantly assist the competitiveness of compeerist-oriented enterprises that would do well in such assessments. Market research, for instance, has shown not only a growing demand for environmentally friendly products, but also a willingness to pay more for them. One study by McKinsey found that 70 per cent of Europeans and Americans are willing to accept a five per cent price increase for environmentally sourced goods, and roughly 50 per cent are willing to pay 15 per cent more (Miremadi et al, 2018). Still, even with a significant, state-supported shift to localized, commonsoriented waste mines, where the circular resource loop comes full circle, it is nonetheless important to also acknowledge that full autonomy from distant non-renewable resources will take time. The technology of indefinitely recyclable plastic, for example, still has a long way to go before it can become the standard in all applications. Furthermore, in some cases the amount of already extracted material is insufficient for the needs of the economy of the future. For example, there is currently nowhere near enough lithium in circulation for the massive expansion of renewable energy storage required to transition out of carbon-based fuels (IEA, 2022). From a compeerist perspective, then, to the extent that mines, quarries, and wells are still needed, they should be subjected to commons-based governance regimes. Importantly, this does not mean state nationalization in the name of the people. Government-run mineral and carbon-based extraction is not uncommon, but it tends to be large-scaled, hierarchically organized, and market-oriented. If there is one key takeaway from Ostrom’s research, and borne out in the countless instances of social and environmental injustice throughout the world, it is that any approach to resource management that does not involve the people where these resources are found is a recipe for mismanagement and abuse. When it comes to non-renewable resources available for local/regional consumption, therefore, member cooperatives are the most obvious option. The Ohio based Energy Cooperative is a good example. While starting as a regional electricity member co-op, it made the move to secure local naturalgas reserves by purchasing the private company that owned their leases (NGO, 2022). In this way, The Energy Cooperative was able to expand its member services to home gas provision as well. As noted in the prior chapter, such cooperatives still necessitate significantly increased member-driven, commons-oriented input to steer them in a more compeerist direction, but the example is illustrative of how community control of critical local resources could be executed. In most cases, however, due to the uneven and concentrated nature of their geographical distribution, non-renewable resources are extracted to service distant demands (as is the case with many renewable resources as well). In such instances, where trade is a primary motivator, commons-based governance is especially critical, yet still extremely rare. Taking mining as an example, the compeerist ideal would be the application of less invasive but efficient technology within an operational regime characterized by significant worker and community buy in (Batterham, 2017; Alves et al, 2019). Such an arrangement is by no means an impossibility, yet given the large capital investments and specialized expertise needed to run competitive mining operations, these generally tend to be controlled by large, centralized corporations or states pursuing maximally extractive rationales. Only in the poorer and lower-tech Majority World can we find some isolated exceptions, such as in Bolivia, where significant mining concessions are offered to local, mostly small-scale operators organized as worker cooperatives (Salman et al, 2015). These examples are noteworthy in that they highlight the compeerist potential inherent in the relationship between government and the mining sector. For instance, it becomes possible to imagine how the US’s efforts to create a cooperative friendly environment for electricity during the New Deal could similarly be pursued regarding raw material extraction. The difference, however, is that the state, in the US and most other contexts, would be required to take an even more aggressive tack by actually decapitalizing (and then commonifying) the extractive mining industry that is already in place (in the case of rural electrification, capital-based actors were not yet present). We should nonetheless also add that apart from the state-cooperative alliance that characterizes the existing mining co-ops in the Majority World, these offer little else in terms of inspiration for compeerists; their community empowerment efforts, worker conditions, and environmental practices all leave much to be desired. More to the point, the long-term viability of these largely artisanal operations, and their ability to deliver real development, remains questionable at best. This is because there are much more rooted, postcolonial assemblages/apparatuses in place that stand in the way of allowing local peoples to truly benefit from the resources on the lands that they inhabit. We will return to this predicament later in the chapter; first, however, we must consider the compeerist potential and challenges within the renewable resources sector, and especially agriculture, where, incidentally, many of the same postcolonial dynamics are in play.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Democratizing Infrastructure.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 101-104. /LJS

While the prospect of a decentralized, autonomous industrial base of small scale manufacturers has frequently been pondered, from an assortment of political approaches, more contemporary work on what a transition to such a system would involve, given our current economic and technological context, is scarce. Where this question has been taken up, however, a favourite example is that of the Emilia Romagna (ER) region of Italy. With just over 4 million people, this region boasts a vibrant and diverse manufacturing sector comprised of nearly 50,000 mostly small and medium sized manufacturing firms, employing roughly a quarter of the regions’ population. The innovative, flexible, and demand-centred small-batch manufacturing system, which relies on significant inter-firm collaboration and networking, has long been an economic engine within Italy and has proven to be impressively resilient to market fluctuations. In 2005 a team sent by the Cooperative Charitable Trust Forum scoped out the region to find a manufacturing model ‘that is practical, has scale, and (is) consistent with social justice values’ (P2PF Wiki, 2018, np). One of the team members documented what they found, describing, ‘a fascinating web of cooperatives, small manufacturing companies, innovative social service programmes, and a complex and dynamic partnership between business, labour, and government’, concluding that Emilia Romagna should be top of the list for anyone seeking an ‘alternative development model’ (P2PF Wiki, 2018, np). Furthermore, in seeing ER as an example that could inform a specifically non-capitalist, use-value form of production geared to meeting the needs of the community, Kevin Carson (2009b, p 5) concludes that, ‘given the small scale of production and the short local supply chains, a shift to production primarily for local needs would be relatively uncomplicated’. This optimistic assessment, however, needs a bit more unpacking, given that the ER industrial system functions primarily as a production centre for components or parts within a complex global manufacturing chain in which assembly is usually done elsewhere. The question thus arises whether assembly could similarly be localized. One possible answer to this query can be found in the emergence of microscaled factories, espoused by a handful of specialized, start-up firms whose vision it is to use digital manufacturing, and especially 3D printing, as a way to outcompete mammoth, dedicated factories. In the words of Kevin Czinger, founder of the automotive-focused Divergent Technologies: There needs to be an alternative to hundreds of thousands of people performing repetitive tasks in a behemoth factory centralized in the lowest cost geography – with loss of manufacturing jobs everywhere else. In our filled-up planet, we should start to re-localize and democratize production. Focus on small teams. Focus on adaptation to the local environment. Think resilience. Think adaptation. Think meaningful, human scale work. And frankly, that’s how we recapture the soul of manufacturing. (Teng and Czinger, 2018, np) Certainly, this vision of microfactory production is very much in sync with the aspirations of the DG-ML model. More critically, it points to a possible path to a compeerist entry into the manufacturing sector, due to the smaller capital requirements for startup and the competitive advantages that can still be attained despite forgoing economies of scale. To get a sense of the emerging capabilities involved here we can look at a few comparisons to big industry, with a particular focus on the automotive sector. Beginning with product development, consider that large automobile manufacturers can take up to seven years to go from concept to production. Yet, in the case of Local Motors, an early pioneer in micro-manufacturing in the automotive sector, their commercially successful Olli vehicle (an electric, autonomous people-mover), managed to go from concept to final product in only a year (Peels and Haye, 2021). Modular, 3D enabled manufacturing also opens the possibility for a much more affordable supply chain by using simpler designs and fewer parts; the low budget, Chinese made LSEV 3D printed electric car, for example, reduced the amount of plastic components from over 2000 to 57 (Coxworth, 2018). Furthermore, Divergent Technologies, which built the first 3D printed ‘supercar’, claims that the dematerialization and efficiency inherent in digital manufacturing fundamentally reduces the material and energy inputs required in production (Weiss, 2015). Looking at capacity, these microfactories also prove to be competitive. To compare, take Daimler AG’s flagship Sindelfingen plant, which employs 25,000 workers in a 14 million square-foot factory to assemble up to 300,000 vehicles per year. Local Motors’ microfactory, in turn, could produce up to 350 Olli vehicles annually, using 20 workers on a 10,000 square foot workspace (Rogers, 2019). When these numbers are crunched, we see the microfactory producing 17.5 cars per worker compared to Daimler’s 12, and 28.6 cars per square foot compared to the 10.3 in the Sindelfingen plant. Microfactories, which are less automated, also require less investment in relation to output capacity, making market entry much easier. Consider here that the construction of the high-tech, US based Toyota-Mazda plant that was started in 2022 is expected to cost over US$2.3 billion (Toyota, 2021). In relation to its estimated yearly car production (similar to the Sindelfingen plant), we arrive at an estimate of just over $7500 per car. According to Divergent Technologies, its small, digital manufacturing microfactory can produce up to 10,000 vehicles per year and cost roughly 20 million dollars, which comes out to be less than a third of the investment per car compared to the Toyota case (Weiss, 2015). While the ER region and microfactories demonstrate the potential competitiveness to be achieved through smaller-scaled component production and assembly (at least with cars), it is worth noting some additional benefits to downscaling being pursued in some other industrial sectors. Growing concerns about the environmental impacts of large-scale facilities, for instance, has led to downsizing initiatives in industries that have long pursued economies of scale. Hence, the advent of the electric arc furnace has triggered a boom in the use of mini-mills capable of smaller, more targeted batch production of recycled steel; and in the chemicals industry there is growing promise in utilizing much smaller, modular, and more environmentally friendly production plants (Scherrer, 1988; Seifert et al, 2012). We are also beginning to see a greater emphasis on downsized, more localized manufacturing to overcome the problem of uncertain and shifting demand. Deloitte, the largest professional services network in the world, reported on this trend in 2015, stating: ‘The digitization of manufacturing … has made manufacturing more repeatable and portable. Individual designers and small businesses now have the ability to produce high-quality goods locally at low cost’ (Hagel et al, 2015, np). They point to the 160,000- square-foot ‘Manufacture New York’ facility in Brooklyn as an example. In line with the DG-ML’s scalar ideals, this centre was created ‘to enable more small manufacturers to subsist locally and be more responsive to local needs’ (Hagel et al, 2015, np). It is worth briefly noting here that this focus on ‘local needs’ could portend a broader change from a supply driven industrial system focused on throughput to a more user-driven approach emphasizing quality and durability/repairability. Importantly, such a shift could also mean placing significantly less strain on localized industrial capacity as the lifespan of goods would be significantly increased, a potential that is often neglected when considering the output limits of small-scale production. We will, however, leave the broader environmental implications involved in more demand driven, prosumer-oriented production to the next chapter. Still, despite the growing potential of localized, small-scale manufacturing, it is nonetheless important to acknowledge that the cost-benefit analyses of pursuing such an approach will vary across industries. This means that the ‘manufacture local’ ideal will undoubtedly be more difficult to implement or justify in some areas. For instance, in the high-volume manufacturing of some standard items, from the spinning of thread to the injection moulding of basic tools, using fast, large scale, specialized processes will still be much more economical in terms of resource input and product output ratios than engaging in small-scale, versatile production arrangements. Ignoring this reality, as some DG-ML proponents tend to do, would be naïve. The 99 per cent reduction in the price of solar panels in the last four decades is a case in point; it is a development directly related to Swanson’s law, which stipulates that a doubling of panel production leads to a 20 per cent decrease in price (Kavlac et al, 2018). As such, in some realms of manufacturing, compeerists will be forced to contend with the overpowering logic that favours the embrace of specialization and economies of scale. This ‘contending with’ for compeerists here is in line with the related ruminations triggered in the realization that some components of the electricity and IT infrastructures must be allowed to function on a macroscale, as per the previous chapter, or, as we will see in the next chapter, that the production of primary goods (natural resources and agriculture) will undoubtedly remain subject to a degree of comparative advantage and hence transregional trade. While these larger scaled arrangements are undoubtedly more difficult to square with compeerist aims, they should not, however, be assumed to be irredeemably incompatible with them. In the end, navigating the question of scale within commons-oriented industrial aspirations will be up to compeerists themselves. They must determine where, and to what degree, localized/regionalized small-scale manufacturing should be pursued. This decision will inevitably be based on a careful weighing of factors to determine the best option for achieving the goals set out by the compeerist enterprise and variously involved stakeholders. As a whole, achieving community focused production, supporting the commons, and sustaining worker and environmental welfare will be the primary driver in making production decisions. Nonetheless, achieving input-output efficiencies will still have to be factored into the overall compeerist equation, because efficiency, after all, remains a critical factor in both achieving market viability and maximizing the production of use-value goods. If the compulsion to pursue such efficiencies then leads to opting for larger scaled production, compeerists will need to ensure that they do not sacrifice the core principles that motivated this production in the first place. We turn next, therefore, to the entrepreneurial governance options available to compeerist-aligned manufacturers in successfully dealing with these various pressures and imperatives.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Contending With the Limits of Our Natural World.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 125-126. LJS

Privately held agricultural land, in turn, which is the norm in Minority World economies, is firmly plugged into the corporate food-based commodity chains controlled by ‘Big Ag’. To confront this reality, one compeerist-aligned effort has been the legal pursuit of a transvestment of land from private to community hands by establishing land trusts and easements. Currently, conservation is the main goal here, in which a particular plot of land is protected from development in perpetuity, even with a transfer of land title. The US has seen a boom in such trust efforts over the last few decades, with conservation-based trusts making up nearly three per cent of all US territory, exceeding the size of the entire United Kingdom (LTA, 2022). Some land trusts, however, are focused specifically on maintaining agricultural land. The US government’s Purchase of Agricultural Conservation Easement programme (PACE), for instance, has worked with private landowners to protect over three million acres of farmland. Private agricultural land trusts, in turn, make up roughly the same amount; combined with PACE the total size of agriculturally focused land trusts in the US equals the approximate area of Albania (AFT, 2021). While the PACE programme offers significant potential for the government to implement further landuse conditionalities, it is mostly in the private trusts where the aim for more intentional agriculture has been pursued. The US based Agrarian Trust, for example, purchases land and then manages it in line with commons-based principles in an effort to protect ‘farmland for sustainable agriculture’ while preserving ‘its affordability for new and disadvantaged farmers’ (Agrarian Trust, 2021). The Trust currently presides over 11 agrarian commons across the country, consisting of up to 12 farms each. At the same time, while land trusts offer an ideal option for pursuing commons-centred agriculture, it is important to note that Ostrom was not singularly focused on land ownership when considering the principles of sound commons governance. What matters, instead, are the mechanisms in place that allow for bottom-up input and power in determining the status of the land, that is, who has access to it, and how it can and cannot be used (Fennell, 2011). As such, given that trusts/easements still make up a relatively small portion of total land, arguably the most likely scenario for an expansion of compeerist-aligned, DG-FL practices would be for privately-owned small and medium-sized farms to voluntarily embrace community-oriented production and governance principles. Such governance can be pursued in a number of ways. One popular option has been the establishment of specific community-sponsored agricultural (CSA) purchasing agreements – in the US over 12,000 farms sell directly to users/consumers using CSAs (NAL, 2021). While such agreements generally include specifications on what and how to farm, they also often embody much more, including monetary and labour investments by CSA members in the farm and its operations. In this way, these commons-centric community farmer collaborations offer an enticing alternative for local farmers to the outright control that the massive transnational food industry currently exerts over the management of both small and large farming operations. Additional community-based purchasing arrangements with local farmers could come from municipalities, for example via increasingly popular farmto-school programmes, as well as from retail cooperatives, which have a long history in pursuing specific standards for their members. Grocery member co-ops, for instance, were pioneers in demanding the disclosure of ingredients and nutritional information, as well as for introducing organic food. Today such co-ops still have significant market share in Europe and could again become more active in their purchasing standards if their members demanded it. Importantly, this could include forging cooperative relationships with local farmers with the intent to push for more humane, local, and sustainable agriculture. A final example of pursuing commons-oriented governance over farmland can be found in the food sovereignty movement, which takes aim, among several other targets, at the distant governmental regulations placed on local agriculture (Edelman et al, 2014). The goal here is generally to achieve bottom-up forms of governance in the pursuit of a more viable community oriented agricultural sector. In practice this can mean that a community decides to exclude their local, community-serving farms from specific rules and restrictions that are clearly meant for large, industrial operators, and place undue burdens on small-scale producers. For instance, communities adopting food sovereignty measures may allow local farmers to sell certain products that are officially not permitted according to federal law, such as unpasteurized milk or food that was not processed in an industrial, federally regulated facility. Importantly, in this way, a community exerting more control over the rules and regulations related to proximate food production then also enables it to exert more say in how local agricultural land is used.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Democratizing Infrastructure.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 86-91. /LJS

The main takeaway from this brief review of the internet’s underlying infrastructure is that a small number of large corporations are using this materiality within internet storage, transmission, and delivery to gain control over, and profit from, its unwieldy content. In this way, what was originally conceived as a decentralized network of co-equal computers has been transformed into a centralized, client-server system aimed at imposing rent-seeking, access scarcity. It is a development, furthermore, that has directly fostered the demise of net neutrality and a widening digital divide between those with and without access to the internet as non-profitable communities remain unserviced. Faced with these realities the populace at large ultimately has a choice: either pay the rising price to access an internet increasingly curated by capital or, as compeerism advocates, to pursue avenues of immediate and longer-term exit. Seeking commons-based alternatives At this point, short of refusing to use the internet altogether, there are very few ways to fully avoid the large capital actors controlling the server cloud. At the same time, it is worth noting that the decentralized, peer-to-peer roots of the internet have not completely vanished. The so-called ‘dark web’, for example, apart from its shady content, still works mostly along the lines of the original internet concept, with direct communication between computers/ servers without a centralized middleman. P2P file sharing networks using protocols such as BitTorrent to interlink personal computers are also still very much alive, offering some guidance in how a more commons-based approach to the material management of digital storage and access could be achieved (Sandvine, 2018). Some peer-to-peer advocates are now also seeking to overcome the clientserver structure of the internet by using blockchain contracts to incentivize participants to lend out their free computing space, thus establishing capabilities based on a swarm of individual, decentralized machines as opposed to isolated, massive server farms. Currently these efforts are led by small startups, like Storj for crowdsourced online data storage or IEX and Golem for decentralized super-computing. While these examples are still run as capital-oriented platforms, they could also quite easily be based on compeerist-inspired platform cooperatives, as exist, for instance, with other forms of resource sharing, such as for cars (eGo CarShare) or household items (Peerby). In this way, users of the internet could once again become an integral part of the infrastructure instead of being made into mere consumers. One thing that nonetheless becomes abundantly clear in such an envisioned trajectory is the need for a massive increase in the small-scale ownership of more powerful computers/servers and less reliance on mobile, cloud-based devices (Losey and Meinrath, 2016). In line with this reasoning, yet even more far-reaching, is the idea behind the Holochain project, which aims to build a parallel, decentralized, commons-oriented internet that nonetheless offers much greater capabilities than what is possible in simple peer-to-peer connectivity. The project’s primary focus is establishing a blockchain-like code that would be capable of organizing the complexity entailed in managing the endless information and transactions that make up the internet without recourse to client-server systems. In doing so, the Holochain code also seeks to overcome many of blockchain’s various drawbacks, particularly the energy intensive ‘proof-ofwork’ verification system used (via mining) and the difficulties in upscaling applications to a much larger set of transactions. This is being done by developing a biomimicry-inspired ledger that replaces anonymous, ‘trustless’ networks (the basis of Bitcoin) with smaller interlinked groups where trust has been established, thereby enabling greater verification speed and the ability to significantly upscale the processing of transactions (Brock, 2016). Arthur Brock, co-founder and chief designer behind the Holochain project, explains that the foundational code works to establish a ‘method and reward structure for storing and accessing data and applications between users themselves’, thus creating the foundation for a people-run internet (Brock, 2021). This envisioned network would serve as the home of Holo applications, or Happs, which could then become increasingly interlinked and expansive, committed to the peer-to-peer, non-commercial nature of the network. Early examples of such Happs range from alternative social media platform initiatives, such as Junto, to energy monitoring and management systems such as RedGrid (Gerhardt, 2020). The material autonomy that Holochain seeks to achieve is then based on the adoption of prosumer-oriented HoloPorts, which are intended to serve as the hardware that hosts the Holochain-based internet. Investing in holoport capacity is incentivized by issuing HoloFuel, a unique cryptocurrency that is used in executing transactions within Holochain-based applications, similar to how the popular cryptocurrency Ether is used to run Ethereumbased ones. All in all, given the active reworking of both blockchain and the material infrastructure of the internet as a means to exit capital, the Holochain project is an exemplar of the abstract hacktivists’ call to re-engineer and repurpose existing and emerging digital technology as a way to pursue a new social and economic paradigm. Next, moving from storage to transmission and delivery, we must consider both long-distance interconnectivity (the internet backbone) and local access. With regard to the latter, and focusing particularly on the last-mile(s) of direct connection, there has been a surge of activity in finding alternatives to the large corporate internet service providers (ISPs), either because they show little interest in investing in broadband capability in certain areas or the services provided are considered subpar and overpriced due to monopolylike privileges. Not surprisingly, communities are therefore turning to the same options available with regard to electricity provision: municipalization and cooperativization. In the US there have been several examples of successful municipal interventions aimed at making broadband internet more accessible. The municipal Electric Power Board of Chattanooga in Tennessee, for instance, offers a fibre-optic network that was first in the nation to claim one gigabyte per second internet speeds for its customers (Koebler, 2016). Chattanooga’s fibre-optic infrastructure is also used to establish a smart energy grid in the city, leading to significant energy efficiencies. Most of the cooperative efforts in the US, in turn, have centred on rural parts of the country (providing 30 per cent of access there), often by building on the already existing infrastructure in place for cooperative electricity provision. There are now over a hundred electricity cooperatives across the country that have diversified into offering broadband (Trostle et al, 2022). A further critical task related to access pertains to expanding wireless connectivity. In less remote areas, one promising initiative has been through the use of mesh networks, where a large number of small-scale routing devices are shared within the network as a way to extend a direct line to the internet backbone (like a far reaching wi-fi network). Guifi.net, for example, is a community-based internet provider in the Basque region of Spain seeking to circumvent capital-oriented ISPs by establishing expansive mesh networks as a way to provide internet connectivity as a common good (Baig et al, 2015). Similarly, in Detroit, the Equitable Internet Initiative is using mesh networks to tackle ‘digital redlining’, which has contributed to 40 per cent of Detroit residents not having internet access (Kalischer-Coggins, 2021). In more isolated areas, in turn, where direct broadband linkages to the internet backbone are few and far between, commons-oriented projects have focused on establishing an independent infrastructure of cellular towers for radio-based wireless connectivity. One example can be found on Native American lands, which have long been on the losing side of the digital divide. Non-profits like the Tribal Digital Village, servicing tribes in southern California, have worked to address this problem by utilizing a small band of non-licensed spectrum as a way to deliver internet access to native homes via tribally-controlled transmission towers. Yet, one of the biggest challenges in this effort pertains to limits on the publicly available radio spectrum. Thus, the push to treat spectrum truly as a commons, with much greater access allotted to localized, non-capital interests, has become a central issue to native efforts seeking not only to reap the benefits of the digital revolution, but to achieve greater autonomy and self-determination (Duarte, 2017). In the end, however, any internet access system, whether through a direct cable connection or via some form of radio-based network, ends with a needed link to the internet backbone. This means there will always remain a certain dependence on what is ultimately a globalized infrastructure, which, as with the electricity macrogrid, raises some key questions from a compeerist perspective regarding how such a macroscaled resource should be organized. In approaching this question, it must first be acknowledged that the commons-oriented spirit associated with the original creation of the internet is still evident in its global management. To this day, the overarching governance arrangement of the internet’s backbone is characterized by a collaboration involving numerous actors representing civil society, business, government, and research (Radu, 2019). One influential organization in this management assemblage/apparatus is the well-endowed, nongovernmental Internet Society, which, among other things, aims to serve ‘as a focal point for cooperative efforts to promote the Internet as a positive tool to benefit all people throughout the world’ (IS, 2021, np). The commons-centric aim of the Internet Society is reflected in their promotion of open standards and protocols, the sharing of technical information, and the building of community networks. In pursuit of this latter goal, the Internet Society has been a strong advocate for increasing the numbers of internet exchange points (IXPs), especially commons-oriented ones, as these are critical in linking, smaller, lower-tiered networks to the internet backbone. Today many IXPs, including some of the largest ones, are established as non-profits with the singular drive to create a more effective and accessible internet. From a compeerist standpoint, with an eye to fully commonifying the internet backbone, the existing commons-centred principles still evident in the oversight and management of this trans-local and unwieldy infrastructure need to be sustained and extended. In particular, more participation and input should be sought from civil society, especially from those that have still largely been left out, either due to their remote location or their lack of wealth. Compeerism here fully embraces the view (broadly adopted by the United Nations), that internet access is a human right, and hence the priority animating any governance over the macroscaled infrastructure of the internet must be to expand service (Howell and West, 2022). This need is evidenced by the fact that significant chunks of the population in the Minority World still do not have access to the internet, let alone a broadband connection, while on the global scale roughly a third of humanity remains excluded (ITU, 2021). As these facts make evident, despite some collaborative governance arrangements, the pursuit of an expanded internet backbone to achieve highspeed access as a universal right remains fundamentally hobbled, primarily by big-capital interests that do not see adequate profit opportunities in such a development. At the same time, as with electricity, there is no alternative but to work with the existing macroscaled infrastructure and its overarching governance regime. Even a Holochain-based internet, which is primarily focused on achieving autonomy in the realm of data storage, would still need to rely on the transmission hardware currently in place. Given this scalar reality, compeerism must again acknowledge the need to engage macro-level governance actors, including, in particular, the state. Most discussions today around how the state can best be enlisted to pursue internet access as a human right, adopt either an accommodational or confrontational approach to capital. The accommodational position sees the state coaxing and incentivizing capital in order to garner the needed investments for internet expansion and upgrades. In Japan, which is often pointed to as a model for this approach, classic incentivizations offered to key IT linked industries include subsidies, low-interest credit, and tax incentives (Atkinson et al, 2008). The confrontational approach, in turn, has primarily focused on outright nationalization. Indeed, we can point again to the British Labour Party’s election platform in 2019, for which, along with electricity, the public takeover of internet provision was another key proposition. While compeerism remains deeply sceptical of the long-term desirability of seeking synergistic relations with capital as a tactic to grow the commons, nationalization, as noted with electricity, is also considered imperfect in its current proposed forms. The compeerist concern with a government takeover of the tier one backbone again revolves around the state’s hierarchical tendencies, which, in turn, are associated with excessive bureaucracy and uninventive management, largely because there are no mechanisms to allow for cross-sectional, democratic governance. Thus, following the main arguments made regarding electricity earlier, the alternative option would be the facilitation of a commons-oriented third way. While not well fleshed out, Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign platform in the US came close to such a vision in calling for ‘publicly owned and democratically controlled, co-operative, or open access broadband networks’ (Bernie, 2017, np). It is the focus here on establishing an internet infrastructure that is not monopolized by capital or the state, but rather is owned and governed by the people via an assemblage of democratically managed entities, that resonates with compeerist principles. One promising option here would be the creation of so-called stakeholder cooperatives, or solidarity co-ops. More particularly, the internet’s infrastructure, from long distance broadband cables and exchange points to large-scaled server capacity and cellular networks, could be placed in the hands of cooperative federations comprised of representatives from a host of commons-oriented and collaborative stakeholders. Such stakeholders could include last-mile ISP co-ops, local/regional governments, workers, and user-members. Importantly, and reflecting this organizational shift, the charter of such macro-level cooperatives could then be rewritten to focus on operating the internet infrastructure as a commons, in line with its original intent as a resource sharing peer-to-peer network and building on the commons-oriented management regimes already in place.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Contending With the Limits of Our Natural World.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 127-130. /LJS

The efforts to establish CSAs and food sovereignty, just noted, highlight the second major and interconnected challenge to a DG-FL model, that is, making commons-oriented agricultural production economically viable once land has been secured. Indeed, it is only through the competitiveness of alternative, compeerist-oriented farms that the envisioned DG-FL transition could begin to take hold. As we will see, the answer to the question of viability, as in previous sectors we have explored, once again hinges on making the most of available commons-based resources (especially in the digital realm); pursuing boundary-commoning initiatives; and collaboratively working to create a more supportive political-economic environment for compeerist food production. Turning first to the digital commons, noted earlier as a promising factor for expanding yields within more generative forms of agriculture, we can begin by pointing to the tremendous potential in simply opening up global channels for the exchange of farming know-how. Studies have shown the tremendous impact that knowledge exchange can have on small farmers’ success and the important role information technology can play in facilitating this process (Zhang et al, 2016). Such exchanges, furthermore, are particularly valuable in more generative forms of farming, which is especially knowledge intensive due to the numerous geographically specific ecosystem interactions that must be taken into account. The need for cutting-edge academic research to be made available within an open access, global digital repository, as noted in Chapter 2, also becomes apparent here. Beyond information/knowledge sharing, however, the digital commons also offer significant openings for tapping into more affordable production-boosting tools and machines (Giotitsas, 2019). Along similar lines to the Open Source Ecology project noted in prior chapters, the Farm Hack initiative sees itself as ‘a community of users and organizations joining together to build a collaborative platform for developing and sharing tools of all kinds, in the name of open knowledge sharing and resilient agricultural systems’ (Farm Hack, 2016, np). Farm Hack maintains an extensive tool design inventory that anyone can contribute to, use, alter, and distribute. Examples of tools include a bicycle-powered fanning mill, a solar-powered off-grid pasture-monitoring system, and an online software platform to assist in planning and managing a farm. The management dimension just noted is worth emphasizing, since so much of what makes a local farm successful lies beyond production, from effective operational administration to establishing the many linkages needed to find buyers. Regarding this latter point, it is important to recognize that there is a great deal of networking involved, for instance, in assembling all the right actors for a successful CSA initiative or farmers market. Consequently, there are several commons-based digital solutions being pursued on this front. One good example is that of Open Food Network, a globally linked group of commoners committed to fostering ‘a sustainable and resilient food system’ by establishing a free, open-source software platform that links intentional farmers to various types of buyers through online networks and markets (OFN, 2022, np). A further area of research and design that is especially hard to come by in the digital commons pertains to GMO technology. For compeerists interested in pursuing this potential within more generative forms of agriculture, a primary aim is to create a collaborative, open-source effort in which the process and product of such efforts are made available to the digital commons. Important initiatives along these lines are already being explored, as with the Australia-based Centre for the Application of Molecular Biology to International Agriculture (CAMBIA). CAMBIA’s biological open-source project is centred on fostering a network of participants (including private, governmental, and civil-society actors) interested in developing collaborative technological innovations along free open-source software principles (Benkler, 2006). Particular attention here is paid to the need to bridge the gaps in technological access – often maintained by big-capital’s proprietary patents – that block lower-budgeted, local farmers from the many innovations in molecular biology. In considering the value of these various digital resources in the pursuit of a DG-FL transition, however, we must return to what we have seen to be a central component in compeerism’s tactical outlook in contending with capital, namely the establishment of peer-property licensing regimes. While some of the examples of agriculturally relevant digital value just covered would be of limited use to Big Ag operators, others clearly could have broader market implications. By pursuing protections in this latter realm, compeerists can strive to gain a broader foothold in the agricultural sector of the economy. Targeted peer-property licenses could be applied, for instance, to ensure that a commons-sourced GMO seed that is particularly adept at thriving in dry conditions, or cutting-edge software for real-time soil analysis, is intentionally managed, with free access made conditional on either being a subsistence farmer or having embraced certain commonsbased principles. In this way, if such peer-licensed resources significantly expanded, compeerist-aligned farmers would maintain privileged access to tools that both increased their yields and decreased their operating costs, giving them an important market advantage in relation to their capital oriented counterparts. Yet, the compeerist-aligned farmers’ boundary-commoning options are not just limited to the digital, there are many more solidaristic endeavours that could be instrumental in securing viability, including the collaborative arrangement of low-interest loans and the pooling of physical resources, such as the local sharing of land and expensive machinery. To help in such efforts, formal compeerist-aligned cooperatives could be formed. These could then also be employed to better control input and product prices, as well as make unified political demands. Agricutural cooperatives are, of course, already a well-established institution, but in the Minority World these generally represent large-scale, capital-oriented farmers pursuing the expansion of market share within a particular sector (such as Land O’Lakes and Sunkist in the US). In the Majority World, however, there are a number of examples where such cooperatives are employed to empower the oftexploited small-scale farmer. The Indian Amul milk cooperative is a case in point; co-owned by over 3.5 million dairy producers, this massive co-op shows that it is indeed possible to productively organize an immense number of small-scaled farmers to great effect (Somjee and Somjee, 1978). Importantly, the desirability of choosing a commons-oriented approach to farming increases as the benefits of boundary commoning expand. Currently, many farmers engaged in corporately controlled, industrial agriculture are not in a particularly happy place. The control exerted from higher up the Big Ag complex, and the demand for continuous and often risky investments, are resented by many farmers who feel they have no alternative but to comply. Relatedly, more and more farmers are frustrated by their diminishing self-sufficiency, which is a deep-seated value in farming communities. The reason for this loss can be linked to the ever-expanding role of intellectual property, applied to everything from seeds to the software running the farming equipment (Rotz et al, 2019). Indeed, farmers can increasingly be added to the hacking community as they collectively resist the corporate repair monopoly by finding ways around the proprietary protections placed on the digital innards of their tractors and other machines. In light of these conditions, it is therefore conceivable that farmers could be tempted by a viable commons-oriented alternative (Kuipers, 2021). As with digital value production and manufacturing, however, in agriculture we must also acknowledge that extensive boundary-commoning efforts are unlikely to be sufficient in achieving thriving compeerist-aligned economies. In the Minority World, in particular, food production is characterized by a state-sponsored context that explicitly favours extractive, profit-seeking, industrial farms. As such, a reorientation of government priorities is critically needed. Keeping our focus on the Minority World, there are many policies that could be pushed for in this effort. First, the subsidization of agriculture, which is already broadly established, would need to be restructured so that support did not overwhelmingly and unjustly favour the largest and most industrial operations (Gordon, 2021). Then, and more proactively, extra monetary incentives could be directed to the production and consumption of sustainably farmed goods, while targeted regulations and fees could be imposed to ensure any environmental externalities involved in food production are reflected in the final price. The ability to engage in small and microscale, community-focused farming, in turn, could also be facilitated by offering concrete resources, like targeted, low-interest loans, preferred access to affordable leases on viable government land, and high quality and well-endowed extension services. Relatedly, demands could be made that agricultural research within government funded institutions focus more on sustainable, open-source agriculture that is aimed at serving community needs, not just global trade. More education and outreach on commons-based agriculture would also be beneficial, especially if accompanied by trusted certification and labelling programmes – administered at no cost to the farmers – that informed users/consumers about the sourcing of their food, with a particular focus on environmental and humane practices. A final move that could be immensely beneficial to the compeerist agricultural cause is abandoning one-size-fits-all regulations on the production, processing, and selling of food, which is often drafted by corporate interests in a way to burden small-scale competitors (Carson, 2009a). Instead, more nuanced arrangements could be pursued in which localized, small-scale agricultural producers maintain their own, distinct guidelines. In this way – following the food sovereignty movement’s demands – rules and regulations targeting small-scale community-oriented farmers could be largely decentralized, allowing leeway for local communities and even farmer-buyer relationships to play a bigger role in determining a farmer’s restrictions and responsibilities.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Democratizing Infrastructure.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 79-82. /LJS

Given that some degree of macrogrid dependence remains unavoidable for many communities, then, the subsequent question for compeerists is how this infrastructure can best be commonified, that is, taken out of capital’s hands and placed under the purview of stakeholder communities. This is precisely the aim of the growing energy democracy movement, which has linked demands for a renewable energy transition to increased citizen empowerment. To better grasp the challenges and possible ways forward in such a movement, it is helpful to view electricity infrastructure as consisting of three main components: generation, transmission, and distribution. The first aim of compeerist-aligned energy democracy activists tends to focus on gaining community control over the last-mile of macrogrid electricity distribution. Strategies to be pursued vary here according to the underlying conditions on the ground. In the worst-case scenarios, where investor-held energy companies have monopolized electricity delivery, the most common tactic has been to strive for a cooperativization or municipalization of the energy infrastructure (Burke and Stephens, 2018). The cooperative route is generally adopted where the underlying regulations are favourable and the population to be serviced is relatively small. Germany, for instance, has seen a significant increase in small-scale cooperatives, from less than a hundred at the turn of the millennium to close to a thousand today (DGRV, 2020). The US proves to be an outlier here, as large-scale cooperativization has also been on the table in some parts of the country, likely due to the presence of already existing large energy cooperatives that can be traced back to the electrification push of the New Deal in the 1930s. In one recent case in the state of Maine, it took a governor’s veto in 2021 to block a voter referendum that would have replaced the current for-profit utility (linked to the energy conglomerate Avangrid) with a decentralized, user/consumer-owned utility (Maine, 2021). In most instances where larger populations are involved, however, the energy democracy movement has been inclined to pursue municipalization efforts. Germany is again an exemplar of this strategy, with the city of Hamburg, for instance, ousting their corporate energy supplier, Vattenfall, as the result of a public referendum which gave the municipality full control over its grid in 2014. Notably, this transition occurred without the local support of both the dominant centre left (SPD) and centre right (CDU) parties (Provost and Kennard, 2014). In Berlin, a similar referendum, again resisted by the mainstream parties within the city council, was supported by 80 per cent of those who voted, but the measure failed because it fell one per cent shy of the 25 per cent quorum requirement (BBC, 2013). Turning to the US, while much attention has focused on Boulder’s multiyear battle to break free from its corporate energy provider, Excel, a much larger municipalization effort has been unfolding in San Francisco. In the California case the beleaguered PG&E utility finds itself increasingly in the sites of the city council, which has been entertaining the idea of a municipal takeover for several years (Castle, 2020; Kukura, 2021). Importantly, however, capital-based corporations are not always the dominant entity in electricity delivery; for example, in the US nearly half the population already receives its last-mile(s) of electricity from either a cooperative or public utility. Nonetheless, homing in on the latter first, despite tending to offer marginally better rates and greater environmental awareness than their investor-owned counterparts, these hierarchically organized public entities still generally lack options for community input and empowerment. In response to this reality, the energy democracy movement is beginning to make robust demands to address these shortcomings. Based on the Berlin case noted earlier, such demands can include the embrace of full transparency, citizen and worker participation on the board, neighbourhood advisory assemblies, and the power to force decisions through citizen petitions (Angel, 2016). The Switched On London campaign for a public utility is making similar demands (Switched On, nd). Yet, as is evidenced from the resistance to such measures from within some city governments themselves (Hamburg and Berlin are both good examples), bringing about truly commonified public utilities will be a continuing battle. The situation is somewhat brighter when we turn to existing cooperative electricity providers, as these tend to be endowed with mechanisms aimed at facilitating community input. Furthermore, being member cooperatives that are not driven by profit – if revenues exceed the needs of the cooperative, the money is redistributed to its members – they are more amenable to member interests and wishes (Bozuwa, 2018). In the US there are hundreds of New Deal era, cooperative utilities and electricity-centred cooperative federations, which were established to distribute (and in some cases generate and transmit) electricity to the large swathes of the country that were considered too unprofitable for capitalist investments. Today, US cooperatives own and maintain 42 per cent of the distribution lines that make up the last-mile(s) of electricity supply (NRECA, 2021). From an energy democracy perspective, having electricity cooperatives already in place on the ground is undoubtedly the most ideal starting point. To illustrate the compeerist potential here, we can take the unlikely case of the US state of Georgia, where a significant portion of the population, mostly in rural areas, receive their energy from various Electric Membership Cooperatives (EMCs). While the actual running of these membership cooperatives can be criticized for the decisions they have made, for instance a lack of investment in sustainability initiatives or barring the public from board meetings, the governance structure is still fundamentally democratic, meaning it is the members of the cooperative (anyone purchasing energy from an EMC) who are empowered to elect their respective decision-making board (Orrock, 2011). This governance arrangement then opens up significant opportunities to ‘hack’ the way these cooperatives have tended to operate. Indeed, it is worth pointing out here that in the oft neglected co-op elections that are offered, candidates with the most energized base usually win (Grimley, 2020). Hence with a concerted compeerist push, greater control over a cooperative board could be used to amend operating procedures to allow for greater openness and transparency while refocusing services to be more in line with commons-based principles. Furthermore, this control could then conceivably be extended to the higher tiered cooperative federation. For example, in the case at hand, each regional EMC board is permitted to vote for their particular representative to the governing body of the state-wide Oglethorpe Power Corporation, which, beyond the last-mile, is also involved in energy production and transmission.

Hannes, Professor of Geography at the University of West Georgia. “Theorizing Capitalism and its Demise.” From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism. University of Bristol. Pp 201-204. DB

Imagine we are in the late 22nd-century and a compeerist ‘renaissance’ has come about after a prolonged period of environmental and subsequently social and economic upheaval. Most notable on the political front is that the Westphalian order of nation-states has largely been dismantled, giving rise to the predominance of partner states, each consisting of several tiers of governance with distinct jurisdictions. The highest level of political authority within these partner states has been shaped by commons-oriented societies in an effort to create a macro-level governance unit that can facilitate the expansion and management of the commons, yet with significantly less coercive power than the nation-states of old. The territorial reach of these partner states is also more confined, based primarily on the agreed upon cultural and natural characteristics of the underlying ‘bio-region’ (Alperovitz, 2005). Homing in on just one of these, we can envision, for lack of a better name, the Alpha Bioregion (AB), located in North America and with a population of about 35 million people. The region is governed by a nested system of commons-oriented councils, with the highest tier, the federal partner state, maintaining a binding constitution that evolved as a deliberative process of negotiation and compromise. Guided by principles for effective, collaborative commons governance, the constitution lays out the legal organization of the various lower tiers of decision making, as well as the establishment of a bill of rights. This bill enshrines the entitlement to basic individual liberties from coercive authority; rights to the means required for a thriving existence; a commitment to the commons and its democratic governance; and nonhuman rights focused on the humane and enlightened treatment of animals and ecosystems. True to Thomas Jefferson’s belief that a constitution should be a living document, however, the AB’s constitution is a constant work in progress. The highest tiered, federal partner state is given jurisdiction over a number of key governance areas that are by their nature geographically expansive. This includes the responsibility of maintaining an effective monetary and judicial system; providing critical transregional infrastructure (broadband, rail, roads, seaports) and services (postal, health, higher education, research); and, more broadly, implementing regulations and guidelines pursuant to the bill of rights. The federal partner state is also responsible for managing relations with political units outside the AB, for instance to negotiate transregional agreements in the areas of trade, immigration, the environment, and space exploration. Yet, despite some similarities, the AB’s federal partner state is quite different to the traditional nation-state, as significant power is devolved to lower tiers of governance which range from the six meso-regions directly under the top tier to the thousands of neighbourhood-sized precincts at the lowest level. Each tier is composed of representatives from the tier immediately below it and while each governance level has certain powers that pertain to its specific jurisdiction, significant leeway is given the lower tiers in interpreting and applying any regulations/guidelines coming from further up the nested arrangement. The governance of the commons in such a political regime is inevitably multi-scalar and characterized by negotiation, collaboration, and the skilful navigation of conflicting interests. The central role of the federal partner state here, as per the constitution, is to pursue the expansion and accessibility of the human-made commons while fostering fair, sustainable, and democratic management over the natural ones. Yet, it is further down the nested governance structure that these macro-level aims are ultimately implemented via targeted policies and oversight procedures. Furthermore, the actual, on-the-ground management of the various commons is then primarily performed by an assortment of partner-state entities, cooperatives, and non-profits that tend to be local in relation to the resources and assets they are overseeing. To help envision this decentralized partner state, it must be placed within the broader context of a populace that has become well-informed and has largely embraced commons-centric rationales when engaging in governance issues. Moreover, this governance should be understood as being conducted within a society in which compeerism has become the dominant mode of production. In other words, the benefits of win-win strategies have begun to bear fruit, including basic needs/wants being met, the equalization of opportunities to thrive, minimal wealth gaps and, critically, a significant increase in the amount of free time – all of which we will explore in more detail when we cover the economy. Not least, governance itself has been fundamentally transformed by sophisticated big-data capabilities and advanced AI data crunching, making it much easier to execute valid assessments of problems as well as offer data-driven response options. Still, it would be wrong to conclude that an apolitical technocracy has been established. There will, for example, always be contestation over the stakeholdership, and hence power claims made, over a given commons. Indeed, the question of who gets a seat at the table is always a fraught one. Furthermore, even with excellent, data-based analyses and policy options, difficult decisions still have to be made regarding the underlying values and aesthetics to be pursued, where to set priorities, and what degree of risk is deemed acceptable in any given governance decision. Finally, the collection, processing, and interpretation of data can never be a completely objective process, no matter how smart the AI. In short, politics will remain an integral part of any commons-centred governance regime. Unlike today, however, the organization of political affairs in the AB is very different due to its decentralized, nested character, which gives much more power to the populace in determining their local realities. In this way, there is generally lively participation in the lower tiers of the partner state, where, within the broad guidelines and overarching goals agreed upon at the higher tiers, a number of important issues are adjudicated, largely in line with the agonistic approach to commons-based politics addressed in the last chapter. Important governance topics include, for instance, land use and the rights/responsibilities of land users; achieving resilience, organizing and implementing educational opportunities; and, not least, resolving contentious issues like the regulation of weapons, drugs, advertisement, and car use. Beyond these localized forums that are part of the multi-scaled partner state’s responsibilities, however, commoners are also engaged in numerous economic governance processes involving non-state actors. Cooperatives, open-value-networks, and non-profits have become the norm in the AB’s economy and these too, using advanced network democratization platforms (like Loomio today), pursue and facilitate participation and decision making from within and outside the organization regarding its economic mission and operations. This localized participation then easily feeds into the higher tiers of the partner state, giving rise to a steady stream of qualified ‘commons servants’ from below. At these higher tiers, governing bodies inevitably become more distant from the populace. Nevertheless, representational politics have here been made significantly more democratic by adopting many of the reform recommendations explored in the last chapter. In this way the upper tiers of the partner state government have managed to achieve high degrees of transparency and fair representation, and, with the help of numerous digitally enabled governance tools, constituents are given multiple opportunities to participate in important decision making. It should nonetheless be noted that the ideal of consensus is generally rejected within the deliberative bodies of the AB partner state, as such an aspiration carries with it the sense that there is an absolute right to be attained, a position compeerism generally rejects (Mouffe, 2009). Instead, more attention is paid to the process of politics with an emphasis put on avoiding simple win-lose scenarios, for example by employing ranked voting for various policy options. In this way, by arriving at solutions/decisions that are considered ‘good enough’ by a unanimous majority, there is a greater likelihood of avoiding either stalemate or widespread disgruntlement, both of which are associated with winner-take-all arrangements (Bollier and Helfrich, 2019). It is also recognized that the monumental sum of continuous, micro-level decision making entailed in governance can never be fully democratized without causing paralysis and governance burnout. Therefore, various forms of common criteria are used in which micro-managers within partner state and other democratic organizations are freed to handle mundane, everyday decisions with the understanding that they maintain full accountability in their charge to abide by the democratically established guidelines that apply. Blockchain-based ledgers are again an effective tool here in maintaining full, detailed transparency and hence accountability in any execution of policy. In its entirety, then, the governance arrangement within the AB depicted here is a combination of the nested political jurisdictions theorized by Bookchin and the partner state proposed by P2P scholars. The aim of such an organizational structure is to facilitate an engaged and commons-focused populace to run its own affairs at multiple scales in a way that is radically democratic, fair, and practical. In the end, it is nonetheless just one, rough outline; there are many variations possible. Regardless of the governance regimes adopted, however, they must ultimately be understood as both expressions and enablers of the specific commons-based socio-economy being pursued and executed. We can now delve deeper into the form that one such economy might take.