A compeeerist shift is financially feasible—circumventing capital-based credit is possible and does happen

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.