In this conversation, Cecilie talks about walking this unchartered path and applying her insights in different contexts, from an international perspective to that of her own local neighbourhood and wider friendship groups. Key to both: Starting from people’s actual needs.

Below the video, you can read the interview based on the transcript, edited for clarity and additional information. If you’d like to learn more about Cecilie’s work, feel free to get in touch with her directly or contact us.

Summary

Cecilie Smith-Christensen is a Norwegian economist who for more than 25 years has worked to support sustainable development through the cultural heritage and tourism domains. The potential of cultures has been a central theme in her work as an entrepreneur and founder of Events Research South Africa, deputy director of the Nordic World Heritage Foundation, expert advisor to UNESCO’s World Heritage Sustainable Tourism programme, and independent consultant.

In 2014, Cecilie founded World Heritage Catalysis, which, focusing on the protection and management of natural and cultural heritage commons in the context of tourism, aims to enhance transformative change and resilience within tourism-dependent communities around the world.

Recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, she is exploring through the ResiliNets initiative how collaborative finance and mutual aid could help build networked resilience based on personal needs and care for dependents.

In the interview, Cecilie looks back at her childhood, upbringing and work experiences, reflecting on how exposure to different countries and cultures has influenced her professional and personal journey.

Interview based on the transcript

Katja: Today I am talking to Cecilie Smith-Christensen. She is an economist and has worked in the heritage and tourism domains for many years, with a specific focus on World Heritage. In 2014 she founded World Heritage Catalysis which, oriented towards commons practices, aims to transform tourism with innovative approaches and tools to build community resilience.

Hi Cecilie, welcome.

Cecilie: Thank you so much, Katja. Great to see you.

Katja: There are two main topics we want to talk about today. One is your career in heritage protection and tourism, and also how you realised there is a need to reorient practice, because tourism, as we probably all know, can be quite damaging to the host. The second one is a personal project that came out of a drastic change in your life. You have been diagnosed with cancer.

But there are also links between the two, as we will see, so you are building on what you did in your work for your personal project.

A career in heritage protection and sustainable tourism

Maybe let's start with your background. You were born in Kenya and then moved to Norway, and after studying economics, you moved around to quite a few places. You did an internship at UNESCO in Paris, and you also spent several years in Cape Town. And you once did a tour from Cape to Cape, from the North Cape in Norway to Cape Town. I found that really amazing. How long did that take you?

Cecilie: Thank you for sharing that timeline Katja. It took half a year. In addition was the time planning, of course. Life’s a journey. Looking at my privileged and exciting life, it’s interesting to reflect on the motivations and the questions that have driven me to the next phase of my life and the exposure that I’ve sought.

I was born in Kenya, to Norwegian parents, but grew up on a small farm in Norway until my parents divorced and I moved to the city (Oslo). My early years journey made me very aware that the starting point of your life is very significant for later opportunities. I hope it has brought a sort of humbleness to me, as it was not a given that I would be raised and grow up in Norway - a country I find somewhat detached from the great societal challenges we see around the world.

Naturally influenced by my parents - my father a pilot and adventurer while my mother more into arts and culture, I developed an interest in how culture varies around the world, how it influences communities, and drive development. However, in the early 1990s there were no formal study opportunities on the role of tourism in sustainable development. So instead, and in order to later pursue my interests, I decided to study economics at the University of Oslo. That took seven years of my life.

Once I got the degree in 1999, I realised it was time to explore the world. In 2000 I did the Cape to Cape expedition with three friends. Our road trip from Cape Point in South Africa through Africa, the Middle East and Europe up to North Cape in Norway, was a wild trip. What was really interesting was travelling metre by metre – and not just flying in and thinking you get an understanding of a place – seeing how people actually live. You know, many people refer to ‘Africa’ as if it was one country, but it is so diverse.

Katja: Yes, it is always mentioned as one thing, but it is so many different countries.

Cecilie: Meeting and talking to people along the route and not doing the luxury kind of touring was also humbling.

Once I came back to Norway, I got an internship at UNESCO - United Nations organisation for Education, Science and Culture, at its headquarter in Paris. I was lucky to be there for four months, very important months for me gaining experience of UNESCOs World Heritage Convention (1972). Upon the rather unrealistic dream of becoming an expert advisor to UNESCO, the recommendation was to get more international experience. My mother always says, if you aim for the stars you may be lucky to reach a bit over the bushes…

Katja: Aim high.

Cecilie: I followed the advice and went to South Africa seeking international experience. I had lectured there for half a year in 1998, but when I went back there in 2001, I ended up staying for seven years. During this period and after a year as a beach-bum in surfers paradise Jeffreys Bay, I moved to Cape Town. At a conference on Responsible Tourism I met wonderful people with whom I co-founded Events Research South Africa – a consulting company addressing events and festivals’ contribution to sustainable development. This was in the time of post-apartheid and the aspiration of building an inclusive ‘rainbow nation’. For me that was an amazing time and experience, being able to roam around in different sub-communities asking questions . I learned a lot about not assuming things about “communities”, the diversity and the richness which exists across all layers.

Anyhow, in 2008 I moved back to Norway, starting a new chapter as deputy director of the Nordic World Heritage Foundation – a UNESCO Category 2 Centre based in Oslo. In that role, I got the opportunity to assist the development of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sustainable Tourism Programme and tools supporting the development of sustainable tourism strategies. Under the UNESCO programme and while most of my work is conducted online, I have been privileged with the opportunity to travel, assisting the development of tourism strategies around UNESCO World Heritage sites.

I want to say something about the UNESCO World Heritage Convention - the International Convention concerning the Protection of the World Natural and Cultural heritage of Outstanding Universal Value aiming to protect our shared heritage. Many of these places are significant tourism attractions. While these places are inscribed on the World Heritage list because of their heritage value, there is also a great motivation among State Parties to inscribe places because of the international recognition and tourism that often comes with it.

And as you initially said, tourism is an economic driver. It's massive. Under the Sustainable Development Goals it's been strongly pushed as a sector that can contribute development through economic growth. However, we now see many places struggling under mass tourism, over-tourism, exploitation, and commercialisation. This is the context for which I have seen the need to reorient practice.

Katja: What problems would you say you have been trying to solve as you oriented your career more towards changing something? Even though it is called sustainable tourism, it still has the growth driver in it, right? Is that something you started to see?

Cecilie: In the aspiration to shift from an extractive to a non-extractive and ideally regenerative development paradigm, how we address our resources is very important. Natural and cultural heritage are often referred to as economic resources, presented for what they could mean for the economy or for people.

What is quite disruptive, I would say, is when you start recognising that many of these ‘resources’ are in fact commons. And when you apply the commons approach recognising the shared right to and responsibilities for the stewardship of nature and culture, it also helps addressing what is problematic about seeing and managing heritage as proprietary and economic resources.

Language has however tied us to the increased privatisation of property and extractive economics. For me and many professionals, the UN Sustainable Development Goals have been the context guiding practice. Around the SDG 8 on economic growth, we have created a language where almost everything we do is somehow tied up in the narrative that economic growth contributes to sustainable development. But to me, over time that narrative and what I observed did not make sense, leading to increased cognitive dissonance. Most organisations do however not invite or even allow for critical questions around the role of economic growth and sustainability. Then, how can you start asking questions necessary to identify the matter, and address the cognitive dissonance? I had conversations with colleagues, airing this, and many said, “Yeah, totally agree, but we don’t see the opportunity to address it.”

Conversations have however changed over time, and specifically after reading the Deep Adaptation paper.

Katja: Yes, Jem Bendell, 2018.

Cecilie: Yes, exactly. Actually, I found my way to Jem because of his work in complementary currencies. I had the opportunity to meet him and also for a while studying under him. The Deep Adaptation paper was really important, because it burst that bubble. With the COVID pandemic, it was like: ‘This is it’.

Katja: We can’t carry on like that.

Cecilie: Yes, the Deep Adaptation paper provided a starting point for improved language, and ways to frame the predicaments.

We are operating under, not only disruptions, but a decline in systems and organisations we believe hold our communities and the world together. Deep Adaptation helped me become more articulate about systems collapse and the need for transformative change. It was also an entry point to learn about the various individuals and clusters of people now coming together to really address systemic issues.

It has been a steep learning curve for me. It’s not only about learning, it’s very much about unlearning and learning again.

I needed time to find out how I bring this changed understanding of the world to relevance through innovation in the context of heritage and tourism. So, again travelling down an uncharted path, I needed to find that out for myself through ongoing reflections. In this process I navigated and learned from international communities of domains including heritage and tourism, but also economics as a broader domain including CoFi [collaborative finance]. By moving between the various professional domains, I now feel different narratives and approaches are merging into new more meaningful narratives guiding practice. What is emerging is a result of people connecting through conversations, addressing needs in the context of communities or places, instead of the needs of an economic sector.

Work I currently engage in involves the formulation of international charters, steering documents and tools hopefully influencing practice going forward. This includes ICOMOS International Charter on Cultural Heritage Tourism (2022) reinforcing cultural heritage protection and community resilience through responsible and sustainable tourism management. The Charter represents a rather radical contribution as it calls out the unsustainability of the current economic paradigm requiring perpetual economic growth, and by addressing heritage as commons it sets out a potential transformative pathway for tourism. This is an important international charter as the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) is an Advisory Body to UNESCO and the World Heritage Convention.

So, coming back to your question; Instead of ‘how can tourism contribute to sustainable development’ which through economic growth in the context of climate change leads to increasing vulnerability, my focus is now ‘how can we or I help enhance the resilience of tourism-dependent communities’. This is where futures thinking and anticipatory approaches come in. What happens within a community upon a disruption, and how can we prepare in advance?

It is increasingly clear that across the world many places need to deal with this vulnerability, but there are very few tools or approaches to do so. These issues are not solved through energy efficiency only, but how we as individuals connect and help each other.

Katja: How much of a role does it play to keep the economy local as well, and maybe reduce the extraction towards the wider economy?

Cecilie: Tourism is multifaceted. Because of international ownership, money is leaking from the local economy it involves a great deal of leakages. Even if we like to talk about sustainable and responsible tourism, there are a number of systemic issues we keep ignoring. The reality is that tourism often leads to extraction and gentrification. Nevertheless, I see the tourism sector as an interesting opportunity to help localise economies, and through the tourism sector supporting local production and local consumption. It is not just about the tourists. We need to think about this very systemically, and from a local community perspective. If a place is not a good place for the local people to live, it won’t be a good place to visit. Revenues from tourism depend on a community’s ability to attract and host visitors. We need, through economics, to build communities that are robust to fluctuations in visitor numbers and disruptions that may affect the tourism sector. Even the scenario where a community is no longer attractive or able to host tourists.

It’s not about abandoning tourism entirely, but we need a form of economy that – I’m a bit cautious using the term “regeneration” – literally sustains life locally. I’m thinking about water security, soil security, food security, housing security - challenges where it’s very interesting to see potential approaches addressed through the commons and collaborative economics and finance approaches.

Katja: I was just going to mention, we actually met at the last CoFi gathering. Do you think something like complimentary currencies or alternative economic models will have a role to play as well?

Cecilie: I hope so.

Katja: Can you see that starting anywhere?

Cecilie: Yes, however not yet so much. You have the CopenPay in Copenhagen, Denmark, incentivising and rewarding tourists for thoughtful actions is a good example. But the CoFi – if I may call it a movement – it holds space for so many innovative approaches. It’s not ‘one system fits all’, but it’s about getting a broader understanding of what economics is and what economic tools can do to complement, and maybe help rectify shortcomings of the current neoclassical economies and fiat-based monetary system.

I’m very encouraged to see innovative approaches addressing energy, housing, and farming. I am also specifically interested in credit clearing – what LocalLoop Merseyside are doing – and Grassroots Economics commitment pooling. To me, it’s about how we could bring different approaches and initiatives to relevance avoiding competition because of limited official budgets. I hope to play a role in contextualising the potential of these types of innovations and support collaboration around piloting and implementation. We must however be very careful attempting ‘social engineering’ through behavioural modification as without rooting it in local needs and values may lead to unexpected consequences.

Katja: It should be the people themselves doing the social engineering. I think that’s important as well, wouldn’t you say? So that it’s not something from outside.

Cecilie: Absolutely. You know, the tokenisation of this and that, tokenising forest, tokenising heritage may be good for fundraising. But we need to consider financial innovation within a broader scope - the potential for systemic change and paradigm shift, and not only how to generate more money for certain projects.

The question is how we can support individuals in their collaborative economic capacity to share and utilise resources in a respectful and sustainable way. On this note, I trust you will bring me to the point of the ‘commons’.

Katja: Yes, there was one specific question, and after that, we can maybe move on to ResiliNets.

Commoning is all about inclusivity, but it seems like in the commons movement, there’s not that many women who are really well known or driving things, and also not in the CoFi movement. Why do you think that is?

Cecilie: Women were always engaged in commoning but maybe not reflected in the language as ‘now what we’re doing is commoning’. Many of the thought leaders in the commons space are men, and they are writing wonderful things making sense. But I think we, possibly due to the limitations of language and vocabulary, have somehow forgotten that commoning is something that we have always done. We therefore really need to make sure that commoning is broad enough to encompass all the commoning that has always been going on.

And this is where knowledge about our history and heritage is important, because it was largely through commoning we survived and flourished in the past. We need to look back, recognise and bring what may have been forgotten or marginalised into contemporary relevance, even if we have all sorts of technologies now. I often say when I am exposed to a new kind of tool: “what happens when the electricity goes down?”

Katja: Is it like that: we have always been doing commoning and have not necessarily needed to put that into language and talk about it in economic terms? And now it is in some areas seen as this economic tool as well? Where am I going with this?

Cecilie: I think it is important as it helps us to understand that what we are doing by default is extractive.

Katja: The current default that we have?

Cecilie: Yes, the current default. Operating in a debt-based economy, even if my intentions are good, I am stuck in this paradigm. How can I find the way out? What is the paradigm shift, and what do I need to do in order to break out?

This is my working hypothesis and proposal: while tourism can be restorative or generative, it is only through decoupling from the debt-based economy, we may shift and contribute towards a regenerative paradigm. This requires tooling that helps us facilitate types of exchanges not possible by fiat money. This involves a mind-shift but is also very practical.

Katja: Is it that we need to take things out of the money system altogether and also do a different type of finance that is more about circulating and not taking on ever more debt?

Cecilie: We can’t say “now you need to shift from this model to another”.

Katja: To have an awareness that that is what we want to do is probably a first step.

Cecilie: I think it’s necessary to recognise our shared vulnerability and understand that the type of money enabling the current economy does not serve us in the long run, and may not always be there. Suddenly, upon a disruption we may be without income and money, and what do we have then?

In Norway, the government may channel funds to local places affected by a disruption affecting the local economy such as the tourism sector, but that’s not possible everywhere. If a remote tourism place suddenly doesn’t have any tourists, or wakes up to the realisation of this being a potential scenario, what then? How can we prepare? Are there complementary mechanisms that could help diversify the local economy and make it more robust towards economic disruptions? However, we are all doing our best, and not everyone can imagine or drive a radical paradigm shift. But we can all start to address collective and individual needs.

ResiliNets

Katja: Let’s talk about ResiliNets. That’s your personal project. How did you get the idea for it, and what is it?

Cecilie: Thank you. Actually, ResiliNets was first conceived through World Heritage Catalysis as an initiative with the aim to enhance networked resilience, and specifically around tourism dependent and vulnerable communities. It has however evolved upon my more recent situation.

When I was diagnosed with terminal cancer in December 2025, it came as a shock, naturally. I am a single mother, and my daughter, who is turning thirteen on Monday, is still young. So, upon that realisation that I don’t have time ahead, my immediate reaction was: ‘This is shit, but let’s make the most out of it. I’m still alive, I’m engaged in what I’m passionate about, but now I need to get my priorities right.’ I also realised that I can’t continue to travel around the world with the hope and intention to “save the world” and implement complementary currencies in remote communities.

Upon experiencing new needs I therefore asked myself: How do I start to build from myself? That was actually a very interesting challenge, because in the past I always thought that efforts to enhance community resilience here in Norway is difficult because I and many live privileged lives in relatively affluent communities. I have great neighbours, and while we have concern for each other, we generally engage upon the ideal of “self sufficiency” ignoring our relational dependency.

Katja: Yes, that’s what the current economy is like.

Cecilie: Exactly. In the past I thought it would be very difficult to integrate or even bring these ideas forward in my own local context, because we don’t necessarily see how vulnerable we are, we are not ready to take that in. So, when I got sick I decided to be very open from the beginning about my situation, my personal needs, the needs of my daughter and mother as my dependents, and our dependency on friends and family.

Katja: Yes, I really admire you for how you communicated it, and also how you are dealing with it now.

Cecilie: Thank you. In the process of communicating my situation I also reflected upon the fact that each of us represents a node in a greater network, and what may happen if a node in a network goes away. It is a disruption. People are disconnected. They don’t only lose a person but also lose connectedness. I found my own passing as a disruption in society very interesting.

In December, I wasn't sure I would survive till summer. Undergoing and responding well to the chemo treatment I now hope to have more time. However, irrespective of time I see the need to build and strengthen my network. I strongly feel the need to find ways we can come together, and enhance networks not only around me, but also my daughter, mother, and greater network of family and friends. A network that will continue beyond my time and as my social legacy.

As I did not have the energy to respond to the many kind questions on how my treatment is going, my first effort was to create a WhatsApp group for my Norwegian family and friends as a forum to share reflections about life with the occasional health update. Quickly the group totalled 105 people. As an introvert I didn’t previously realise I had so many friends. It’s a playful space, now engaging a lot of people so it’s really a big ego boost. It’s fantastic.

But what’s possible to mobilise through a WhatsApp group is very limited and restrictive to what I hope to accommodate. So it was actually thanks to you that I learned about HumHub, which is an open source community platform that I now use to build what I call ResiliNets, #FriendsofCecilie. With this I aim to develop an inclusive digital space where my broader set of friends and family can connect and engage around shared interests building community around my daughter and themselves.

Next was recognising and being vocal about personal needs. While I love flowers, I don’t like to see flowers dying in front of me. I would however appreciate help with cooking, and home-baked healthy bread. I would also appreciate help with my shortcomings, for example if my daughter is stuck with homework or my elderly mother needs help. Recognising my own needs and wants spurred an increased interest in mutual aid and reciprocity networks.

Many mutual aid networks start with what a person has to offer. Exposing one’s needs, it’s more – I wouldn’t call it taboo, but less practised. From my own experience living abroad – if you’re not needed, you feel very disconnected even if you live in a so-called ‘community’. Therefore I decided, ‘okay right now I need to somehow go forward with an example around my needs’. Next, ‘how can I somehow support the practice of reciprocity through mechanisms making it fun?’

As part of ResiliNets (which is still under development), I want to integrate a mutuality and offers-and-needs market, engaging with people within the CoFi network offering and evolving relevant technologies. Meanwhile I am playing around with the use of vouchers. For instance, upon expressing my needs, and if someone responds to any of my needs, issuing a simple voucher can be a way of expressing appreciation. Through a voucher I can say, “Thank you so much for what you offered”, and in return, I can offer to borrow a book or use my sewing machine. I have a lot of tools. Before I invite my friends and family into an offer and needs market platform, I want to bring a bit of playfulness through the use of vouchers as many people are not aware of or used to these types of practices, and hence need a soft introduction to new ways of sharing and reciprocal networks.

Even for those not seeing the need for it now, let’s start to play with reciprocity and make it fun. The doomster in me thinks that we all can prepare by playing a bit, knowing that in times of greater needs there are tools out there.

Katja: As I understand it, your local network is already quite active now, right, and now you’re extending it more towards your global network.

Cecilie: Yes, of course. Through ResiliNets I hope to connect my international network of friends - #FriendsofCecilie.

Katja: Before we went on this live call, you showed me a bit of the platform and we were thinking, you could show that a bit here as well, so people can get an idea.

Cecilie: Yes, thank you, that’s very exciting. This is really work in progress, and so I am just showing you the entry. This is ‘Welcome to ResiliNets’, a space where I invite friends and family to join across generations.

Currently under development, it is a bit overwhelming, but here are examples of spaces on themes where I would like to engage with my friends and family. I also have my own space – Cecilie’s space – taking over the WhatsApp group where I will continue to share my thinking and reflections and just being me. I also created a safe space for my daughter Lucie. But primarily it offers opportunities for shared engagement. For instance, share your favourite book and film, with the potential of hosting a little virtual book club. The same goes for cooking and recipes. While I will share delicious mocktails, my mother will share her signature dishes, and I will invite my friends to share healthy meals. There will be spaces on culture and creativity, gardening and other themes. This summer I will invite people to virtual gym classes.

Last Sunday, I had an open invitation to come and help me create the dream garden. People who hadn’t previously met came together around production rather than consumption, leading to the most wonderful result. Next week I will be organising a clothing swap using vouchers. That will be fun.

ResiliNets is however not set up with the ambition for everyone to join. First of all it connects me to my immediate and broader network of friends and family – hence #FriendsofCecilie as their shared point of reference. If it can help my distributed network of friends and family to connect with and support each other – to meet around co-creation rather than consumption, I have achieved my goal.

Katja: I remember we went to an event where that came up as well – about doing productive things together. Often we consume things together. We go to the cinema, or we buy things. To come together and do something together is probably something that is good to do more.

Cecilie: So, that’s the idea.

Besides thematic spaces to connect personally and virtually, I also plan a space on travelling and hospitality with the aim to connect friends from around the world - including you and people I have befriended through the Cofi network. In the future if you ever come to Norway, you could reach out through ResiliNets finding other #FriendsofCecilie that can help you plan your trip and even meet up for a coffee or help with accommodation. Or, if you have children who are going to a foreign country, you could reach out to this personal community, and find people that should be ready to be a local connection and provide help if necessary.

Building resilient networks from oneself is something everyone could do. Thinking very practically around my own needs, wants and desires, and how I may build community and networked resilience, I hope my lived example could inspire others who may be in similar situations, as a social legacy, support dependants, friends and family after someone is gone. It could even come to relevance in the tourism-dependent communities I for years have attempted to support, but as an outsider.

Together we stand stronger.

Katja: Yes, I see ResiliNets becoming a network of your friends, friends that also care for your daughter.

Cecilie: Friendships to me do not only include people I grew up with, or see regularly. Friends are people that I had honest conversations with. Honest conversations build trust through openness, transparency, and respect. Engaging with people in the CoFi movement, engaging in deep conversations around things that really matter to us, has created human bonds and expanded my network of people I trust will respond positively at our next encounter.

Katja: I also remember us going on the train with Sue Bell, we had such good conversations.

Cecilie: Yes, and I also want to acknowledge your hospitality. Staying with you and your family was really nice.

Katja: Yes, we had such a nice time. And then we went to London as well, and we played the money game with Jem Bendell and Matthew Slater.

Thank you so much for sharing that, and I’m looking forward to seeing the network grow. Is there a place where people can learn about that?

Cecilie: I welcome those interested in the potential of commoning and CoFi in the context of heritage and tourism, or ResiliNets to connect. As emergent practices I’m open for collaboration, and will continue to engage in various ways as long as possible. I’m very glad that technology allows us to collaborate and co-create, even if we are not in the same location. That’s really amazing.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to take so much space and time.

Katja: It’s been really interesting, and I know others will think that, too. It’s so valuable. Thank you.

Cecilie: Thank you so much.

This article is adapted and expanded from a knowledge base entry written by Matthew Slater. The Growing the Commons knowledge base is a community-curated collection of concepts, projects, and ideas related to commons-based approaches and systems change.

We have preserved much of Matthew’s original language and argument while adding editorial context, a short introduction to Collaborative Finance and its underlying principles, selected examples, and a fuller invitation to the upcoming CoFi4 gathering in Austria (21-28 June 2026).

Why traditional finance goes awry

The commons movement is a backlash to the idea of private property, in which ownership of land and other assets is exclusive, which gradually splits society into classes of owners and of the dispossessed. But ownership is just a part of the problem.

Collaborative Finance addresses another dimension of the problem, which is how the money and financial system puts the state, its institutions and its plutocrats between people struggling to make a living, skimming and confiscating their resources at every turn.

Let’s consider some common, even essential, financial instruments:

• Insurance

• Pensions and unemployment benefits

• Loans and mortgages

• Saving and investment

• Payments

The smooth and fair operation of these mechanisms is critical because their failure ruins lives. Stringent regulation helps to protect against fraud and failure, but also to obstruct small players and innovators. Maybe this is fair – when it comes to risk management, the larger institutions can juggle more assets and cope with larger hazards.

But this also leads to the financial sector being owned and run exclusively by the ruling class. Those elites can evade these regulations because they can afford specialist accountants and access tax havens. The products and tools are arcane and difficult for the government to regulate. Revolving doors, corruption and other mechanisms compromise the regulatory system. Despite all the government protection, violent speculative cycles, scams and abuses still happen, and justice fails to catch up. The largest institutions are often the most prolific criminals, and in some ways hold sway over government itself.

Meanwhile, for most of us, the financial services we use have become like indifferent machines: algorithms decide if we are creditworthy; our pensions are used to finance polluting industries and war-criminal governments; we struggle to keep our data from predators and time-wasters. We watch all the money slipping through our fingers and being collected in enormous pools which overflow with riches we may never enjoy.

What if?

Being organised at such a large scale ensures that only remote rich people design these systems and derive all the secondary benefits. But what if there was a more appropriate scale, in which trust actually played a role, in which profit was not the prime directive but was ploughed back into the system? In which the people taking risks helped to manage those risks?

What if the so-called free market had space for small-scale financial services – like house and car insurance in every street? What if pensions were managed by the local government which, after all, is the main provider of elderly care? What if we could invest in the very businesses that produce and sell our necessities, as a way of ensuring our own security? What if those businesses turned around and invested in us, making our security mutual? And what if this myriad of local human financial organisations could de-risk through voluntary federation?

One of the first assumptions we need to unpack is about the role of money itself, the thing that integrates all our activities with the dominant financial machine and makes each of us part of the problem. Money is really good for standardising accounting, taxation and fines, but it is quite hard to obtain and hold on to. Maybe if we could enter into different kinds of financial relationships, we could find other ways to settle debt, to account for exchange, and to provide for the future.

Because money, it turns out, is not where finance begins. Finance precedes money. Long before banks, markets, or coins, people pooled resources, shared risks, settled obligations, and invested together in a common future.

What is Collaborative Finance?

Collaborative Finance, often shortened to CoFi, is not a single organisation, technology, ideology, or mechanism. It is an emerging field and community of practice exploring how communities can create, run, and govern their own financial systems, services, currencies, and instruments – collaboratively, and for themselves.

That one idea stretches across all the major financial functions: not just exchange and payments, but also saving, lending, credit, insurance, and investment. What unites them under a single umbrella is a shared answer to one question: who finance is by and for. In CoFi, the answer is the community itself – the people who actually use the system.

The motivations vary. Sometimes the aim is to reduce dependence on scarce cash, letting members trade even when money is tight. Sometimes it is to keep value circulating locally instead of leaking away to distant shareholders. Sometimes it is to give smaller players the bargaining power that comes from acting together, to share risks that no one could carry alone, or to finance the things that banks and governments will not.

Many of the approaches explored within CoFi are far from new. They draw on practices that are often centuries old and found the world over (see What does CoFi look like in practice? below for specific examples). What is genuinely new is the opportunity to connect these traditions across countries and sectors, to learn from one another, and to build shared tools using recent technological advances.

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What makes CoFi different?

Mainstream finance is optimised to maximise profit for the owners by maximising revenue from the customers, at least as far as the cartel allows. The benefits of doing it another way, then, are everything but maximal revenue! Instead finance done collaboratively between peers should be less fearful, more flexible and less legalistic; more fun, more participative, more considerate of the environment and community. It should build social bonds and provide more non-monetary and serendipitous returns.

Several principles recur across the field:

• It treats money as a social relation, not a commodity or thing: when we treat money as an object, we forget that it is always, at bottom, based on social agreement – a negotiable relationship of credit, trust, and obligation. The question is not what tokens circulate, but what relationships and responsibilities sit behind them. CoFi also prioritises money’s role as a means of exchange – keeping value moving through a community – over its role as a store of value to be accumulated.

• It serves the real economy: the point is not to create assets for speculation, but to support the people and organisations producing real goods, services, care, infrastructure, and ecological value.

• It treats trust as something to be nurtured, not eliminated: some technologies try to make finance “trustless.” CoFi does the opposite, seeing trust as the solid foundation on which effective finance can be built. It leverages the trust that already exists between people who know one another, then devises ways to extend and reinforce it over time.

• It assumes different tools serve different purposes: a mechanism designed for local exchange tends to be unsuitable for long-term savings and community funding. CoFi therefore doesn’t seek a single universal solution, but promotes a plural ecosystem of interacting tools, instruments, mechanisms and services, each serving a specific purpose.

• It scales not through consolidation, but federation: CoFi starts with individual communities – often small, usually grassroots. Scale comes not from one network absorbing the rest, but from many independent, self-governing systems choosing to connect and interact on shared terms. Each stays sovereign over its own rules, but expands its reach through federation.

Put simply, collaboration comes before finance. Financial tools can support cooperation, but they cannot substitute for it. Communities need relationships, trust and shared purpose before any mechanism can succeed.

What does CoFi look like in practice?

CoFi takes many forms. Most practitioners are less attached to any one mechanism than to the question of how these approaches can complement one another to support resilient local economies. Some of the main families are:

• Mutual credit: participants extend each other credit within a network, trading even when cash is short, with the network itself acting as the source of liquidity. This family includes Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS), time banks, and business-to-business barter exchanges. Examples include Sardex in Sardinia, the government-supported Fureai kippu care-time system in Japan, and the global Community Exchange System (CES).

• Community and local currencies: money designed to circulate within a particular place or community, often with additional social and environmental goals. Examples include Brazil’s Banco Palmas and its social currency, the Palmas (now part of a network of over a hundred community banks), and the Chiemgauer regional currency in Germany.

• Multilateral clearing: businesses cancel out what they owe one another within a network, settling only the net balance and freeing up scarce cash. Examples include Local Loop Merseyside in Liverpool and the global Cycles network.

• Voucher and use-credit systems: businesses or producers finance themselves by issuing prepaid vouchers that can be redeemed against their own future goods or services. Classic cases are Deli Dollars and Berkshire Farm Preserve Notes in Massachusetts, USA.

• Savings circles and rotating credit associations (ROSCAs): members pool their money and take turns drawing on the pot, under rules they set themselves. Examples include kin.coop in the UK and the Sarafu Network in Kenya (which combines several mechanisms including mutual credit and community currencies).

• Community investment: residents collectively finance shared assets such as housing, renewable energy, shops, or pubs, keeping ownership and returns local. In the UK alone, for example, community shares have funded hundreds of such projects over the last two decades.

• Mutual insurance: participants collectively share risks among themselves rather than outsourcing them entirely to commercial insurers, much as the original friendly societies and tontines once did.

What can I do?

Finance is always a shared activity – you can’t do it on your own! But you can start by deprogramming yourself from deep cultural indoctrination. Reflect on what these words really mean:

• Money is a means, not an end in itself.

• Value is what you value, not the market.

• Work is the creation of wealth for yourself or for your community.

• Wealth is not the balance of your bank account but the quality of your life, your health and your relationships.

• Security is emotional and relational, not just physical or material.

With this grounding you can work with others to create wealth and security together. Building large-scale, trustworthy institutions from scratch takes years or even decades of patience, yet commoners have achieved it many times before. Building societies took hold and thrived amongst the urban poor of the Industrial Revolution; savings pools can be found in nearly all the monetised societies of the world; the Mondragon Coop still dominates a whole region of Spain.

But we also have to be realistic about the obstacles. Most people are very conservative with their money and the incumbent system is the devil they know: it is more or less predictable, and highly efficient. By contrast, collaborative finance is often built around potentially less familiar assets and relationships. A young CoFi initiative has many ways to fail and potentially lose its members’ assets. For this reason it is important not to put all one’s eggs in a single CoFi basket.

There is also a lot of churn in this field. Many projects fail to get off the ground, often for governance or personality problems, and if successful, there is always the danger of being co-opted and the temptation to sell out. The other great challenge is finding each other and building real, trusting relationships. The people who are awake to the menace of the financial system are thinly spread, often use different language for similar ideas (or vice versa), and don’t always recognise each other as natural allies. This makes it harder for them to meet, to associate, to build trust and to develop lasting institutions.

So building a more collaborative financial system can only happen gradually, cautiously, even if you feel the need for it painfully urgently. And even if you never fully achieve the ideal, the process itself should be immensely valuable for building trust and community around you.

Join us at the CoFi 4 gathering in Austria (21–28 June 2026)

CoFi is also a thriving community! Every summer, people from across the field gather in the picturesque Austrian Alps to meet, compare notes, and build bridges – between community-currency practitioners and technologists, between monetary theory and local practice, between people who have spent decades on alternative exchange and those arriving from newer fields such as Web3, regenerative finance, and network science.

Matthew describes the spirit and rhythm of these gatherings as follows:

First, we talk – a lot – and learn from each other; often we realise we are describing the same thing in different words. Then we help each other in little ways. Then, sometimes, we do projects together.

CoFi4, the fourth gathering, runs 21–28 June 2026 at Commons Hub Austria, in Hirschwang an der Rax, at the foot of the Alps. It is less a typical conference than an intimate, week-long community retreat combining structured sessions and open space with shared meals, walks, and time in nature – set in a former countryside inn now being developed as a centre for the commons economy. The programme is organised around daily themes spanning experiential learning, mechanisms, infrastructure, system analysis, and implementation strategies. Katja Durrani’s review of CoFi3 gives a good sense of the welcome that awaits.

A few places remain — if you’re working on community finance, or simply curious how finance might serve communities differently, come and join us!

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This is an interview with David Barkin, distinguished professor of economics at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico. He collaborates with indigenous and peasant communities, many of which are developing new institutions, trying to build a post-capitalist society. He’s recognised for his theory of Radical Ecological Economics. Here, he’s talking with Dave of Growing the Commons about successful commons projects in Mexico and around the world.

Below is a video of our conversation, followed by a summary in bullet points (with links to more info), and then the complete transcript.

Summary

• Ecological economics as a field was created in 1989 by economists and biologists, who produced academic output on the connection between classical economics and environmental damage

• Barkin became convinced that the state would not be able to solve these problems, but that communities in Mesoamerica had systems that didn’t involve capital accumulation or the consumer economy, that could allow humans to live in harmony with nature. Children and old people were involved in the community, rather than in nurseries or care homes.

• Society is part of nature, and has to care for non-human species as well as humans. This Barkin called ‘radical ecological economics‘.

• Marx, in his later writings, was impressed with grassroots organisation and indigenous groups in many parts of the world, and moved away somewhat from focus on seizing the state as a route to a post-capitalist world.

• There are thousands of grassroots groups around the world that have organised to protect their environment and to ensure that their young and old are not burdens on society. These are not ‘subsistence communities’ - they have huge celebrations of life involving the entire community, and their young people go to universities around the world.

• Mexico has interesting commons or commons-like projects, such as the Ejido movement - a land (and water) commons, that has survived attempts by a neoliberal state to privatise it. Also, the Zapatista uprising happened when NAFTA was formed in 1994, as they saw it as a threat to their freedom and quality of life, as it gave control of much of the Mexican economy to US capital.

• The Zapatista movement is still alive and well, in the southern state of Chiapas, and has rescued an area the size of the Netherlands, with a population of half a million people, from timber exploitation, monoculture agriculture and cattle ranching, and introduced self-management and local governance.

• There’s a day-to-day struggle between capitalism and commons in the Global South. Neoliberal globalisation has made it difficult for nation-states to make the kinds of changes we’re talking about, but tens of thousands of local communities in the Global South insisting on protecting their cultural and economic heritage is giving a new breath of life to the commons.

• Another example in Mexico: a co-operative union called Tosepan, built around a credit union that funds their economic ventures, with 40,000 families participating, in the state of Puebla. Their land-use plan, validated by the government, prohibits mining and high-voltage electric lines, corporate supermarkets and foreign investment in commercial operations in their territory.

• Also Cheran, in Mexico, formed via an uprising started by 30 women in 2011 to stop logging and organised crime. They’ve since initiated self-governance and expelled political parties and the national police force!

• There’s an international consortium of thousands of communities, committed to the collective governance of their territories, in all continents, called Territories of Life, that restrict nation-state activities within their territories. This includes the Global North - for example Snowchange in Finland, protecting old-growth forest, waterways and peatland, and re-wilding. They’ve created an alliance of peoples within the Arctic Circle, in Siberia, Scandinavia, Greenland, Canada and Alaska, enabling their communities to provide a good quality of life and counteract environmental degradation. There’s a beautifully-illustrated, freely-downloadable book.

• Here are examples from the Global North in the journal, Ambio.

• See also David’s paper, Radical Ecological Economics, for more.

• In a nutshell: commons are thriving on a global scale, but the domination of neoliberal ideas is holding them back.

Transcript

Dave Darby: Today, I’m talking with David Barkin, distinguished professor of economics at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico. He collaborates with indigenous and peasant communities, many of which are developing new institutions trying to build a post-capitalist society. And he’s recognised for his theory of radical ecological economics. Hello, David.

David Barkin: What a pleasure to be with you on this international connection.

Dave Darby: And what is radical ecological economics?

David Barkin: Radical ecological economics is the result of our work with communities. It’s radical in the sense that ecological economics as a field was created in 1989, at a meeting, in Washington, DC. But it was invented by economists and some biologists who were interested in using their tools of economic analysis to understand what were the impacts of environmental change on the planet. The heritage of that was a number of extraordinarily important thinkers. One of them was Kenneth Boulding.

Kenneth Boulding was a professor of economics in his last years at the University of Colorado, and he wrote a very prescient article called The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth in which he said, if we think about Earth as a spaceship, and all of the world’s population were passengers in the spaceship, and everything that humanity had to survive was in the hold of the spaceship, then the question would be: how long would they last in space before everyone died off? And that was an extraordinarily important, influential article coming out at about the same time as the beautiful book called Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. That was, we could say, the roaring sixties. And then a Romanian by the name of Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen did another masterpiece. He was awarded the prize of the most promising young environmentalist economist in The United States at the time.

He was at Harvard, and he wrote a book about the second law of thermodynamics [The Entropy Law and the Economic Process]. And in his book, he was saying there’s no way we can get around the inevitable fact that there’s only so much energy in the world, and that to the extent that we’re using it, we’re degrading it so that it will no longer be available for the human species. And some of your listeners may know that a man by the name of [William D.] Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize in economics for his extraordinary – at the time – emphasis on the fact that global warming was a problem, but not an unmanageable problem using the tools of economics.

I was born in the United States, but by that time, I had lived forty years in Mexico. And, working with indigenous communities, I became quite convinced that the state – that is the government, public policy – would be unable to solve the environmental problems and that there was an extraordinary fountain of knowledge among the peoples of Mesoamerica to confront the problems. And in fact, they were actually going about living a different way of life saying, we’re not interested in capital accumulation. We’re not interested in the consumer economy. What we’re interested in is living our lives the way we’ve always done.

But very importantly, no one was to be left behind. That was extraordinarily important. What does that mean? That means that there are no children stuck in day care centres doing nothing, playing, but the children are actively involved in solving the community’s problems.

But the other part of that was that there are no old people who are sitting around in old people’s homes or in wheelchairs. They had a fountain of knowledge which the community valued and depended upon for their leadership and their wisdom. And so this approach was very important, and very firmly impressed upon me together with another thing, that society is part of nature. And that’s a really extraordinary thing - that we have to take care of all the other nonhuman species that are in the environment.

And the question is, to what extent can we take advantage of all of these resources in the economy, without damaging our own future lives. And so that’s what led me to ecological economics from below. And then we had to make it more understandable, so we called it radical ecological economics.

Dave Darby: I changed a traditional economist’s view on that once. He said that the biosphere was a subset of the global economy. I said, don’t be silly. It’s the other way around. I said, what would happen to the biosphere if the global economy was destroyed?

He said, nothing. It would probably get better. I said, what would happen to the global economy if the biosphere was destroyed? He said, oh, okay, yes.

David Barkin: Well, that’s a simpler way of phrasing it than the long description I just gave.

Dave Darby: And you contacted me about Marx’s views changing in later life. I’m writing a series of articles [Commons, not Communism] trying to persuade anti-capitalists that commons is a better route to post-capitalism than Marxism. But you opened my eyes to Marx’s later ideas, which sounded more like commons to me, rather than getting the working class to rise up and overthrow the state. So thank you very much for that.

David Barkin: Well, it was my pleasure to get in contact with you about that. But the extraordinary thing about it was that all of these insights by Marx were marginal notes in his notebooks of the readings that he was making of anthropologists in the late nineteenth century. Of course, he was slightly immobile in his lodgings in London at the time, But, it was extraordinary given the limited amount of anthropological work that was going on at that time that he acquired all of this knowledge and began to make two, I think, very important discoveries. He was asked very presciently, does the Russian peasantry have to destroy itself, or have to be destroyed, in order to move to a better society? And his letters at the beginning of the eighties were extraordinarily insightful in saying, well, perhaps the Russian peasants in their ‘mir’ could, actually, skip the stage of capitalism and go on to create a communal society in which they would be able to improve their standard of living, take care of the environment and point the way to a better future world.

That was an insight that was extraordinarily important. The other was his familiarity with what was going on in Ireland at the time. And, similarly, he was very impressed by the Irish capacity for communal organisation of their land holdings and their disdain for the Irish state. And then he got hold of all these anthropologists from what we now know as the Global South. But, let me say that one of the parts of the Global South is what is now know as North America. He was very impressed by an indigenous group that we call, in Anglo Saxon terms, Iroquois.

Yeah. But it was part of the Haudenosaunee (I’m pronouncing it badly) confederation in the Northeastern part of North America. And they had lived for centuries, if not millennia, taking care of their land and assuring a good quality of life with full participation, including women and men in the process of management. And then he came across, of course, the literature about Mesoamerica, and the Andes. And he began to write about that, and he said he had great hopes that these people with their communal traditions and their understanding of the need to take care of the land, would be able to create the basis for new society after capitalism.

Dave Darby: Yeah. I’ve read about the Iroquois Federation. It was David Graeber. I was amazed. It was really participatory democracy in action.

David Barkin: It’s very, very interesting. Jean Jacques Rousseau read about it in a travelogue of a French missionary who went to the northern part of the Iroquois confederation and described all of that. And, actually, the French missionary brought back to France one of the leaders of the confederation.

Dave Darby: I read about that. Oh my god. I would have loved to have been in that room.

David Barkin: And it’s really quite extraordinary. The indigenous person after being in Paris for a little while said, I don’t wanna stay here. This is an awful society. How can you have children begging in the streets and the dirt and the filth and the bad treatment of so many people? This is something we would not allow.

That’s in chapter two of the Graeber [& Wengrow] book, The Dawn of Everything.

Dave Darby: Yeah. I mean, I couldn’t believe that when I read it. I would have loved to have been in that meeting. So I want to show that revolutionary change doesn’t have to be centralised and that the Russian revolution could have produced a decentralised result, and the twentieth century could have been very different. And I’d like to know what you think about that.

I mean, attempts at decentralised, nonhierarchical, truly democratic organisation keep coming back throughout history, don’t they? And they don’t seem as though they’re gonna stop.

David Barkin: Well, I don’t think it’s a question of them keeping coming back. They’ve never left. I think that the important thing is that there are literally thousands of communities around the world on all the continents, including the Global North, of peoples who are organising themselves to respect their territories, and to make sure that their young and their old are not burdens on society. And they are doing so with a quality of life and a celebration of their relationship to the cosmos that is quite extraordinary.

We call this native tourism when people from the North go and visit an Amazonian community or you have a beautiful, colourful, indigenous celebration of life. One of the questions that led me to codify radical ecological economics was the fact that mainstream social sciences talk about many of these communities as subsistence communities. I would ask your listeners to think about it. What kind of subsistence community exists where you have a three or four day communal ceremony celebrating life and with everyone participating, and where there are no extraordinary inequalities within the community?

And they are continually attempting to make sure that people are able to have an improving quality of life. But I want to emphasise one thing about many of these communities that we’ve had contact with. These are not communities that are separated from the modern world. These are communities that are sending their young children to universities around the world. These are communities that are learning about the advances in science and technology, about the advances in medicine, and they are communities that are evaluating what part of this knowledge is valuable for their well-being and what part of this knowledge has to be discarded. And that’s extraordinary. If you think about it, not just here in Mexico, but it’s all over the the world.

Dave Darby: ‘Growing the Commons’, we are promoting commons projects, but mainly in the Global North. I’d like to talk to you about what’s happening in the Global South and how we might connect. And in Mexico specifically, I want to talk about the projects there, especially the Zapatistas and the Ejido movement and others. From what I read, Ejido is like a land commons, but the land is ultimately owned by the state. Is that right?

I mean, that’s a problem if the state changes its mind. I think in 1991, the government allowed Ejido land to be rented or sold, and stopped creating new Ejido land projects because Mexico wanted to be in NAFTA. Is that right?

David Barkin: It was in 1992, a constitutional amendment by a neoliberal regime. But the interesting thing is that more than half of the ejido land that could have been privatised has not been privatised. It’s held in commons. And while it is literally true that all the land is given in concessions to the ejidos and therefore, ultimately, property rests in the state, the fact is that the ejidos are in one way or another, self-governing groups of people.

A growing number of these communities are beginning to insist upon the collective management of their lands. This has become increasingly important because it doesn’t matter if you have land, if you don’t have access to water. And the collective organisation for the control of water rights is an area of great contention.

So there are a great many communities that are beginning to look for ways of reclaiming their control over the water rights that the Mexican constitution gives them, but have been privatised, by diverse nefarious mechanisms. I won’t go into the details of that. Sometimes they’re very violent, and corrupt.

Dave Darby: And the privatisation of ejido Lands, is that what caused the Zapatista uprising? Is that right?

David Barkin: No. The Zapatista uprising was a much more profound uprising than simply the privatisation of the ejido. The Zapatista uprising was in January 1994, which was when NAFTA, or the free trade area, went into effect. And they said, the underlying cause of the choice of that date was that NAFTA is a threat to our sovereignty, to our freedoms, and to our ability to live a good life. That was a prescient understanding of what would happen with NAFTA, because what free trade did was subject much of the Mexican economy to control by US capital and US political interests.

And, the Zapatista rebellion is still alive and well, thirty two years later.

Dave Darby: And how are they doing? And, what have they achieved?

David Barkin: Often we think of the Zapatistas as a group of men on horseback with their guns and being very militaristic. But the Zapatista movement is a group of people in the Southern state of Chiapas that encompasses a population of about half a million people.

We’re not talking about a small band of horseback riders. But also I want to emphasise that the area that they are controlling and the area they have rescued from cattle ranchers, from monoculture and from timber exploitation, is an area greater than the size of the Netherlands. So we’re not talking about a small movement that is socially and politically irrelevant. We’re talking about a movement that over the past thirty years has dramatically improved the life of half a million people, and, just as important, has brought women in as equal partners into the process of local development and local management, and has improved the health standards and the nutrition of the people.

So the Zapatista movement has extraordinarily enriched the lives of half a million people and led to a decentralised series of local governments throughout this territory that are self-managed and are insisting upon the strengthening of the commons.

Dave Darby: I mean, one of my main points is that the mainstream Marxist approach of workers seizing centralised power is not going to work in the Global North, and the commons approach is much better. I’d like your opinion on that. And is it different in the global South?

David Barkin: In the Global South, I think that the domination of neoliberal economic plans and the political domination of what’s called globalisation, has led to a limiting of the possibilities for nation-states to make the kinds of changes we’re talking about.

And one of the few nation-states that has tried to do that is Cuba - under attack for trying to insist upon improving the quality of life for all of its people. But the kind of commons that are being created by the thousands, tens of thousands of communities that are involved in resuscitating or strengthening their cultural, political, and economic heritage, is definitely giving a new breath of life to what you and your colleagues in the North are trying to do for reviving the commons. But I think that it’s very, very important to understand that these movements for building the commons in the South are not state-run. These are grassroots movements, and many of them can trace their roots back thousands of years.

You mentioned David Graeber and the chapter he wrote with David Wengrow on the Iroquois. But the important thing is that there are still many thousands of communities around the world that are practicing these traditions, and recuperating these knowledges and enriching them with the best of modern science and technology, to improve their quality of life and protect their territories.

Dave Darby: So community is very weak in the UK. You know, there are very few people walking in the street and talking with each other. All the front gardens are paved over. The little pubs and shops have closed. But community is much stronger in the Global South, isn’t it? And that’s a big factor in what’s possible, as regards commons, isn’t it?

David Barkin: Well, I hate to make these kinds of sweeping generalisations that you just made because large parts of the Global South, as you call it, are very much intertwined with the dynamics, the personalities, the politics, and the economics of individualisation which goes with the capitalist economy. In this moment, for example, in Latin America, there’s a struggle among those who are trying to impose the rule of capital, and those who are trying to strengthen the commons that they live in. And so that kind of struggle is a very, very real struggle which we live day to day.

And that struggle, of course, is being fed by large injections of money and politics from the Global North.

Dave Darby: Yeah. But are you saying that there is no more real community in the Global South than there is in the Global North?

David Barkin: No. I’m not saying that. I’m saying that there are lots of communities all over the Global South, and in parts of the Global North, that are strengthening and expanding community.

We just talked about the Zapatistas. But I’ll give you another example in Mexico. There’s a cooperative union, of people from three different ethnic groups that fifty years ago formed Tosepan, which brings together a quarter of a million people.

Dave Darby: Can you say that one again? Spell it.

David Barkin: Tosepan, t o s e p a n.

And during that fifty years, they have been effective in creating a credit union which finances all of their economic ventures in which they have 40,000 families participating. And they have developed a land-use plan for their area, which is extraordinary because it’s a very valuable and a very rich area.

Dave Darby: And which area is this?

David Barkin: It’s in the mountainous area in the north of the state of Puebla. And their land-use plan, which has now been validated by the government, prohibits mining, prohibits high voltage electric lines, prohibits the installation of supermarkets, prohibits the use of foreign investment for commercial operations in their territory. And the extraordinary thing about it is with all of these prohibitions, the people in that community will tell you that they’re living a good quality of life.

Dave Darby: And are these kind of projects replicable?

David Barkin: Not on that scale. A scale of a quarter of a million people, formally organised into cooperatives like that doesn’t seem like it’s gonna happen again in Mexico. But, and it’s extraordinary - they’re 50 years old, and they’ve just written a book, which is a life plan for the next forty years.

It’s being replicated, in different ways and on different scales throughout Mexico and around the world. And perhaps we should move now to a consortium of communities, that was created beginning thirty years ago but formalised in 2010, called Territories of Life. That consortium brings together thousands of communities in every continent, including parts of the Global North, and I can talk about that.

Dave Darby: Please do.

David Barkin: They are committed to the collective organisation of their territories. And that goes back to an ILO convention of 1989. I really want to stress that the notion of the commons and the development of these collective ways of managing is not something brand new that was invented ten years ago.

But the International Labor Organisation codified a convention. It required consent for any national government to engage in activities in indigenous territories.

Dave Darby: You said this consortium is called Territories of Life? And it’s an indigenous consortium?

David Barkin: Well, most of the members are indigenous, but many in Mexico, we would call mestizo communities. That is they are mixed-blood communities, because many indigenous people have interbred now with people of other descents. The important thing about that is that Territories of Life encompasses many, many people in the Global North.

I can give you an example of one very important group in Finland, which I just visited. The group is called Snowchange and is a cooperative. And over the past quarter of a century since they were formed, they have engaged in protecting old-growth forests and trying to rescue peatlands, which are one of the major forms of carbon sequestration that nature has developed. And they are rehabilitating the waterways, the lakes, and the fjords in their region so that they can have healthy fishing while assuring that fish populations are not endangered.

They’re also doing something extraordinary, which is called re-wilding. They are rebuilding the forest structures, of yore.

The important thing is not just the trees, but when you rebuild the forest, you rebuild all of the wildlife that is so important to our quality of life. And they also have activities to support the Sami population in the Arctic. They’ve created an alliance between all the people above the Arctic Circle. That is in Siberia, Finland, all the other Nordic countries, Greenland, Iceland, Canada, and Alaska.

And these groups of people are going about a very systematic program of re-enriching their territories, making them capable of a good quality of life and making a substantial contribution to counteract environmental degradation on a global scale.

Dave Darby: That’s really exciting. I have to look up these Territories of Life.

David Barkin: There’s a 350-page book, which is beautifully illustrated, 50 pages of footnotes, and on the Internet, which is freely downloadable in English and Spanish.

Dave Darby: Fantastic. Why didn’t I know about that?

David Barkin: Well, I mean, that’s part of the problem. If you accord these rights to the indigenous population, what you’re doing is reducing the ability of large corporations to continue their process of capital accumulation.

Dave Darby: What do you think are the main barriers to building commons in both the Global South and the Global North? And how might we overcome them? Is it always gonna be marginal, or can it actually challenge capitalism?

David Barkin: Well, I’m very optimistic in the sense that I think capitalism is on its deathbed. But perhaps that’s not what your audience wants to hear.

Dave Darby: I don’t know. It seems to be having a good attempt to commit suicide, doesn’t it, capitalism?

David Barkin: But it’s marginal in the sense that it’s not in Hollywood movies. Although I must admit that there have been a number of very, very good movies recently, celebrating people who are trying to do this in the Global North. I can think, for example, of Wes Jackson, there’s a wonderful movie called Prairie Prophecy. I recommend it to your people.

Celebrating the work of rebuilding the prairies in the Midwest of The United States by an agroecologist called Wes Jackson who has spent all of his life showing that the wildlife, the bison, the collective control of land and the use of it with agroecological techniques are extraordinarily valuable to improving the quality of life, of people who are capitalist farmers. And Prairie Prophecy is a movie that I would recommend to your people. Also, there’s an article in the journal Ambio, from 2025, called ‘Extent and Diversity of Recognized Indigenous and Community Lands, Cases from Northern And Western Europe’.

Dave Darby: Okay. I’ll look at that. But back to Mexico for a second. Do you have any links or sources of information for people to keep up to speed with the Zapatista and the Ejido and other movements in Mexico? And also, what might they be able to do if they would like to help in any way?

David Barkin: Okay. The links are very, very easy. If you just put Zapatista movement in your search, you’ll find lots and lots of material, on that. And they have their own site, which is very, very good because it’s available in 15 languages - all the declarations over the past thirty years of what they’re doing and what they’re trying to do.

But, also, a description of the kind of onslaught by organised crime against them because organised crime would, of course, like to use this territory for its own purposes. Tosepan is less well documented, but there’s another community called Cherán, which had an uprising in 2011. The uprising was instigated by 30 women, who stood in the middle of the road against a criminal logging group. And with their babies in their arms, they were able to stop the logging effort and catalysed the community into supporting and developing a collective effort to expel organised crime from their area.

But not only that, what happened also was that as a result of that, the community realised the extraordinary significance of their indigenous heritage. And in the fifteen years since then, they have installed self governance. They’ve expelled political parties. They’ve expelled the national police force. They have obligatory bilingual education, and they have four communal enterprises which provide some of the economic resources that they need for their own survival and well-being.

You can find lots of information in English. It’s much more than the Zapatista and Ejido in Mexico. There’s much more going on.

The article that I wrote that was the instigation for our conversations, called Radical Ecological Economics with open access on the Internet. You just put radical ecological economics, subtitle: a paradigm from the Global South.

Dave Darby: I’ll definitely put a link to that in the description as well as all the other things we’ve been talking about.

David Barkin: But the thing I want to stress is that, just in Mexico, hundreds of communities are involved in this kind of operation. Some of them with the support of government, and some of them in direct confrontation with the government. But throughout Latin America, you have examples of communities. I would venture to say that the only reason the Amazon still exists is because of the hundreds of communities that are still resisting the illegal gold mining, the petroleum exploitation, and the forest degradation as well as expansion of sorghum and soy production. So what can your audience do to find out more about this?

There’s a lot of references in my article, and Territories of Life has its own website. So the importance of this is really much more than I think many appreciate.

The commons in New Zealand are very, very important, and it’s a very important struggle in Australia too. I don’t know how much contact your movement has with what’s going on among indigenous peoples and indigenous rights in Australia and New Zealand?

Dave Darby: We don’t. So that’s why I’d like to build these kinds of relationships.

David Barkin: There’s a very good book, called The Commons in an Era of Uncertainty, published by the University of Toronto Press, by a man from Ghana. It’s a beautiful collection of essays.

The next time we talk, I’ll make sure our connection is better.

Dave Darby: Okay. And, if you’ll allow me, I’d love to tap into your wisdom and get some more information that we can broadcast on Growing the Commons.

David Barkin: Great. Bye bye.

Dave Darby: Thank you, David. Lovely speaking with you. Bye bye.

Each round-up brings together short updates from projects and organisations our members are involved in. For more information about the GtC collaboration and the people behind it, visit our About page. The first edition of the round-up can be found here.

Are you working on a commons project? We’d love to feature your work – get in touch to find out more.

Knowledge & dialogue

GtC Knowledge Commons

An open wiki-based initiative bringing together introductory guides, resources, and practical knowledge about the Commons, with topics curated by specialist contributors.

The knowledge base wiki is the second aspect of the broader Growing the Commons knowledge commons that we’re building – and much has happened in the last few weeks.

Following the completion of the large-scale transfer of materials from LowImpact, we set out restructuring and regrouping topics in ways that make the knowledge base easier to navigate, maintain, and expand over time. We have now reached the point where we can begin inviting people to share in the ongoing curation of this shared knowledge. That means not only keeping materials accurate and up to date, but also gradually expanding into new areas.

Of course, we need people with deep knowledge of the many commons-related subjects already featured. But if this is going to become genuinely useful to a broad range of people, we also need contributors with skills in teaching, journalism, editing and communication – people able to help translate complex material into forms that are actually digestible. And, naturally, we also need at least a few people capable of managing the more technical side of things: formatting, structure, templates, and maintaining the wiki itself.

It’s rare to have all three sets of skills in one person, so we are imagining small collaborative teams forming around topics and areas of interest, with people contributing in different ways and all benefiting from each other’s abilities.

We have already tried out introducing a few new people to our wiki, and this is proving not to be impossible! We look forward to more volunteers with these skills, perhaps younger people who would benefit from being directly in touch with experts or specialists in their own fields. We now have a working set of guidance material and templates to help people get involved. If you are onboarded as a curator, you will have your own public page on the wiki to help publicise your work, spaces to discuss and comment on the pages you steward, and opportunities to collaboratively hone new questions to guide the advance of our commoned knowledge.

Credit Commons Society

Formed during the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, the Credit Commons Society hosts a regular online gathering for practitioners, researchers and organisers interested in collaborative finance and the development of the Credit Commons – a global network of decentralised “moneyless” trading groups built on a shared open protocol.

The Credit Commons Society has had a quieter period over the past two months, with no recent online gatherings taking place. During this pause, we took the opportunity to begin publishing recordings and transcripts from previous conversations here on the Growing the Commons Substack.

Recently published sessions include conversations with Dil Green on commoning in practice, Matthew Slater on the Credit Commons Protocol, and Michel Rauchs on the Commons between markets and states.

Festival of Commoning

An annual gathering in Stroud, Gloucestershire that celebrates and connects the people acting together to build commons of all kinds – bringing together thinkers, practitioners, and communities from across the UK and beyond.

Preparations are well underway for the third annual Festival of Commoning, which will take place across Stroud on Friday 2 and Saturday 3 October 2026.

This year’s theme is Common Ground: Healing Divides. We will celebrate stories from people and projects who use commoning practices to foster belonging, mutual care, resilience, and shared power in the face of growing societal division, polarisation, inequality, isolation and exclusion. This year, alongside the usual talks and workshops, we’re creating more spaces for participants to connect with each other, learn new collaborative skills, and experience commoning projects already making an impact in and around Stroud.

The festival is organised by a group of volunteers local to Stroud, while also drawing on relationships and participation from the wider global commoning movement. It is a festival for doers, organisers, and people who want to common.

The new website has recently gone live, with the line-up confirmed and tickets now available. In the spirit of commoning, tickets are being offered on a sliding scale to help make the festival accessible to as many people as possible. This includes supported tickets, standard tickets, and “pay-it-forward” tickets that help subsidise places for others. A limited number of free tickets are also available for people who would otherwise be unable to attend.

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Commons infrastructure

Commons Lab

A new research lab dedicated to building enabling infrastructure for thriving commons – developing open design frameworks, field-tested models, and practical learning resources to help communities create and sustain viable commons projects of their own.

Earlier this week we launched the first fuller version of our website after spending the last two months operating with little more than a placeholder page. It is still early, but the site now brings together a clearer picture of our mission, programme areas, and overall approach, including some initial material introducing the Commons for people less familiar with it – covering, among other things, its history, manifestations, and common myths. If you have a moment to look through it, we’d genuinely welcome any thoughts or feedback.

On the funding side, both of our recent grant applications were unfortunately unsuccessful. The feedback was thoughtful and broadly consistent: reviewers found the ideas “innovative”, “genuinely different”, and overall “compelling”, but felt Commons Lab itself is still too early-stage as an organisation for support at this point. This is of course not the outcome we were hoping for, but going through the process was a useful exercise that helped clarify where the project currently stands and what still needs to mature. In response, we are now exploring more lightweight ways to bring in some support – mainly to help cover a portion of the time and costs that are currently entirely voluntary.

The main focus is now turning towards the core of the work itself, particularly formalising the Integrated Commons Toolkit – the underlying design framework behind our sector models – and developing the first practical playbook based on the experience of the Stroud Climbing Commons (see below for updates). We’ll share more as this develops, but if you’re curious to learn more, we’d be glad to hear from you.

Local Loop Merseyside

The UK’s first member-owned credit clearing club for local businesses, helping small and medium enterprises across the Liverpool city region solve cash flow problems, get paid on time, and build local trade.

It has been a fairly tumultuous period for Local Loop Merseyside and Mutual Credit Services since the last update – though fortunately with good outcomes.

We come out of this period having formally launched Local Loop in Merseyside, with a great cohort of founding member businesses, and with a team that is increasingly firing on all cylinders and working as a unit. It is, admittedly, a much smaller team than last year: we will soon be down to about five full-time equivalent people, compared to ten or eleven some time ago.

But we have secured some more funding, which enables us to double down on improving the user experience for businesses who share their invoice data with us before the network reaches the scale required to do proper clearing. That funding also now allows us to take on a real local business growth-driver person – yes, that terrible word, growth. But, honestly, the Commons will have to grow at a faster rate if it is to have any impact – growth of the commons sector at the expense of the capitalist economy, not growth in terms of GDP, which it should effectively reduce.

Another development during this period is genuinely exciting, but also comes with a tinge of unease, just like the word growth. We have been engaging much more seriously with AI-assisted development tools to multiply our capacities and significantly expand what we are able to build. However, we try to remain honest about the compromises involved: there are, of course, huge energy and social costs that make this possible, and we are determined over the next year to have our own local AI models running on our own hardware, rather than being beholden to the rapidly escalating AI arms race driven by large commercial providers. No one gets out of here without compromising.

Open Food Network

A global open-source platform that connects farmers, growers and community food enterprises – enabling them to sell directly to their communities and build a fairer, more resilient food system from the bottom up.

Over the past few months, Open Food Network has been developing and piloting Power of Food, a social cohesion project exploring how food-based activities can help bring people together across social, cultural, and political differences.

This work builds on something we’ve repeatedly seen over years of supporting local food networks: that growing, cultivating, harvesting, cooking, and eating together create forms of connection that often outlast political disagreement. The current project is an attempt to better understand, document, and share those practices so they can be taken up and adapted by other communities.

The next phase will involve learning from projects already bringing people together around food, experimenting with storytelling and arts-based facilitation approaches, and creating spaces where people can share experiences connected to food, place, identity, and belonging. We’re particularly interested in how food can help address loneliness, isolation, fear of the future, and wider social fragmentation in ways that feel grounded and practical.

We are now looking for rollout funding to expand the project further and make the learning openly accessible so other communities can build on it themselves. At the heart of the project is a simple belief that has only become stronger through the pilot process: that people who eat together can live together.

If you want to learn more about how to get involved and support the project, please reach out here.

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Place & community

Stroud Climbing Commons

A community-owned climbing gym built on the principle that access to climbing should not be determined by ability to pay, and that the people who use it should own and govern it together.

The long wait is over – after several years of planning, fundraising, design work, and construction, the Climbing Commons has finally begun opening its doors.

It’s still slightly surreal seeing people come through the space, especially remembering where we started: an empty industrial shell at Brimscombe Mill and a fairly wild idea about community-owned climbing. Since then, thousands of volunteer hours have gone into turning the project into a functioning community bouldering facility based on the principle that climbing should be accessible, affordable, and safe for everyone.

We’re now beginning a phased opening while we test systems, gradually expand sessions and opening hours, and work out the inevitable practical issues that only really emerge once people start using the space. Founding members and early crowdfunder supporters are first through the door before we open more widely to the public over the coming weeks and months.

Like many commons projects, Climbing Commons is still a member-led organisation run on the goodwill of a small group of volunteers, which creates real limitations around staffing and opening hours. We do want to transition to paying staff soon, but have designed the model so that we can gradually build operational capacity and observe what is financially viable before committing to hiring. At the same time, we’re starting the longer transition towards social commons governance and inviting more people to get involved in stewarding and helping run the space itself.

Alongside climbing itself, we also hope the facility becomes something broader than just a climbing wall – somewhere people can spend time together, organise activities, and build community around the space. With summer approaching, we’re looking forward to finally celebrating properly after the long build process. The opening party will take place on Friday 5 June with a BBQ and music at The Long Table – we hope to see some of you there!

Stroud Housing Commons

A community housing project in Stroud that brings residential properties into permanent common ownership, offering secure and affordable tenancies under a novel multi-stakeholder partnership structure designed to create material interdependence between tenants, investors, and stewards.

We’ve had quite a number of interesting developments since the last update, ranging from the everyday practicalities of stewarding a shared house through to the early exploration of a financial model that could unlock pension money for community housing.

At the most immediate level, our first tenant has now begun taking over the administrative side of stewarding the house itself. This further reduces the effective cash rent paid by tenants while also significantly improving the quality of bookkeeping and record-keeping we have been able to maintain so far. This marks an encouraging step as the commons begins to function more and more as a normal, everyday reality.

There is also an increasing feeling that several more houses may be on their way into the commons in Stroud over the next year or so. Some of that will be on the basis of Stroud Housing Commons (SHC) becoming incorporated as a company limited by guarantee with a bespoke multi-stakeholder membership constitution – which might even be something of a world first. This summer, the title deeds of the first house are expected to be formally transferred to the SHC in return for rent vouchers, which will be a notable stage in our evolution from informal stewardship arrangements towards fully established legal ownership by the commons itself.

Part of what we are trying to explore through this process is how organisations with large ambitions but small means and initially rather simple conditions can gradually evolve over time: beginning with a constitution that embodies the minimum viable governance structures appropriate to their current situation, while consciously building in the requirement for members to develop more sophisticated forms as responsibilities and ambitions grow.

Alongside these practical and organisational developments, some really exciting work has also started to emerge around financing. Working with collaborators connected to the worlds of pensions and actuarial mathematics, we have begun exploring whether a modified form of a historical type of mutual pension – a tontine – could be adapted to channel pension money out of big institutions and back into the places where people actually live, helping fund permanently affordable housing held in community ownership.

The proposal remains at an early stage, but the underlying ambition is substantial: finding ways for savings and pensions to provide pensioners with reasonable annuities while simultaneously supporting decent homes on decent terms, strengthening local stewardship, and reducing the scale of mortgage financing that drives up asset prices and pushes housing further out of reach for many people. In collaboration with the Institute of Actuarial Mathematics at Liverpool University, we are now hopeful of having two students undertake three-month special research projects on the mathematical modelling of mutual tontine pension funds to help buy houses into the commons.

Tiny House Project

An initiative in Stroud exploring how tiny houses – small, self-contained, ecological homes – on community land could provide secure and affordable housing for food growers.

The Tiny House Commons is a project born from the urgent need to address the interlocking crises of housing affordability and fair livelihoods for local regenerative growers. The project has taken a significant step from blueprint towards reality with the formal submission of our pre-application proposal to Stroud District Council.

The proposal centres on installing two pilot Tiny House modules at Good Small Farms in Stroud, a thriving regenerative farm producing market garden crops, raising pasture-fed livestock, and developing agroforestry systems. The homes, each approximately 8.0m x 3.2m with <45m² internal floor area, are designed to be movable and low-impact, using ground screws instead of permanent concrete foundations. The longer-term goal is to stabilise the grower workforce, enabling farms to pay fair wages, scale regenerative land management, and strengthen local food security, all while providing low-cost, high-quality homes for growers, new entrants to agriculture, or trainee landworkers.

At this stage, we are primarily seeking clear guidance from the council on the most appropriate planning route, with the hope that this pilot can serve as a viable case study for future scaling across the district. In the ideal case, we would not just secure approval for these first homes, but also a clear and supportive framework from the council that could give future Tiny House projects greater confidence and legitimacy as the model evolves – potentially even influencing local policy development to recognise the value of this approach.

Assuming the process moves forward positively, the next phase will involve more detailed co-design work with growers themselves to better understand their practical needs and how the spaces can be optimised to support the realities of living and working on the land. In parallel, we will also initiate conversations with local businesses and builders around sourcing materials regionally wherever possible, supporting the Stroud circular economy and cutting embodied carbon emissions associated with transport and construction.

Behind the scenes, we’re beginning to prepare for the launch of a dedicated website, broader public outreach via social media, and eventually a crowdfunding campaign built around Rent-Credit Obligations (RCOs), a community-backed voucher model intended to help keep the homes affordable over the long term while offering an ethical investment with fair returns to aligned funders.

There is a growing sense of excitement and confidence within the team: we’ve laid the foundations, assembled the right people, and have gained crucial lessons from successfully raising funds for and developing the Climbing Commons bouldering facility.

Bristol Commons

A city-wide initiative of individuals, organisations, and community groups seeking to build a culture of commoning and support broader community ownership and governance across Bristol.

The Bristol Commons is currently gearing up for activities that will support bringing the former Bethesda Sunday School building on Church Road, known as the “Spark Space”, into community ownership: a Community Share Offer aiming to raise £250,000, alongside a fundraising campaign for a further £150,000. You can learn more about it here.

On 28 March, we held an Open Day in the new space with food, drinks, and entertainment (including a bring-your-own-baby choir), where people from the local community could learn more about how the share offer will work. It was well attended, the atmosphere was great, and people were eager to learn more about the project and offer. A second Open Day is now planned for 6 June.

Meanwhile, a small editorial team is preparing the first edition of our new magazine, due to launch in July as part of the Bristol Commons website. The idea is for it to be more than simply a reporting platform: we hope it can also help build relationships across the wider community, with local people contributing directly to it over time. In that sense, we hope it can become something like an “organ for collective sensing, meaning-making and inter-group coordination”.

Thank you for reading this edition of the commons round-up. If any of these projects resonate with you, we encourage you to explore their work further, follow their progress, and share the article with others who may be interested.

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This is one of a series of 24 articles that I hope to compile into a book – working title, The Commoners’ Manifesto: Neither Capitalism nor Communism. Here’s an introduction to the series. Comments welcome, including disagreement and debate.

In the previous article I looked at the problems with communism, from a commons perspective, including historical materialism, seizing the state, growth and progress and the working class as the vehicle for change, whilst recognising that Marx sounded much more like a commoner in his later years.

In this article I want to argue that a decentralised, commons world isn’t pie in the sky, and actually, the world could have easily moved in that direction in the 20^th century, rather than in a centralised, statist, world wars / cold war direction. Here are the main points I’ll cover:

1. Bakunin and other anarchists challenged Marx’s ideas well before the Russian Revolution, and could have become dominant in the workers’ movement.

2. Anarchism and community-based initiatives were strong in Russia and Ukraine in 1917.

3. Between the February and October revolutions, workers took control of the factories, peasants the land, and community and workplace assemblies had a lot of power.

4. After the October Revolution, Bolsheviks crushed these decentralised movements.

5. But it was really close, and it could all have been very different. We could have taken a profoundly decentralised direction in the 20^th century.

Bakunin and the Internationals

The ‘Internationals’ were four separate workers’ organisations at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th centuries, aiming to bring labour movements together globally in the same way that capitalism was internationalising.

• The First International, 1864-1876, aka The International Working Men’s Association. This was the stage for the Marx vs Bakunin split (centralised socialism vs anarchism) that caused its collapse.

• The Second International, 1889-1916, a federation of socialist and labour parties that broke apart during WW1 as, when push came to shove, nationalist sentiments trumped global solidarity.

• The Third International, 1919-43, The Communist International (Comintern), started by Lenin to promote Russian-style communist revolution.

• The Fourth International, 1938-present, started by Trotsky to oppose Stalin, only exists in fragments today.

I want to focus on the clash between Marx and Bakunin, which became the defining split in the First International, and finally tore it apart as Bakunin and his followers were expelled. We’ve talked a lot about Marx already. Let’s look at Bakunin, his arguments for anarchism and against Marxism, and whether he was right. Here’s an overview of the split, by a biographer of Marx, if you’re interested in the details, and below is my short summary.

Bakunin and Marx had an on-off relationship for 30 years, and respected each other. Although Bakunin described Marx as authoritarian, he also translated the Communist Manifesto into Russian. Their feud may or may not have been largely personal, but their attitudes to the state were very different. Bakunin saw the state not as a tool to be used, but a problem to be abolished. He argued for independent local communities, federated to get to scale, rather than a central state, which will always be captured by the most powerful groups in society, and used to maintain their power. He didn’t believe that workers could run the state, even temporarily, because if ‘workers’ get into positions of power (which isn’t likely), they stop working. And he certainly didn’t believe that the state would eventually ‘wither away’.

He believed that any authority should be temporary and voluntary. So for example, if a group of people found themselves on a boat in rough weather, and only one of them was an experienced sailor, they might decide to give authority to that person until they got safely to land again.

By many accounts, Bakunin wasn’t the nicest of people (and neither was Marx), but this isn’t about personalities, it’s about his predictions about what would happen if communists seize the state, which seem to me to have been correct. He said that the version of socialism proposed by Marx would mean that power is not transferred to the people but to the leaders of the communist party (Bakunin called them the ‘red bourgeoisie’).

He summarises his position nicely (in Statism and Anarchy, 1873): ‘The people will not be happier if the stick with which they are beaten is called ‘the people’s stick’’.

He was in favour of bringing together more aware people to ‘incite the latent instincts of the masses’. The internet makes it easier to bring aware people together, and I hope (and believe) that the latent instincts of the masses are towards commons, rather than centralised power.

Bakunin and the anarchists could have ‘won’ in the First International, which expanded quickly across Europe, but was hindered by language barriers, distances, slow communication and different legal restrictions in each country. So federal councils emerged to co-ordinate propaganda, organise congresses, manage membership disputes locally and translate and circulate resolutions.

The Basel congress in 1869 was the last really representative congress, before events in Europe (the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the Paris Commune of 1871 and its aftermath) made full congresses impossible. At that congress, according to Eugène Varlin, one of the International’s outstanding militants (who played a major role in the Paris Commune, and was executed for it), the position adopted almost unanimously by the delegates was collectivism, or non-authoritarian communism.

By the early 1870s, the movement was growing fastest in Spain, French-speaking Switzerland, Italy and Belgium, and in those places, a decentralised / federated approach dominated. The General Council in London and key northern European trade-union and socialist networks remained Marxist-controlled, but the balance of social and geographical strength within the International was shifting towards decentralised, anti-authoritarian socialism.

In Letters to a Frenchman on the Present Crisis (1870). Bakunin urged peasants to ‘take the land and throw out those landlords who live by the labour of others’ and to destroy state institutions through direct action, spreading ‘anarchy through the countryside’ (paraphrased from his 1870 writings). That’s exactly what did happen between the February and October revolutions of 1917 (see below), although of course it wasn’t because the peasants had read Bakunin!

A key event was the Paris Commune in 1871, just one year before the Bakuninists were expelled. It was claimed by both sides – as an example of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and of ‘anarchism in action’. Capitalists and their media blamed the International for the Commune, and indeed there were many International members involved. Marx wrote an address from the General Council praising the Commune. Bakunin claimed the commune had overthrown Marx’s ideas and accused him of hypocrisy.

The International’s support of the Commune made them enemies of all the governments of Europe and the bourgeois press. Although state repression usually hits centralised structures first, because there are identifiable leaders, physical headquarters etc., and local cells are harder to find and eliminate, it still caused problems for the anarchists because long-distance communication became harder and co-ordination costs rose faster than decentralisation capacity. The General Council was located in London, outside the main zones of repression, and so overall, anarchists were hurt more than Marxists.

After the Commune was defeated, Bakunin celebrated the fact that it had raised workers’ hopes of real change, outside of the state. Marx came to a different conclusion: for him, the defeat demonstrated the necessity for working-class political parties whose purpose would be the ‘conquest of political power’. Marx and Engels manipulated the composition of the Hague Congress in 1872 to ensure a majority that would affirm the London Conference resolution on political action, expel Bakunin and his associates and transfer the General Council to New York to prevent European anti-authoritarians from challenging their control.

Bakunin was accused of various skullduggeries including setting up secret alliances. But even Mehring (a Marxist), in Karl Marx: His Life, said that there was no evidence, and that Bakunin was trustworthy.

Bakunin and his followers formed their own decentralised movement (the St. Imier International), but both groups dissolved soon after. Anarchists weren’t allowed in the Second International.

None of this was inevitable. The outcome of the Hague Congress in 1872 didn’t reflect a clear ideological majority, but rather the ability of the Marxist leadership to leverage the International’s centralised institutional structure to discipline and expel its rivals. This approach wasn’t available to the anarchists, because of ideological opposition to centralised structures!

Anarchists weren’t fringe – they were a rival pole. Bakunin’s position was approved by the 1869 congress, was gaining ground across key regions of the International, and might have become the dominant tendency, but the institutional structure of the International - and the anarchists’ own anti-centralist principles – made it extremely difficult for them to convert that momentum into organisational control, as did events and the responses to them. In even slightly different circumstances, the main current of anti-capitalism by the time of the Russian Revolution might well have been decentralised / anarchist.

While an anarchist International would not have guaranteed an anarchist Russian Revolution, it could plausibly have shifted the balance of strategic and institutional resources away from highly centralised party models and thereby opened a broader range of revolutionary outcomes in 1917.

I’m not saying any of this was likely – just possible. A decentralised / commons world is no less likely than the communist revolutions of the 20^th century. It depends on events, the right people at the right place and time, hard work, and some luck.

Today, with the internet, it’s not so difficult to maintain national federations speaking different languages. The decentralised approach is much more achievable today, and local and national federations can speak to each other without going through a central hub. It’s still easy to imagine state crackdowns on anti-capitalist organisation, but today, centralised control would be a disadvantage, as it’s easier to shut down.

Anarchism and commons

Let’s look at the A-word. To many (probably most) it denotes chaos - and those in power have benefited from that. But it means the exact opposite. I’ll cover this more in a later article, but anarchism means decentralising power through negotiation and highly-ordered, non-hierarchical organisation, with decision-making covering larger geographical areas via confederation.

Bakunin didn’t help, by writing (in The Reaction in Germany), that ‘the passion for destruction is at the same time a creative passion’. While it is often cited by anarchists as a guide to action, Bakunin wasn’t outlining tactics or gesturing towards violence; he was writing as a Hegelian, not an anarchist. In Hegelianism, ‘destruction’ means the negation of an existing order as part of the process by which a new one comes into being - not chaos for its own sake.

Controversial I know, but I’d argue that ultimately, there are just 4 system-based philosophies: capitalism (ranging from neoliberalism to social democracy), communism, anarchism and fascism. Various lenses straddle those philosophies, like feminism or environmentalism. There are feminist capitalists and communists, and environmentalist anarchists and fascists (the Nazis were environmentalists).

Anarchism is a state of mind – a belief that people are basically good, but that power corrupts. People practice it all the time - in families, among friends, in clubs, informal and even formal gatherings or work. But there’s so much anarchist literature, often contradictory, and split into so many different threads (there wasn’t a central figure like Marx) that it needs some thinking about. There are lots of ways to do it, not one rigid ideology / set of rules. I identify 3 main threads though:

• Mutualist anarchism (follows Proudhon): gradualist rather than revolutionary; distribution via markets, but no bosses, landlords or shareholders - no making money from anybody else’s work or from usury. Private property is fine as long as you live in it (housing) or use it for your work (workshops / land).

• Collectivist anarchism (Bakunin): requires revolution; involves collectivisation of the means of production (land, industry, buildings, machinery); distribution is planned socially rather than through exchange.

• Communist anarchism (Kropotkin): revolution; people take what they need from communal stores; from each according to ability, to each according to need.

Here’s an infographic (not mine – I stole it from somewhere years ago) on the differences between strands of anarchism (leaves out collectivist anarchism, harsh on anarcho-primitivism but spot on about ‘anarcho-capitalism’):

If you want to go deeper, An Anarchist FAQ is a huge resource.

Commons is, I believe, a flavour (or building block) of anarchism – the mutualist flavour, to be specific. That doesn’t mean that it can’t evolve into something else (that doesn’t involve markets for example), but I can imagine it growing, in the cracks in capitalism, whereas I don’t see a viable route to the other two from where we are.

Anyone interested in commons is unlikely to be neoliberal or fascist, so arguing against them would just waste time. I’ve already argued against the communist approach from a commons perspective, and in future articles I’ll argue that the centre-left / social democrat approach is capitalism with (some) rough edges removed, and it won’t challenge corporations or deliver the scale of change we need.

Communist writers dismiss anarchism. For example, here: ‘Anarchism is appealing to many young people due to its simplicity: to reject anything and everything to do with the status quo. But upon deeper examination, there is a pervasive lack of real substance and depth of analysis in these ideas. Above all, there is very little in the way of an actually viable solution to the crisis of capitalism.’ (the rest of the article continues to patronise, and to demonstrate that he doesn’t understand anarchism).

Those not familiar with anarchist ideas see that anarchists and right-libertarians oppose the state, and often conflate them. Actually, the words libertarian and anarchist were virtually synonymous in the 19^th century. The right captured the word libertarian after WW2, some calling it anarcho-capitalism (an oxymoron if there ever was one), but some anarchists use the term left libertarian to describe themselves (although I’d prefer to drop left and right labels altogether, and just use the term anarchism. We’ll go into this more in the ‘decentralisation’ article, later, but the big difference between anarchists and (right) libertarians is their attitude towards capitalism. Libertarianism is nowadays a cover for vested interests, who want less regulation of their own industry. They want a small state until they squeal to be bailed out when they’re in trouble. Right libertarians denounce the state and champion capitalism. But capitalism can’t exist without the state, so right libertarianism is an oxymoron. Anarchists denounce the state and capitalists, as partners in centralising power.

And libertarians view society as consisting of nuclear families, individuals and businesses. They don’t include co-operation or commoning. Anarchists do.

But who needs -isms? We can just build commons. If you want to study anarchist theory as well, great. But it’s not necessary in the way that Marxist theory is necessary to understand and apply Marx’s ideas. Anarchism has been largely theoretical for a long time, at least in the West. Rojava is an exceptional example further east, but threatened now by developments in West Asia.

Decentralisation of power in 1917

Events in Russia in 1917 shaped the 20^th century, led to millions of deaths, untold suffering, and cold and hot wars. It could have been very different.

First, a bit of history. Serfdom didn’t end in Russia until 1861. Serfs were then legally free, but land was still owned by the nobility. Serfs were given allotment land that they had to reimburse the nobility for. The growing season in Russia is very short, and peasants couldn’t generate the surplus to pay the debt.

There was a revolution in 1905 – peasants rose up, burned many nobles’ manor houses and took the land under the ownership of the mir (village commune).

By 1917, WW1 was causing food shortages and breakdown in the Tsarist system. Anarchist ideas were spreading, especially in Ukraine, where Nestor Makhno was active in underground revolutionary circles that eventually developed into a large peasant-based insurgent movement that established zones of anarchist self-organisation. Anarchists played a part in the revolution, and in some regions helped defeat the ‘Whites’ (counter-revolutionary forces, including Tsarists).

There were actually two revolutions in 1917 – in February and in October. The February Revolution was a popular uprising that removed the Tsar, but the October Revolution was a Bolshevik military coup. Isaiah Berlin witnessed both of them. For him, the dominant feeling in the first was excitement, and in the second, fear (Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life and Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers).

From a commons perspective, there were some very interesting developments between the revolutions of 1917. Peasants seized and redistributed land among themselves, and workers formed factory committees to run industries. This was a massive, decentralized social revolution from below. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s The Russian Revolution (1982) gives a good overview.

Many soviets appeared – locally elected councils, or ‘citizens’ assemblies’ (in towns, workplaces and army barracks), in parallel with but not controlled by national government. First formed in the 1905 revolution, soviets were crushed by the state, but re-emerged in February, 1917. Co-ops also expanded rapidly.

It seemed that actual workers had a different conception of ‘worker control’ from that of the Bolsheviks. Maurice Brinton (The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, 1917 to 1921) gives a detailed chronology of the development of popular structures in Russia after the February Revolution, then describes the Bolsheviks’ steps to undermine and destroy them after they gained power in the October Revolution (see below).

He said that by September there were national conferences of factory committees (All-Russian Factory Committee Congresses) that managed production in those factories. It was all looking very commons-like.

Bolsheviks re-centralise power

The Bolsheviks, especially Lenin, didn’t want a decentralized system. They believed in a vanguard party that would seize state power and use it to guide society towards communism (Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, 1902). They saw worker control as ‘syndicalist nonsense’ and peasant landholding as backward. They were disciplined, organized, and utterly ruthless in their pursuit of a monolithic state.

They gained influence in the soviets, especially the big ones in St Petersburg and Moscow. Lenin argued for direct seizure of power. Trotsky co-ordinated military forces loyal to the Bolsheviks, who easily took the Winter Palace (the imperial residence of the tsars, which was then housing the provisional government – the post-tsarist administration). There was an election immediately afterwards, which the Bolsheviks lost (but they dissolved the assembly and took power anyway).

But Peasants, workers and soldiers didn’t want centralised power, so the Bolsheviks indulged them at first, and got them onside by talking about how they’d got rid of the fur coats, fancy restaurants and mansions of the rich. This neutralised attempts by other groups (and there were many) to take centralised power off them. They crushed the independent factory committees, replacing them with state-appointed managers, forcibly requisitioned grain from peasants, leading to famine, and suppressed anarchist groups in Moscow, St Petersburg and Ukraine.

Emma Goldman, who lived in the Soviet Union for 2 years following the October Revolution, said (in My Disillusionment in Russia): ‘As soon as the Communist Party felt itself sufficiently strong in the government saddle, it began to limit the scope of popular activity. All independent organizations... were either subordinated to the needs of the new state or destroyed altogether, as were the soviets, the trade unions and the co-operatives – three great factors for the realization of the hopes of the Revolution.’

Maurice Brinton, in The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, 1917 to 1921, said that even before the October Revolution, Bolsheviks had started infiltrating factory committees with a view to making them subservient to the party. After gaining power, they started to dismantle the factory committee system.

Civil war followed (1918-21), which allowed the Bolsheviks to consolidate power using emergency wartime measures, expansion of the Red Army and secret police, and state terror.

‘Soviet Union’ implies a network of nested citizens’ assemblies, from neighbourhoods up to the national level. The Bolsheviks destroyed that idea, and enforced centralised control via the Communist Party. Soviets weren’t allowed any decision-making powers – only rubber-stamping the state’s decisions.

Sheila Fitzpatrick (in The Russian Revolution) noted similarities between communist collectivisation of land / rapid industrialisation in Russia and earlier enclosures and capitalist industrialisation in the West – both pushed peasant farmers off their land and into cities / factories.

Communists often denounce Stalin, but the Soviet Union was authoritarian well before Stalin became uncontested leader in 1928.

But it was really close

It really wasn’t inevitable that the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution, or that they managed to keep it afterwards. They did it by the skin of their teeth. They never had majority support, couldn’t get elected nationally, and almost collapsed several times. They got power via a coup – that could easily have failed. They then held an election, lost heavily, and had to send in the Red Guards to close down the assembly.

Several factors helped the Bolsheviks. The provisional government was weak – after the February Revolution, authority was split between the government and the St Petersburg Soviet. The Soviet had real influence over workers and, crucially, soldiers. This ‘dual power’ meant the government couldn’t reliably enforce its decisions – orders could be ignored if the Soviet disagreed.

Led initially by figures like Alexander Kerensky (later prime minister), the government chose to continue fighting in World War 1. That was deeply unpopular: the army was exhausted, desertion was rising, and civilians faced shortages. Every failed offensive further destroyed its credibility.

Peasants wanted land redistribution immediately. The government delayed it, but peasants just started seizing land anyway – undermining the government’s authority in the countryside.

It was an interim body, not elected. It kept postponing elections, which made it look illegitimate – especially when more radical groups like the Bolsheviks were offering immediate solutions.

It mishandled crises – notably the ‘Kornilov Affair’. In August 1917, General Lavr Kornilov appeared to move troops toward St Petersburg, to impose order. Kerensky panicked and armed workers (including Bolsheviks) to defend the capital. This backfired: it strengthened the Bolsheviks while making the government look weak and unreliable. The government ended up alienating almost everyone. Liberals thought it was too weak, conservatives thought it had lost control, workers wanted more radical change, peasants wanted land, soldiers wanted peace. It was trying to fight a war, build a democracy, and contain a social revolution simultaneously, without real authority over the army or the streets. That made it fragile, and the Bolsheviks were able to exploit that fragility. They managed to get a large section of sailors and soldiers on board, with promises of ‘all power to the soviets’, gaining support for expectations that never materialised.

Workers and peasants could have maintained their control over industry and agriculture if factions within the Bolshevik movement (libertarian Marxists and others) had gained more power, and if there’d been a more unified anti-Bolshevik front (involving anarchist, Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionaries), that could have still won the civil war. None of this was impossible.

And finally, the Kronstadt Rebellion could have succeeded (soldiers and sailors rose up with the slogan: ‘soviets without Bolsheviks’), although it wouldn’t have been necessary if the Bolsheviks had failed in 1917.

The point I’m trying to make is that there was a big slice of luck involved in the Bolshevik victory, in very slightly different circumstances, they could have lost, and that those different circumstances weren’t at all outlandish.

Some historians, such as Orlando Figes (A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924) and Richard Pipes (The Russian Revolution), argue that the outcome of 1917 was highly contingent and that the Bolshevik seizure of power wasn’t inevitable. Democratic alternatives existed, including soviet-based or decentralised systems. Noam Chomsky also emphasised the suppression of more libertarian socialist possibilities in the revolutionary period.

The 20^th century could have been very different

Many Western leftists disbelieved or downplayed atrocities being carried out in the Soviet Union. George Bernard Shaw visited Russia in 1931, met Stalin and came back praising him. The position of many anti-capitalists was, more-or-less: ‘Wow, the Bolsheviks have pulled off a revolution! They may be a little authoritarian, but… they’ve pulled off a revolution!!!’ Revolutionaries all over the world were impressed. Anarchism declined, into a sideshow.

But just imagine what could have happened if the Bolsheviks hadn’t won. I’ll describe a few potential outcomes –- a global domino effect that’s pure speculation of course, but not complete fantasy. The fact that these things didn’t happen was largely down to the power of an authoritarian ‘Soviet Union’. In chronological order:

• Russia and Ukraine, 1920s: power resides in democratic soviets; anarchists are not crushed or expelled; workers and peasants maintain control of factories and farms. With a friendly Russian ‘centre’ (or lack thereof), the Makhnovists would likely have survived and consolidated their hold in Ukraine, holding on to their territory and creating a powerful anarchist beacon.

• Spain, 1930s: the anarchists of the CNT-FAI – the biggest workers’ organisation in Spain – prevented a fascist victory at the beginning of the civil war, took control of Barcelona and collectivized industry and land in Catalonia and Aragon. They were weakened by a lack of international support, and the USSR actively opposed them via support for the Communist Party (see Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938). An anarchist Russia (a true ‘soviet union’) would almost certainly have provided the CNT-FAI with the resources and legitimacy they needed, potentially tipping the balance in their favour.

• Eastern Europe, 1920s-40s: between the world wars, peasant parties held power across Eastern Europe. Land ownership was based on smallholdings, and they were trying to develop small-scale industry scattered among the farms, producing things for each other. This was the opposite of the Soviet approach – large-scale agriculture and industry – so although they were fighting fascists, the Soviets didn’t take their side. They could have combined to suppress fascism, but didn’t, and so by 1939, all peasant governments except the Czechs’ had gone. (see David Mitrany, Marx Against the Peasants). After the war, instead of being forced into the rigid, Stalinist model of the USSR, the Eastern Bloc countries could have developed their own, decentralised forms of socialism, potentially influenced by a decentralised Russia.

• China, 1940s: the influence on Mao’s Chinese Communist Revolution is more speculative, but a different model of libertarian socialism dominating the global left would certainly have been a major factor. It might have provided an alternative to the rigid Stalinism that Mao often emulated.

• Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, 1950s-70s: there might have been anarchist revolutions, rather than communist ones, which could have influenced other countries in the Global South.

It’s conceivable that we might have had a largely anarchist world in the 20^th century, especially in the Global South. I’m not saying it was likely – just not impossible. A decentralised, commons or commons-like world would be even more possible now, with global support, new technology, no Soviet Union and the US in decline.

Conclusion

There are lots of ‘what-ifs’ in this article, but I just want to show that the Russian Revolution could have produced a decentralised, commons-like challenge to capitalism in the 20^th century. It’s speculative, but not crazy, I don’t think.

Capitalism suppresses commons via extraction, communism via forced collectivisation and crushing civil society. Communism is far from dead, and it’s often seen as the only real alternative to capitalism. I want to persuade anti-caps on the cusp of communism that there’s an anti-authoritarian, sustainable and achievable alternative.

Communists and capitalists can be members of the commons (as customers, investors or employees, all of whom are full members with democratic rights). Capitalists will find it hard to dismantle a system that brings benefits to many people, but where communists are able to seize power, I think they’ll probably suppress commons. Both left and right have created barriers for the commons, historically. Capitalism and communism create their own elites, with concentrated power that makes real democracy impossible. Commons does the opposite.

Communism couldn’t compete with capitalism – Hayek was right about planning. Also, in the 60s, the Americans and Soviets built proto-internets, but the Soviets closed theirs, because the communist party feared it would challenge centralised power. Big mistake. It was the thing that could have saved them. Without it, the massive bureaucracy involved in running a giant planned economy was impossible. By the time Gorbachev was implementing his reforms, the whole Soviet system was collapsing.

That doesn’t mean we have to have a capitalist world. Capitalism is disastrous for nature, democracy and community. Communism was tried extensively as a solution in the 20^th century, and actually made things worse. A non-capitalist, non-communist world is possible – systems don’t last forever. It’s time for a new approach for anti-capitalists – the commons approach. Build a better system from within capitalism, and transition to it. Marx was writing in 1844, when groups of people in Rochdale were starting to build the co-operative movement. That was a much more promising movement than communism or reform of the state.

But here we are, with capitalism still dominant, although looking more fragile than previously. 100 years ago, workers, peasants and anarchists struggled to co-ordinate and communicate at scale. We now have the internet and new tools / models to make it happen, that I’ll cover in more detail in upcoming articles.

Attempts at decentralised, non-hierarchical, truly democratic organisation keep surfacing, and they’re not going to stop. In the previous two articles, I tried to point out that Marx’s critique of capitalism was good, but communism in practice wasn’t, and in this article, that a commons / decentralised world isn’t pie-in-the-sky.

So far, I’ve tried to persuade anti-caps not to take the communist route. In the next few articles I’ll explain why I don’t believe the electoral route will work either, because states are captured and serve corporate interests.

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In this interview we look at the possibility of divesting from the conventional money system with its growth imperative by creating our own means of finance. A money commons, so to speak. It certainly isn’t easy! But if you listen to Stephen, it is also very much worth it.

If you fancy learning more about this topic in person, and exploring it practically first-hand, come to the fourth annual Collaborative Finance gathering in Austria if you can.

Find the video of the conversation below, then a summary and further resources, and finally the transcript.

Summary

• Stephen DeMeulenaere has been involved in managing and setting up community currencies all over the world for over 35 years. In recent years, this has involved projects based on blockchain technology.

• He first got interested in community currencies in the form of a Local Exchange Trading System (LETS) – the second of its kind – in 1990, in Victoria, Canada, when he was a student. This led to his lifelong involvement with this kind of exchange.

• It is important that a community currency is set up correctly. Far more of them fail than succeed. But even when they fail, in many cases people will have had very positive experiences and friendships from the time that they lasted.

• As Stephen sees it, we do actually want to compete – and this extends to aggregating wealth – but want to have egalitarian, cooperative and collaborative economic relationships, too. According to Bernard Lietaer’s observations, money can be designed in a way that’s competitive, or in a way that’s cooperative (Yin Yang theory of money). But that also means that cooperative systems should allow for some competition, too – the Yin has always a bit of Yang in it.

• But to go beyond a level of basic exchange with a community currency is a challenge in Stephen’s experience, although the tools for that are there. Buying a car, or a house, usually still happens in the mainstream economy. There are financial institutions that are built around the cooperative management of wealth, though.

• The global money system now resembles a casino, and creates structural inequality. That’s why community currencies should start handling larger amounts of wealth, according to Stephen. While people who use community currencies usually do not want to go beyond a certain scale, people in blockchain do! And they, too, want to transition to a different money system. But they are more competitive. This makes the work Stephen does really interesting. “We are bridging these two worlds between collaboration or cooperation, and competition.”

• At the level above consumer-to-consumer exchange, we can counter the “craziness” of the conventional money system, too. Mechanisms like invoice clearing and even commercial barter networks have a role to play in moving to a more steady-state-economy.

• The Regiogeld network Margrit Kennedy devised with the help of Bernard Lietaer aimed to move wealth from the national and transnational to the regional and local level. Lietaer was also involved in the transition of the European Currency Unit (ECU) to the Euro, but this did not work out how he had hoped.

• There is still a lot to gain from the ideas of regional and local currencies. “That’s why I’ve stayed involved in this, and many other people have stayed involved in this, because we know how awesome it is in a personal way. It’s life-affirming to be doing something like this. It’s an interesting life choice to make, because it’s not so much about enriching yourself, but helping other people around you to become more wealthy, or to meet their needs more efficiently, more easily, or with greater resilience.”

• The annual Collaborative Finance gathering, is happening for the fourth time this year (CoFi 4) at the Commons Hub in Hirschwang an der Rax. It will bring together people from different backgrounds in finance, community currencies and technology, and those simply interested, to explore topics like games, cosmolocal production, and implementation of local currencies over the course of a week, from 21 to 28 June. Participants come from all over the world. There are still spaces available. You can learn more about the gathering here:

  https://collaborative-finance.net.

  

• Blockchain technologies got a bad press, but some people point out their potential to create better economic solutions than what we have now, for example Joshua Dávila in the book Blockchain Radicals. What could be positive sides to them?

• Stephen has been working with digital currencies before Bitcoin. He was involved in the creation of Ripple, though not on the technical side. That was Ryan Fugger, who developed the model and code for what became Ripple. Ripple Labs later bought it and it became XRP. It was a pre-blockchain platform that did mutual credit digitally. Stephen participated in early discussions about how important it is that transactions are transparent and immutable.

• He heard about Bitcoin early on, but thought it was weird and didn’t understand it. But when he did, it started to take over his mind a lot more. Stephen sees the fact that issuing Bitcoin can not be directly influenced by humans – but by an open source algorithm that can be viewed by anyone – as a key trait. He likes that aspect of blockchain technologies in general, that they can’t be taken by the government.

• The most successful community currencies have in past years and decades in fact been shut down by federal or national government, or the national bank. This happened to a project that Stephen did in Thailand during the Asian monetary crisis which was shut down by the central bank of Thailand. It also happened during the Great Depression in Germany and Austria when the central banks of those countries shut down local currencies. We will need to “defend the wealth that we create and protect it in a way that can’t be taken by the government,” Stephen says, “until they are on our side – but there’s a bit of a hurdle to get over there.” Once our economies are large enough, we could develop ethical relations with the government while protecting generated wealth with the goal of creating a steady-state economy.

• We can do a lot with the technologies of today. Collaborative finance is a movement that does not belong to one particular ideology, not everybody has to think the same, “in that sense, I guess you could say we share more commonality with the black flag than with the red flag, but still, it’s open to to anyone who wants to move towards a more sustainable future”. Stephen points out that there are not that many “Blockchain radicals”, it’s probably less than five percent. But it is growing.

• One of the main obstacles might be to get people to join who are not much into tech. Stephen points out: “That’s because the technology is set at such an early stage. It still requires a change in thinking about how we use computers; and of course that’s what corporations want. Corporations want us to know as little about computers as possible. They want us to know as little about finance and money and banking and how it’s created, and how it’s being wielded against us. They want us to know as little as possible so that we’re powerless to be able to make any changes.”

• Blockchain and crypto are implicated in a lot of bad news, but people being greedy, selfish and awful is happening a lot in the general world, too. At the same time, other tech that is geared towards self-sufficiency, like solar punk, is generally not encouraged by governments, either.

• Stephen, with his co-author Scott Morris, published the book Pathways to Regeneration last year. The book can be downloaded for free. The book discusses how we can move to a better world that we know is possible. It takes inspiration from past currency designers like Bernard Lietaer and Margrit Kennedy, who were already mentioned, next to Jem Bendell and Michel Bauwens, who also write about transformative change. Stephen and Scott also look to Buckminster Fuller and E.F. Schumacher for a solid grounding in the foundational philosophy for the work that needs doing according to them. Going back to historical models, they aim to show how we can create models that work if they are grounded in proven practices from previous times. David Graeber is also referred to in that context. A key finding of Graeber’s was that in ancient times, humans did not just have one economic system and government, but different kinds alongside each other.

• The climate crisis might be a factor in forcing us to move to different economic systems from what we have now. Currently, governments are ignoring it in core ways, says Stephen, just making surface-level adjustments.

• One of the most important things to take care of when designing new economic models is good governance. Pathways to Regeneration is a lot about that, and Stephen emphasises that he and Scott are happy to talk to representatives of such initiatives. It is really important to look for help from people who have done this kind of work before. The Bristol Pound is an example, where mistakes could perhaps have been avoided, if that had happened at the beginning.

• What would be a good entry point for people to learn about collaborative finance, and money and finance in general? – Stephen says, it is best to start with books. He recommends Rethinking Money by Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne, and People Powered Money, which you can download for free. They are a bit older, and don’t cover blockchain, but are a very good foundation. You can find further helpful books under the following ‘Further Resources’ section.
  

Further resources

Books

• Pathways to Regeneration (free download) by Stephen DeMeulenaere and Scott Morris

• Blockchain Radicals by Joshua Dávila

• Rethinking Money by Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne

• People Powered Money (free download) by Community Currencies in Action

• Remaking Money for a Sustainable Future: Money Commons (free download) by Ester Barinaga

• Money: The Unauthorised Biography by Felix Martin

• Value Beyond Money by Diana Finch

• Breaking Together (free download) by Jem Bendell (listen to the audiobook version of chapter 2 here:)

Websites

• Monneta.org

• Monetary Diversity

• Ramics with the journal IJCCR

• Money and Society MOOC from 2015/16, with Matthew Slater and Jem Bendell

That’s why I’ve stayed involved in this, and many other people have stayed involved in this, because we know how awesome it is in a personal way. It’s life-affirming to be doing something like this. It’s an interesting life choice to make, because it’s not so much about enriching yourself, but helping other people around you to become more wealthy, or to meet their needs more efficiently, more easily, or with greater resilience.

Transcript

Katja: Hello, today I’m talking to Stephen DeMeulenaere. He has for over 35 years been helping communities design financial tools that strengthen local economies, support small businesses and build resilience.

You started with a LETS community in Canada and then you got involved with local currencies in Mexico and Argentina, and you also helped to set up complementary currencies in Thailand and then in Indonesia.

You have been involved in so many projects and also very varied projects, it’s really too much to mention, it’s quite amazing.

Some things that I found particularly interesting were: in 2004, you co-authored a paper with Bernard Lietaer – who is quite a big name in the community currency world, for people who are not that familiar – on how dual currencies in Bali help to keep the Balinese culture alive.

Also, in 2018 – so, later you got involved with blockchain – you organised a conference on blockchains for sustainable development at the UN. Those were just a few things. Do you want to add anything?

Community currencies – a lifetime occupation

Stephen: Well, thank you very much, Katja, for interviewing me today, and hello everyone, nice to have you with us on this conversation, or conversational journey that we’ll be going along here. Katja has prepared many questions. Some of them I might be able to answer and some of them I might not, but I will try to answer as many as we can and then we see where we go from there.

So, maybe I can just start by saying that I started my journey with community currencies in the very early 1990s. Actually, 1990, to be exact, when I came across a table for the Local Exchange Trading System at the Fernwood community market in Victoria, BC. So, everyone is there, selling their unwanted items on tables set out in the public square, or selling vegetables, or selling bicycle repair, because many people in the area would ride bicycles, things like that. And then there was a table for a currency system, a local currency system. And not all of the vendors in the market were members of the system, but they started to learn about it.

I was a university student in political science at the time, and I thought that’s very interesting. Sometimes we would see a table from the Communist party or from some of the Green party of British Columbia, and then this was something that was non-political, they weren’t pushing a particular political message but they were saying, no, actually we can create an economic system which is very different than the one that we live in all around us right now. And so I became very interested in that, and became involved in LETS and basically committed the rest of my life to it from when I was in my very early twenties.

Katja: And it was also right at the start of LETS, right? That was quite at the beginning.

Stephen: Actually, it wasn’t. LETS started in 1983, believe it or not. But it’s kind of one of these slowly… so for seven years, there was nothing really happening with LETS outside of Vancouver Island in the very Western side of Canada.

Victoria, the table for the system that I had visited that day, was the second system ever initiated, the second system after the first one that Michael Linton started in the Comox Valley on Northern Vancouver Island in a very very small remote town which is quite difficult to get to.

For seven years, he toiled away in obscurity, and then from Victoria – people started to hear about it in other cities, like Perth, Manchester, London and many others, Amsterdam and so on, through the internet. By the early nineties, there was the creation of Freenet through public libraries, so the very beginning of the bulletin board services that preceded the internet was how these ideas started to spread. Michael Linton was very tech savvy, and I was also quite – nowhere near his level – but as a young person, I was quite tech savvy with all of these new network technologies happening, and so I started to make friends in various places all around the world, many of whom are still my friends and to this day.

Katja: That sounds great and because you said, it would occupy you up to now: Why do you think it’s important to have local currencies – I assume you think it’s important.

Stephen: It’s important, but it has to be done right, and that’s been the biggest problem we’ve faced up until now. Because money is all around us and we think about it all the time, many people think, ‘I really don’t like these Euros, or these US dollars, or whatever national currency I happen to be forced by the government in the area I live in to use; I want to make my own. Let’s just go and make our own currency and convince people to use it and spend it.’ And then it crashes and fails miserably, and people might lose money, or they might lose the investment of time and effort that they put into it.

So, that’s what occupies me a lot: how to set things up right so that they succeed. Because there are far fewer examples of that than there are of failures. There’s thousands of examples of failures of community currency systems. That’s sad, and there’s reasons for it. At the end of the day, it means that the desire to implement them and to have them succeed is still there. Hopefully, we’re getting to that point where they don’t fail that often anymore.

That’s what keeps me involved and others as well, too. We want to be there when someone says, “I want to start a currency in Milan”, or in Geneva, or in Marseille, or Vancouver, or Montreal, New York and so on, and help them to do it right.

Katja: Though even if they fail – I was recently on a call with Ester Barinaga, and she said people are then more aware of what monetary policies are all about. And it also probably depends on how they fail. Do they fail after a long time, when people have probably had a lot of benefit from them nevertheless?

Stephen: That’s right. When I talk with people who have been members of a system that has failed – and I’ve been a member of a system that has failed – we remember the good times that we had when we were doing it, and people generally focus on the positive experience that they received from it. They made friends that they never would have made if they hadn’t exchanged or built. That social capital, that real social nominal that happens only when you’re exchanging what you produce out of love for something that someone else produces out of love, and those are wonderful things.

Katja: We also of course want them to last longer. Would you say, part of the reason is that we really – like the economy at large –, we need to create better systems and eventually it really has to have an effect that goes wider than just local implementations, community currencies. Could they get networked and federate?

Yin and Yang

Stephen: That would be the ideal. We need better governance structures to do that, yes, and it’s something I debated a lot with Bernard Lietaer and also with Margrit Kennedy as well, because she started the Regiogeld systems coming from her experience of community currencies in Germany.

The funny thing that seems to happen, from how I see it, is that we actually do like playing games and we do actually like competing in some way with each other, however small. That’s offset by our desire to also have some forms of economic relations which are egalitarian, or cooperative, or collaborative; and so we actually need a way of combining both of those in some ways.

And that goes beyond just saying I grow better tomatoes than you do, those kinds of competitive comparisons, but some kind of way of playing money games where it’s kind of like when we’re playing with poker chips that don’t have a value, or playing poker with pennies. It doesn’t really matter who wins, because the pennies are worth nothing, but there’s still something like, ooh, I did a little better then someone else.

And that extends into how we look at wealth. Wealth is sort of the next level of money. So money is a medium of exchange that we use to exchange goods and services between each other, and capital or wealth, that’s something that’s aggregated, it’s money that’s been brought together, and a lot of people who work with community currencies are scared of that. They’re scared of wealth, and so they say, “oh, I want to exchange with my neighbours for vegetables and bicycle repair or haircuts and massage and acupuncture”, but when it comes to buying a house, or a car, or something that takes a lot of money, they still often leave that in the space of the mainstream economy. There have been people who – there’s JAK bank in Sweden, and there are of course the ethical banks, cooperative banks like – I mean, Rabobank is huge – so, there are financial institutions that have built up around the idea of cooperative management of capital and wealth, but usually that doesn’t happen within the community currency space.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around it, but I had debates a lot with Bernard and Margrit about this, because Bernard always talks about the idea of Yin Yang in money, the Yin Yang dichotomy, where money can be designed in a way that’s competitive, or it can be designed in a way that’s cooperative. But as we know from the Yin Yang, there should be elements of cooperation within the competition and competition within the cooperation.

Katja: One thing I wanted to say: competition is one thing, but the money system as it is at the moment is not only competitive. I mean, to me it looks like it’s gone really out of hand. Like, the financial casino – Ann Pettifor has a book out, The Global Casino, and then also, that was one of Margrit Kennedy’s big things: the compound interest.

So, the money is created as bank debt, and then people get more and more into debt, and the gains always go to the top. That is not competition as such, that is something more.

Stephen: It’s structural inequality that the money system creates. And that’s why we should, on the community currency side of things, we really should be trying to learn how to handle larger and larger amounts of wealth, I mean to bring even that scale of exchange into a community currency system, and it is possible to do that.

We have examples of it, we have the tools, the governance, the laws, because you are of course starting to interface with the financial system and the government, and when you’re at that level, you have to play at that level. We can totally do that, and keep the local scale aspect in place as well, too. But it’s still that a lot of people in the community currency space are not willing to go there yet.

But the people in blockchain are. We can come back. We can still talk more about community currencies and come back to talk about how blockchain technologies fit into this whole transition towards a new type of monetary system, because that’s what they want as well, too. Even if they’re more competitive about what they do and don’t think as cooperatively or collaboratively as we do in our space – which makes what we do really interesting.

We are bridging these two worlds between collaboration or cooperation, and competition.

At the middle level

Katja: That’s an interesting way of looking at it. I just briefly wanted to mention: there are maybe also other levels. I mean, for example, Local Loop Merseyside and Stroud Housing Commons. They are going one level up, to the medium level, and also bringing together different parties in a way where you can do with less cash so to speak, or don’t have to take out a bank loan. So, that would also be examples, so maybe it has to happen on many levels, and involving local municipality would be good probably.

Stephen: Actually, I’d be happy to talk more about that next level as well, too. So, with community currencies, we have that C to C, consumers. Producers and consumers. It’s kind of like what Alvin Toffler was talking about in The Third Wave, where his prediction was that in the future we would become producers as well as consumers of the goods and services around us. But it didn’t quite work out that way, or hasn’t yet quite worked out that way.

There’s still a level above the consumer level, of businesses that do the majority of production within an economy, and yes, we have cooperative banks, we have these invoice clearing systems, like you were just giving the example of Local Loop Merseyside, we have business to business barter. There’s many billions of dollars in trade being done through those levels of systems run by very professional administrations. These are financial professionals that are used to putting on suits and being at work at eight thirty every morning for their entire lives and such.

But that’s an important role that needs to be played if we’re really going to transition to a more steady-state economy, or even get into discussions about degrowth and how to actually start stepping back the economy because of all this casino craziness, while still maintaining the quality of life that we have right now, so that you can still have that beautiful red wall behind you, and a bookshelf, and pictures on the wall and such, and everything is in fine shape or type. Degrowth doesn’t mean that we have to walk around wearing twenty-year-old pairs of pants with holes in the knees or things like that. We can actually have a very nice quality of life and just remove all of those other things that are causing so much damage.

Katja: So, the cooperative way of doing trade has to increase proportionally to the competitive one, and also somehow get rid of the craziness as you called it. I sometimes think all the cooperative things going on almost helps the casino go on, because they are kind of counter-balancing it. It might have already come down and collapsed otherwise, and maybe it still will, but of course, what we can’t prevent is those boom and bust cycles, and how many people are affected by them. And that is maybe one of the first things: to get rid of the extraction and all that.

Stephen: And that is what Margrit Kennedy was trying to do by starting the Regiogeld network in Germany: to take a lot of the wealth away from the the level above the regional, so the national and transnational level, and move that wealth into the regional and local level using the local currencies that Bernard Lietaer was trying to propose. So, they worked very closely together to formulate how this would look, and how this should work in practice, when the Euro was being created.

As I think you know, and I’m not sure if the listeners know, Bernard Lietaer worked on the convergence mechanism of the ECU to the Euro for the Belgian central bank. He was deeply involved in the transition of the European monetary system from one of multiple national currencies to one that was unified. As we know from what happened in Greece, and what’s been happening with Italy and Spain and Portugal, the way the Southern countries in Europe have been treated compared to those in the North, that things haven’t worked out in the European banking system as Bernard would have hoped.

He was hoping for a much more egalitarian form of monetary issuance that wouldn’t be dominated by the larger financial powers in Europe and so things haven’t quite gone…

Katja: I think it was also not his system that was implemented. I don’t know if that played a role in that. I think his was a precursor.

Stephen: Yes, it was a precursor, but he had been lobbying very hard to change the way that money would be issued – that the Euro would be issued. It would still be issued through loans. That would be hard to break. It’s too early to bring in a new currency and then completely change how it’s being issued into the economy, but at least, there would be mechanisms that would make it more egalitarian between the countries, which we’ve seen hasn’t… It’s gone the way it’s gone in Europe.

Katja: And I think that was partially also a consequence of the global financial crisis that these things happened.

Stephen: Absolutely. But if we go back to their ideas, to regional currencies and local currencies, there is still a lot – we can gain ground back again, if we take it seriously and understand why we’re doing it. That’s why I’ve stayed involved in this, and many other people have stayed involved in this, because we know how awesome it is in a personal way. It’s life-affirming to be doing something like this. It’s an interesting life choice to make, because it’s not so much about enriching yourself, but helping other people around you to become more wealthy, or to meet their needs more efficiently, more easily, or with greater resilience.

And those are all great things that are worthy to do in our lives I think, which keeps me motivated, and I hear similar stories I’m sure from you, and from others who attend the collaborative finance gathering, that this is what keeps them so committed to this kind of work.

Katja: It also matters I guess when they spring up in times of crisis, they are more significant than having a LETS scheme somewhere.

Stephen: Oh, absolutely. LETS is a nice introduction to how these systems can work. It’s egalitarian, it’s fun, you get to meet nice people in your neighbourhood – all the nice people in your neighbourhood will belong to it, and almost none of the not nice people will belong to it. So, it’s fun that way. And then we can build other things on top of that. That’s what I’m excited about and happy to help communities to do.

CoFi

Katja: You mentioned CoFi. That is the Collaborative Finance gathering that is happening for the fourth time this year in Austria in June; I went last year, and I really enjoyed it, and I learned so much, and it was really amazing. It is also a real commons, at a place called the Commons Hub as well.

Stephen: Yes, absolutely right. The second one that we had before last year was a lot of fun. It was held in Belgium, and we stayed together in a dormitory and we did all of our cooking and cleaning and such in teams. We do the same at the Commons Hub with the Crypto Commons Association which is the umbrella organization that CoFi is a part of – although we are not all one hundred per cent supportive of crypto.

As you recall, there were quite a few people who attended last year who were completely against technology; completely against money. They think that we should only exchange everything that we have as a gift. So, that’s the the great thing about the Collaborative Finance gathering, that it’s completely open to all kinds of thinking about this area, but within a space that says: if we’re really going to get serious and and scale up then we’re probably going to be going towards the blockchain in order to do that.

Katja: Can you otherwise say a bit more about what the conference does and who should attend it?

Stephen: Well, it will be held from 21 to 28 June in the foothills of the Alps, in the Rax mountains. They’re still pretty big, but they’re not the really really big ones, in Eastern Austria. It’s a beautiful natural area, and this year will be focused on five main topics, which wouldn’t mean too much if I explain them to you. We will look at workshops and games – how people can introduce these ideas in a fun setting in their communities. Fun and educational, of course. So, there’ll be quite a few games being played. We will look at cosmolocal production, which is a way of how we are localising production, or regionalising it, to revive dead towns which is actually what Hirschwang is – a dead or dying town – and there are a lot of towns like Hirschwang in Europe, in Italy and Spain and Portugal and such, where the population have left, but the rail line is still there. There’s a former hydroelectric dam which is not being used anymore and such, so those can be revived under new economic models that may not work for capitalism, but they work just fine for the kinds of purposes that we have in mind. That kind of thing, and of course we’ll be talking about governance and how to design the administration of these systems so that they can be transparent yet effective – resilience, yet efficient.

We’ll talk about technologies – on how some technologies can possibly assist; so there’ll be some people who have developed technologies that can serve these kinds of ends and we’ll be learning about those. So, anyone who’s interested in implementing in their community. I would say, if they have some experience in that – many of our members have worked with financial institutions in Europe like GLS bank, or Raiffeisenbank, or Rabobank. I mean, they are banks, but these are credit unions or ethical banks.

So, we have a number of of people with backgrounds in these kinds of financial institutions coming. Municipalities and regional governments, and then people who just have a deep interest in the space from a religious or philosophical, ethical, political perspective.

Katja: So, you can attend if you just have an interest in the space of alternative currencies, alternative monetary systems.

Stephen: And we still have plenty of room. We still have room for about thirty more people to sign up on our website at collaborative-finance.net.

Then, if the listeners have any questions, they can send us an email and say, “would this be suitable for me, this is what I want to do.” I should mention as well, too, that we hope to have more regional gatherings again, like two collaborative finance events a year, is what we’ve been wanting to have for a long time. We will have the June event in Austria every year. That’s the main annual flagship event, and then we would like to have regional events in different parts – I would say mainly in Europe, because that is where we find the broadest support. But if there’s another part of the world where there’s a lot of support for these kinds of monetary and economic systems, then we could consider having a regional event there as well, too.

Katja: That sounds great. And CoFi, of course, has very international participation, that’s great about it as well. People coming from all over the world.

Stephen: Oh, absolutely. We’ve had people come from China, Taiwan, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand – you know, from Southeast Asia, and we had a number of people coming from North America and Central America, South America and Europe, and Africa as well, too. But I would say, the focus now – I just think that for some reason, Europe is just a little bit further ahead in this space than the other areas, in general.

Blockchain

Katja: Okay, then let’s come to the blockchain. That has got a bit of bad press, mainly because of Bitcoin becoming more a speculative asset, other cryptos as well, but there’s much more to it. There’s also a book I have been reading called Blockchain Radicals by somebody who has a podcast called The Blockchain Socialist, Joshua Davila. I’ve almost finished it now, but it’s really interesting – and we should talk about your book as well, of course. I’ve read that, too.

Maybe – can you just say what piqued your interest and then the journey, seeing how it developed, and why do you still believe in it, and what do you think it could do.

Stephen: I had been working with digital currencies before Bitcoin. I was involved in the creation of Ripple. Not technically. That was Ryan Fugger, who developed the model and the code for what became Ripple, which was purchased from him by Ripple Labs to become XRP and such. It was a pre-blockchain platform, but it was a way of doing mutual credit digitally. So, I’ve been involved in the early technologies behind blockchain and participated in those discussions about the importance of transparency in transactions, and immutability, that transactions could not be struck or rewritten once they were locked into a database, and things like that. So, I heard about Bitcoin when it came out. I saw it on SourceForge right away, because I was already an open source software lover and user.

But I thought it was weird. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t like it, and so I waited a few years before I became involved in it. And then, as I understood it, then it took over my mind a lot more. About how, if it’s managed properly – the limitation of issuance which I think is very important. Especially algorithmic: the issuance of Bitcoin cannot be controlled by humans, it’s set out by the algorithm of the software program which is open source and can be viewed by anyone. So, I think that’s fascinating, that we have a multi-trillion dollar asset whose software layer is not locked behind a corporate firewall, and that there’s no CEO or board of directors really calling the shots. I mean, there are people who can kind of call the shots, but they don’t have the final word if the community disagrees.

So, I like that aspect of blockchain technologies, and that it can’t be taken by the government, which I think is the most important aspect, because that’s what’s destroyed – I mean that’s what’s taken down the most successful community currency efforts in past years and decades; just simply being shut down by the federal government, national government, or the national bank. Whether that was a project that I did in Thailand during the Asian monetary crisis which was shut down by the central bank of Thailand, or what happened during the Great Depression in Germany and Austria when the central banks of those countries shut down those local currencies as well. So, in order to survive that battle, we will have to be able to defend the wealth that we create and protect it in a way that can’t be taken by the government. Until they’re on our side – but there’s a bit of a hurdle to get over there.

Which may come. It depends on us building our economies large enough so that it actually means something in terms of affecting how the national economy functions, and then developing proper ethical relations with the government, and, if necessary, protecting the wealth that we have generated and are continuing to generate, with the goal of creating a steady-state economy which is in harmony with the natural world and sustainability. If governments don’t want to do that… – because at the moment they talk like they want to do that, but they don’t really want to do that, because, of course, corporations will revolt on them, and they’re more scared of corporations than they are of groups of people.

We have the tools now to be able to direct things the way that we want to direct them if we choose to take that action. Of course, it’s not up to you or me, and there’s no red flags anymore, or black flags, waving in the background. We’re not trying to create a homogenous movement where everyone has to think the same. So, in that sense, I guess you could say we share more commonality with the black flag than with the red flag, but still, it’s open to to anyone who wants to move towards a more sustainable future and I think that’s where the defining point really is, rather than saying, you have to be a socialist, or an anarchist, or a leftist.

As we know from blockchain technologies, there are not that many blockchain radicals actually, in the blockchain space. It’s a significant minority across the board in fact.

Katja: But it’s a significant minority.

Stephen: It’s growing because we are reaching out and finding each other, and starting to build our tools together, right. It’s tiny. Not a significant minority, no. It’s still less than five percent, I would say. People thinking about blockchain in these ways make up about five percent or less of all blockchain users in the world.

Katja: But that is still not so few, I mean, five percent of all blockchain users, I think. But is one of the main obstacles maybe to convince people who are not into tech to take part in it?

Stephen: That’s because the technology is set at such an early stage. It still requires a change in thinking about how we use computers; and of course that’s what corporations want. Corporations want us to know as little about computers as possible. They want us to know as little about finance and money and banking and how it’s created, and how it’s being wielded against us. They want us to know as little as possible so that we’re powerless to be able to make any changes.

So yes, I can understand that when someone opens up Youtube, they see a lot of videos about how Bitcoin is a scam, and they read in the news that these people have been hacked, and there’s all these criminals in jail that Trump has pardoned for their criminal behaviour using crypto-currencies and blockchain technologies.

That’s awful, but there are a lot of greedy, selfish, awful people in the world; not only in the blockchain sector, but in the regular world as well. It’s almost the same, it’s like Pareto’s law.

Katja: So that’s why we need to create systems that are co-governed and are transparent. And can you see a way how – let’s say a community living on the land – how could they use something like that. So, if there was an interface of, let’s say there are people who know about the technology and can explain it in a good way, do you think they might be able to convince people? And I don’t want to say everybody living on the land is not tech tech savvy, there are lots of people who are.

Stephen: No, that’s why we have solar punk. There’s solar punk. They are pretty advanced with energy generation and in other applications of technologies which are also to a large part being suppressed in a lot of places. And people have to learn about water and wind, and solar power technologies, pretty much by themselves. Here in Indonesia, the government actively opposes the use of solar power.

Katja: It opposes the use of solar power?

Stephen: Yeah, actively. So, you take a lot of risks – you can buy solar panels on the market, they haven’t outlawed them, they haven’t gone to that extent but they they make it difficult in every other way to have solar power in a country which is close to the equator and has sun most of the time, very hot sun.

Book Pathways to Regeneration

Katja: Maybe let’s talk about your book.

Stephen: Our book is similar to Blockchain Radicals in a way, and to a number of other books that have come out in the space in recent years. In that way, we are discussing how to get towards a better world that we know is possible.

We take a lot of inspiration from Bernard Lietaer and Margrit Kennedy, and Jem Bendell who wrote a book on climate collapse called Breaking Together and Michel Bauwens who is in Thailand and writes the Fourth Generation Civilization blog on Substack and has been talking about how to change the mode of production for a long time.

So, we look at what these people have been saying, and then bring in Buckminster Fuller and E.F. Schumacher and the really big names. Many more people know Buckminster Fuller and E.F. Schumacher than they do Bernard Lietaer or Margrit Kennedy and such. Because they provide a very solid grounding in the foundational philosophy of why we need to do what we’re doing, and how to do it right.

And so we draw a lot from them on applying Indigenous wisdom, whether that’s how things used to be in Europe for your grandparents and great-grandparents, or in Canada where I’m from, with my grandparents and great-grandparents, how they lived. Or we can go back five hundred years, a thousand years, two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand years, and look at how societies functioned, and what elements of how those societies function do we still know about today, and how do we encode those into economic and monetary systems that we use.

Because those will have the most resonance with how our life works. We will know innately, we will feel, ‘oh yes, this makes sense,’ rather than saying, ‘this seems really alien to me.’ When we can make blockchain technology feel like that, then people will feel like it’s something that they can use, and it’s not something that’s completely alien to them like something that has just come from outer space, brought to you by aliens; but something that actually relates to how we really used to operate economically and there are a lot of similarities in blockchain technologies with that.

Katja: That is an interesting point.

Stephen: So, we draw that line directly in the book. It might not be easy to see, but we hope it’s at least seen between the lines, and one other author we use for that is David Graeber, especially his book Debt, the First Five Thousand Years and The Dawn of Everything, which is a huge book. But it’s really amazing in how it takes ancient anthropology and archaeology and helps us to realise that we didn’t have just one type of economic system in ancient human society. We had many different kinds. We have many different kinds of government. We had many different kinds of leadership. We had many different kinds of mobility.

Some leaders then would allow people to walk away if they didn’t agree. Or some wouldn’t. And some people could get on a boat and sail, and some people had to walk, and some people had to go to get in a canoe and go down a river to escape whatever society had gone toxic for them. Which is something that we’re not able to do now. We can’t say, “oh, I don’t like what’s happening here in Canada, and I want to go to Indonesia.” Governments make it extremely difficult. Now you have to be a taxpayer in some country of the world. You have no freedom to be a non-taxpaying human being on Earth right now. Everywhere you go, you’ve got to be registered as paying some government money, and they impose that on each other, to make sure that that happens. So that they keep each other all in business.

So, we talk about that in the book. What needs to be dismantled, or rearranged, and how we can go about doing that, and what are some of the challenges and opportunities that we may be facing, that will force us to do that. And we think that the climate crisis is really what that challenge and opportunity is going to be.

I was watching a TV programme the other night about how temperatures in Thailand would be above 35 degrees only maybe five days out of the year, and now it’s almost 60 days of the year where the temperature is above 35 degrees somewhere anywhere in Thailand as a country. And that they are already facing temperatures of 60 degrees Celsius, which is becoming unbearable, so it becomes kind of like – we’re faced with a possibility in the near term of an event kind of like what Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about in his Science Fiction book

Katja: What is that, I don’t know that book. What is the event?

Stephen: It’s a red bulb event, where the combination of heat and humidity becomes so high that people die in their thousands or the hundreds of thousands. So that’s the catalyst in Kim Stanley Robinson’s book. It’s an excellent book and worth reading, and the steps that people who experienced it, or whose job it was to protect humanity, as staff of the United Nations, and how they failed to do that, and the reasons for that failure, which is basically government ignorance of the situation because it didn’t serve them.

I heard a saying recently that it’s hard to get someone to see something unless their salary depends on it. So, if the government is not making money from the climate crisis, it’s going to be very hard for them to actually take a look at it. That’s the stone that the builders are refusing right now. They’re mostly ignoring the climate crisis in a core way. They’re just saying, “oh well, we’ll provide some rooms that have water and air-conditioning in them, and we’ll show people where they can escape to if they’re having a heat stroke emergency,” but

when it comes to whether or not we should grow more trees or ban cars or something like that, well, we can’t go there because corporations would get upset.

Katja: You could also say that the climate crisis is acknowledged in some ways, but then turned again into something that the industry can use like carbon offsets and things like that.

I think we’ve come to the end but I wanted to ask something specific about the book as well. So, it is actually a lot also about the social side of things, right? How you govern things, because that is an important aspect, that it is a real democracy, not too hierarchical governance.

Stephen: As I was mentioning in the beginning of our conversation today – I was talking about how important governance actually is, and how little people actually think about it, because they’re busy thinking “ooh, this new money experiment is exciting. Let’s just design a new currency.” And they go into a meeting, and they say, “okay, do you second my motion?” using Robert’s rules or some old-fashioned form of governance, and they say “no, I created this system, you do what I tell you. I don’t care what you think. I created this. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else.” Which is actually what happens in community currency systems, because people don’t know that there are actually better ways of doing governance. And so we have seen a lot of systems collapse because of this kind of toxic governance behaviour.

I mean, that’s just one of many reasons community currency systems can collapse, but we can at least solve some of these problems. We have solutions here. My co-author of the book Pathways to Regeneration – his name is Scott Morris – we’d be more than glad to talk to any communities – and I say this in every podcast or conversation I have – we’d be happy to talk with any representative of the municipality or regional government, or even larger scale, or lower scale; neighborhoods – if you’re in a neighborhood government and are interested in implementing these kinds of systems, reach out to us, and we’d love to do what we can to assist and make sure it’s done right so that it has the best chance of surviving.

Because I’ve been at this for 35 years. There have been people like my colleague Thomas Greco, who is in his 80s now, who have been doing this for way longer. He was friends with E.F. Schumacher and Bob Swann and Susan Witt in America from that side, and of course, there are many people in Europe who are ten – you know, I’m nearly sixty – so there are people who are 10, 20, 30 years older than I am, with even more experience, that also have been through this enough times to know how to do it right.

So, I’m not trying to say that I’m the only person, or this is an innovation, that kind of thing. I’m not trying to sell myself as being the only solution to this. There’s actually a lot of people that have an important contribution to make, helping these systems to get started properly.

Katja: That’s really good, to have a variety of opinions. The message I guess is, to not just start and also, don’t dictate things. Talk to people who have done this before, and have been doing this for a long time.

Stephen: I can’t stress that enough. Because that’s what often happens. We often find out about these systems once they’re collapsing. And we say, “oh, we didn’t know that there was a system there, no one had ever contacted us. So, when we saw the Bristol Pound was a very big collapse several years ago, and then I was like, “oh that’s too bad, they never reached out to me. I still had 25 years experience then. They didn’t reach to my colleagues. That’s too bad. Maybe we could have done something that would have helped it to survive, instead of reading the post-mortem book.

Katja: Yeah, I’ve read that as well. It’s interesting. There was so much enthusiasm, and they’ve done good things as well.

Stephen: It’s wonderful people. I’m not criticising the people personally one bit. They are very kind, generous, have huge hearts, but they thought they knew what they were doing, and they didn’t. Sad.

But it’s a good example. And it’s important that we be honest and open about these kinds of things that have happened. Rather than say, we shouldn’t talk about failure, whereas on the contrary, we really should talk about failure, and why these things happen so that we

can be collective in how we develop responses to it.

Katja: Diana Finch has also said, if anybody wanted to try something like that again, to reach out to her. She only came in towards the end anyway..

Book recommendations

Maybe, as a last point, anybody who doesn’t know very much about community currencies or the monetary system, finance system – can you recommend an easy entry point, on how to learn these things.

Stephen: Well, I really think it’s in books. I would read Bernard Lietaer’s book Rethinking Money. That’s a really wonderful book that gently introduces the concepts, the philosophy, the mechanisms and so on. And if you want to go a little bit deeper, then I would suggest finding the book People Powered Money by the New Economics Foundation in the UK.

That book was written by a whole large group of practitioners across Europe about 10, 15 years ago. I wasn’t involved in that project, but many of my colleagues were and I think it’s an excellent piece of work and explaining in even more detailed terms about how to implement community currencies, but it’s just a bit out of date because it is before blockchain technologies. If you can survive reading those two books then you should already be at a point where you can start finding your way and knowing what questions to ask to find people and resources around. Or just contact you, Katja.

Katja: Yeah, I also have some book recommendations from my side.

Stephen: What would your top recommendations be?

Katja: I think the book that Ester Barinaga wrote which is Remaking Money for a Sustainable Future: Money Commons

Stephen: That came out six months ago, isn’t that right.

Katja: It is also available for free as an ebook or pdf.

Stephen: As is ours. As is People Powered Money

Katja: Yes, I’ll put the links in the description. I would recommend yours as well. I really got a lot out of that as well. And for money history, there’s a book that came out in 2013 by Felix Martin, called Money, the Unauthorised Biography, I think.

And I think as a website monetta.org is quite good. And that is one that Margrit Kennedy founded, and I just saw yesterday that they have quite a good explanation on the home page on what is wrong with the money system, and then the various different approaches to tackle it.

Stephen: Great, and I would also recommend Breaking Together by Jem Bendell.

Katja: Yes, I read that as well. Chapter 2 is all about the money system, right?

Stephen: And he covers the reasoning for why we need to change the monetary system as soon as possible in there. I think all of those books are actually the best way to start rather than – I mean, yeah, Monetta’s website, too, of course.

Katja: There are probably other websites, I just happened to be there yesterday.

Stephen: Websites are created out of a more specific interest than a book. A book needs to appeal to a wider range of possible readers, whereas a website might take you down the wrong path. Monneta is a broad enough path, but other ones – you run the risk of becoming quite focused on Transition Town movements or mutual credit systems or credit common systems that use very specific types. Whereas as you may know, or not know, there is a strong movement or tendency towards monetary diversity and that, as Bernard Lietaer was a great big fan of, not just the duality between competitive and cooperative currencies, but a multiplicity of currencies each fulfilling specific roles that they’re best designed to do, right?

And this is actually what economists say: that monetary systems should be designed to achieve… they should be efficient in the ways they achieve what they’re best at achieving, and not be used in ways that they are not best at and most efficient at achieving, but we treat it like they are. Like in the money system, there should only be one currency, but in fact there should be at least two or five or 10 or 20 different currencies circulating at the same time, all for different purposes, and I’ve seen in real-world contexts and it works very very well.

It actually does. People think, ‘oh I’d be completely confused in a world with ten different currencies in my wallet or in my phone,’ and actually, no. You get used to it, you’ll sort it out very very fast.

Katja: It will be interesting to see what the future will bring.

Stephen: Yes, always looking forward to it.

Katja: I think we can probably finish here, we’ve covered a lot of ground. Thank you so much for joining me, it’s been really interesting talking to you. And I’ll see you in June, or maybe online before that.

Stephen: Yes, thank you, Katja, for an enjoyable conversation. I hope your listeners enjoyed it, look forward to seeing their comments, and yes I’ll see you at the end of June in Hirschwang in Austria at the Collaborative Finance gathering.

Here’s part 3 of a very quick history of money, to counter claims that ‘money evolved from barter’, or ‘Kings introduced coins so that their subjects could trade more easily’. Money, our means of exchange within capitalism, is also used to store value, and so stored it is - billions are accumulated in the hands of very few, taking the exchange medium out of circulation and effectively destroying democracy in the process. In a commons world, we could do much better.

Part 1 (3000BCE to 1400).

Part 2 (1400 to 2000).

The crash of 2007-8

This is an overview of the build-up to the global economic crash of 2007-8 — especially the role of banks:

1970s

• Lewis Ranieri of Salomon Brothers invents mortgage-backed securities (MBS).

• Mortgages are sold to investment banks, who package thousands of them together as securities.

• They sell the securities to third-party investors, who receive the cash flow from them.

• Because they’re large packages, they give much higher yields than individual mortgages, but with less risk, because most people pay their mortgage.

• So they catch the eye of large investors.

1980s

• Lots of legal wrangling, but MBSs become legal, as long as they’re given a good enough rating by a ratings agency.

• MBSs get triple-A ratings, make billions, and change the image of banking from Captain Mainwaring to cocaine and strip clubs.

• Banking becomes the dominant industry in the US and the UK. Bankers successfully pressure governments to deregulate their sector.

• Lots of different types of securities appear.

1990s

• Credit default swaps (CDS) are developed – insurance policies against default on debts. You can take out a CDS on anything – they’re, in effect, bets against debts being paid.

2002

• Dotcom bubble bursts. Economy wobbles, but housing seen as stable and secure (it isn’t).

• Banks push for more and more mortgages for MBSs – even from people who are big credit risks.

• If housing securities are recognised as risky, and don’t sell, they’re taken apart and repackaged as collateralised debt obligations (CDO).

• CDOs are types of derivates (their value is derived from something else – in this case the collateral if the loan defaults).

• Ratings agencies give them triple-A ratings, or they lose business to other ratings agencies who will.

• ‘Synthetic CDOs’ arrive, which are bets on other CDOs; then there are bets on those bets, and so on.

2003-4

• Hedge fund manager Michael Burry (featured in the book and movie ‘the Big Short’) and others, notice that a lot of MBSs are full of sub-prime mortgages.

• Burry begins buying CDSs on housing securities.

• He’s right, and makes a lot of money as the MBSs start to fail.

• Burry ‘short-sold’ housing securities – i.e. he bet against them.

2007-8

• MBSs have morphed into a huge number of dodgy securities.

• A large number of them fail, and crash the economy.

• Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson bail out the banks.

• No bankers get jail time (apart from in Iceland).

• Bankers lobby governments to kill any meaningful reform.

The current situation

Currencies are no longer pegged to anything – so there are crises involving wild fluctuations and massive devaluations. Plus there’s currency speculation. The foreign exchange market is huge, and almost all based on speculation. Currency speculation is not only parasitic, providing nothing useful, but it’s an activity that thrives on instability. The more the value of currencies rise and fall, the more opportunity there is for profit from speculation.

Should we go back to the gold (or silver) standard? Of course not – why base the global exchange system on a commodity that has to be dug out of the ground, often in terrible conditions, often by children, causing lots of environmental damage, to be stored in the vaults of banks and concentrated in the hands of the already wealthy? It makes no sense when we have credit clearing and mutual credit.

Where does money come from now?

It’s incredible that there isn’t general agreement about how money is created (although I think we’re getting closer to it now). Money is a human creation. How can we create something and then not agree on how it’s created? There’s agreement about how stars are formed, and that’s much more complicated – or maybe it isn’t. Maybe the mechanics of money creation are more difficult to understand than the mechanics of star creation; or perhaps the waters have been deliberately muddied.

There are 3 theories of banking and the creation of money: the financial intermediation, fractional reserve and credit creation theories.

Financial intermediation

Textbooks often quote the FI theory, where banks take deposits from savers, and lend them out to borrowers. Presumably, money is assumed to come into existence only when governments print notes or mint coins. Banks make their profits from the interest they charge to borrowers, which is more than the interest they pay to savers. When this was generally discovered to be incorrect (although probably the majority of people still believe this is what happens), some textbooks started to quote the fractional reserve theory.

Fractional reserve

According to this theory, banks lend out more money than they have on deposit from savers (in the same way that goldsmiths lent out more notes than gold in their vaults to back them), as long as they keep 10% of the money they receive in reserve at the Bank of England. Then the ‘money multiplier’ effect kicks in to boost the amount of money in circulation. It works like this. Say a bank receives £100 in cash from a depositor. They keep £10 in reserve and can lend out £90. The borrower then (probably) buys something with this loan, and the seller deposits this money with their bank. Their bank sees this as ‘new’ money, keeps £9 in reserve and lends out £81 – and so on. In the end, almost £1000 is pumped into the economy from an original £100 deposit. The banks profit hugely by charging interest on money they didn’t have. In this model, the central bank can tweak the amount of money in the economy by changing the reserve ratio. In the example above, the ratio was 10% – the banks had to keep 10% of deposits in reserve. The central bank could increase the money supply by dropping this to 5%, say, or reduce it by increasing the reserve ratio to 20%. However, this model isn’t correct either, although you can find plenty of economics textbooks that say it is.

Credit creation

There’s no fractional reserve banking in the UK. Now banks can lend as much as they like, with no reserve requirements whatsoever, knowing that they’ll be bailed out if it all goes horribly wrong. The amount they lend is only dependent on the banks’ confidence that borrowers will pay it back. Banks have a government monopoly on the creation of money as credit, or if you like, as debt. So when someone borrows money from a bank – for a mortgage or a business loan – that’s when most money is created, out of thin air. This seemed unlikely to many, until it was proven by Richard Werner, and the Bank of England confirmed it in a bulletin in 2014.

It’s all accounted for with double-entry book-keeping. Banks register a £1000 loan as an asset – because someone then owes them £1000. But when they make the loan, they deposit £1000 into the customer’s account, and money in an account is a liability – a promise to pay. So the asset and the liability are for the same amount, and therefore cancel each other out, and nothing seems to have happened, even though there’s an additional £1000 sloshing around in the economy. This accounts for around 97% of all money in existence. Less than 3% is provided by the central bank when they print notes and mint coins.

We’ve been here before, by the way. Early banks used to issue their own banknotes (as promises to pay gold when demanded). They then charged interest on this magic money, until, in the 19th century, the Conservative government of Robert Peel attempted to stop banks lending and charging interest on money they didn’t have, by bringing in the Bank Charter Act of 1844, after which only the Bank of England could issue bank notes. However, the act didn’t prevent banks from lending money by creating deposits in customers’ bank accounts. Customers could pay for things using cheques, and no banknotes were required at all.

Positive Money conducted a poll of MPs, and found that 85% of them didn’t know where money comes from, which is a bit of a worry. J K Galbraith said that “The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled”. Maybe that’s what it is – people hear it but can’t really believe it. But I think that’s changing now.

The symbiotic relationship between state and banks

Governments don’t have control over the total amount of money in the economy. That’s down to the activities of banks, although states and banks now have a symbiotic relationship. Banking is perhaps the least trusted of professions (with the possible exception of politics). Banks don’t share their profits with taxpayers, but their losses are forced onto us. They make big decisions that affect everyone in the world, without consulting us, and they’re beyond effective regulation. It’s not a question of ‘evil bankers’ – most of them don’t understand how the money system works or where money comes from either. It’s about a system that’s evolved, and has been gradually manipulated to concentrate wealth in ever-fewer hands, and that slowly destroys our ability to do anything about it.

Two men who have never stood for election, Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke, were the architects of the bank bailouts in the US after the 2008 crash. It was the biggest transfer of wealth from ordinary people to elites in history. Every other Western country was told to follow suit.

The basic relationship is this: the state gives a monopoly licence to the banks to create money from nothing, as debt, with compound interest attached. Security is provided by the borrower, usually in the form of bricks and mortar, which is sometimes appropriated by the banks – especially when the economy crashes. The banks reciprocate by funding the state machine when they purchase government bonds (promises to pay in the future – a bond is an IOU, in other words). Banks have no restrictions on the amount of money they can create (and charge interest on), with nothing to back it. This is as true for the purchase of government bonds as it is for loans to businesses and individuals.

The future

The battle between the money men and everyone else continues. In their quest for power, the money men have defeated Roman emperors, the church, kings, US presidents and now, Islam (think Dubai). In other words, they have an awful lot of power. Financial institutions find ways around restrictions with more and more complex financial transactions, and the boom in the use of credit cards. The movement of money across national borders makes it even more difficult for a government or central bank to control money, and almost impossible for most people to even understand it.

There have been plenty of proposed solutions to curb this power – taking control of the money supply into the hands of the state in various ways (but the relationship between banks and state is so strong, this seems unlikely; and it would only put the same damaging game under slightly different management); crypto is certainly challenging banks, but is mainly about speculation rather than trade; mutual credit is certainly looking interesting too – no more scarce money, and control of the exchange medium brought into the hands of the public.

Economists tend to see themselves as concerned with the ‘real’ economy, and they see money as a mere means of exchange that concerns accountants, not them. And yet now money is a commodity in itself, and by far the most traded commodity in the world. So money is anything but a neutral medium of exchange (a surrogate for barter) – its main role in the current economy is to make more money. Private banks bring money into circulation, as debt, with compound interest attached to it, and they decide how much to lend and to whom, based on profitability, rather than what’s good for society.

We can do much better than this.

Here’s part 2 of a very quick history of money, to counter claims that ‘money evolved from barter’, or ‘Kings introduced coins so that their subjects could trade more easily’. Money, our means of exchange within capitalism, is also used to store value, and so stored it is - billions are accumulated in the hands of very few, taking the exchange medium out of circulation and effectively destroying democracy in the process. In a commons world, we could do much better.

Part 1 (3000BCE to 1400).

Part 3 (the 21st century).

15th – 19th centuries: early capitalism

John Calvin was credited (or blamed) for the relaxation of usury laws, but whoever was responsible, the ban on usury was certainly ended, resulting in a boom for bankers.

The birth of bonds

In Italy, at the beginning of the 15th century, bonds were introduced by the cities to fund wars. Purchasing state bonds became compulsory for citizens, but interest was paid on them. Bonds were promises to pay in the future. Because of fractional reserve banking, banks were able to buy up most bonds with money they didn’t have. So governments issued bonds to get the resources of the citizens to fight wars, but governments actually ended up deeply in debt to the banks.

Spain and Portugal lose out

Spain and Portugal had carved up the entire world between themselves in the 16th century, and galleons were importing gold and silver from Latin America every year. But a century later, they were among the poorest countries in Europe. They spent their American plunder on palaces and luxury goods, instead of developing banks and industries. They transferred money to merchants in other parts of Europe, where wealth and power began to concentrate.

This bullion from the new world formed the springboard for capitalism and the industrial revolution, but Spain and Portugal didn’t benefit.

The gold that the Spanish stole from South America didn’t hang around in Spain for very long.

The Great Settlement – foundation of the Bank of England

There was a constant tussle between banks and the state for control of the money supply. In Britain, Henry VIII relaxed usury laws and moneychangers prospered. Catholic Mary re-tightened usury laws, moneylenders hoarded coins and the economy shrank. Elizabeth took on the moneylenders, and issued gold and silver coins from the public treasury. Cromwell was funded by moneylenders, and provided licences for them to operate legally. They were given a square mile in the City of London to ply their trade.

This battle was ended with the founding of the Bank of England (the Great Monetary Settlement). It was the result of a deal between the sovereign and bankers – but only after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had given real power to parliament. The sovereign (state) endorsed bankers’ private money, and allowed it to circulate throughout the country as legal tender (that you can pay tax with). In return, state finances were put on a sounder footing, and the state had money to fight wars.

In 1688, William and Mary came to the English throne. William was in a war with France, and needed money desperately. Moneylenders generally refused (they’d been stung by royalty when the Stuarts had reneged on debts). Scot William Paterson came up with a plan – a loan of 1.2m from a consortium (largely Huguenot merchants, whose names were never released) who, in exchange, would be allowed to form a central bank. This happened in 1694. It provided money as debt to the king, and by 1708 it had virtual monopoly on issue of banknotes.

This was the start of a central bank / state system that survives today – the government can sell bonds to the central bank – so that they can spend without putting up taxes, and banks can lend money that they don’t have and charge interest on it. Debt started to grow uncontrollably. All countries now have central banks based on the Bank of England model.

US presidents v the bankers

There were several attempts to form a central bank in the US, and various US presidents were violently opposed to it – because they favoured democratic government over an unelected ‘money aristocracy’.

Alexander Hamilton wanted to establish a central bank in America modelled on the Bank of England. Jefferson trusted Hamilton and didn’t understand banking. Later, Jefferson, Franklin and Madison opposed it – it was a battle that raged until the Federal Reserve was eventually founded in 1913.

Andrew Jackson was the biggest opponent of central banking, and famously said ‘I killed the bank’. Bankers tried to crash the economy by restricting loans and blaming Jackson, but Jackson made successful alliances and the bank idea stayed dead. He survived an assassination attempt.

Lincoln applied for loans from bankers, who wanted to charge extremely high interest rates. He refused, and instead, got congress to authorise the printing of money by the government to fund the civil war. The notes were called ‘greenbacks’ because of the green ink on the back. These were printed without interest to the government (i.e. to taxpayers), to pay for troops’ wages and supplies. Lincoln wasn’t as lucky as Jackson, and was assassinated.

Hut taxes

When Europeans colonised Africa, they found it difficult to get Africans to work in their plantations, as most families had a smallholding to support themselves. Their solution was to introduce money into the African economy. ‘Hut taxes’ became payable – i.e. if you had a hut (which everyone did), then you had to pay a tax to the colonial authority. The taxes had to be paid in coins produced by the colonisers. When Africans asked how they were supposed to get these coins, they were told that they would have to work for them, in colonial plantations. If coins weren’t available locally, taxes could also be paid directly with work (Narissa Ramdhani, Financing Colonial Rule: The Hut Tax System, 1985).

In this way, money was introduced into parts of the world where it had never existed before. Whoever had the strongest army could issue money to organise a society to transfer wealth from ordinary people who created it, to themselves. It was a means of control, that still exists.

1800 to 2000

‘Money’ is not some given monolith that exists independently of world events – it’s constantly changing. 1971 was possibly as significant as 1694. Another momentous change is overdue. Let’s hope it’s a good one, that transfers power to communities and people, and away from the finance sector and the super-wealthy. Here are some of the big changes over the last 200 years.

In 1821, the UK introduced the first official ‘gold standard’, and other developed countries followed. It meant that all bank notes could be exchanged at a bank for gold. In other words, currencies are ‘backed’ by gold. This gave confidence in national currencies, but was discontinued when World War I saw combatant governments printing money like crazy to fund the war effort. The Federal Reserve (the US central bank, founded in 1913) was allowed to put $100 into circulation, backed by only $40 worth of gold, and between WWI and WWII, notes were only partially redeemable for gold. This was called a gold exchange standard, a type of fractional reserve banking that required banks to hold only a fraction of the value of the money they issued in reserve as gold.

Global currencies were at one time backed by, and redeemable for gold.

1920s and 30s

During the ‘Roaring Twenties’ – the Federal Reserve increased the money supply. Interest rates were low, and companies and individuals got into a large amount of debt.

The Great Depression: on ‘Black Thursday’ in August 1929, banks stopped lending and called in loans. People had to sell their stocks for any price to service their debts, but the big names (Morgan, Rockerfeller et al.) had taken their money out of the stock market and put it into cash or gold.

Wikipedia states that the Keynesians believed that the Great Depression was caused by people hoarding money, and refusing to consume or to invest, and that monetarists believe that it was caused by a contraction of the money supply. Both had an impact.

Wikipedia also says: ‘There is consensus that the Federal Reserve System should have cut short the process of monetary deflation and banking collapse’, and ‘By not lowering interest rates, by not increasing the monetary base and by not injecting liquidity into the banking system to prevent it from crumbling the Federal Reserve passively watched the transforming of a normal recession into the Great Depression.’ This sounds as if the banks are passive, and don’t understand the consequences of their actions – as if the ‘boom and bust’ business cycle doesn’t exist. If banks can make lending easy then tighten it up and foreclose on lots of businesses and homes, sell them, make more money and repeat – why wouldn’t they do it? Banks are able to make money scarce. The business cycle doesn’t just happen.

1940s, 50s and 60s

During WW2, European economies were turned over to war production, and farm and factory workers were sent to war. Consumer goods were bought from the US, mainly with gold. The US entered late, and by the end of the war, had two-thirds of the world’s gold. Europe had virtually no gold, but was later flooded with dollars lent by the US. The global economy couldn’t continue in the way it had, and so representatives of world governments met in Bretton Woods in the US in 1944 to devise a new system. From that meeting came the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. All global currencies were backed by the dollar, which was backed by gold, at $35 per ounce. This brought stability, with all currencies pegged to the dollar, rather than floating around freely. World trade boomed. But no reserve ratio was established, so this was, in effect, zero reserve banking, or at least the freedom for banks to do that. Banks could create money freely and states could spend it freely.

In 1949, Diners Club cards – the first credit cards – were introduced, and since then, credit card debt has boomed (provided by all kinds of corporations, not just banks) to the point where it makes a mockery of any government or collective attempt to control the money supply.

In the 50s and 60s, the US embarked on a spending spree, culminating in the hugely expensive Vietnam War (carpet-bombing poor countries isn’t cheap). The world was flooded with dollars, and countries started to wonder how much gold there really was to back it. In the 1960s, France got suspicious, and started to redeem dollars for gold. Other countries did the same, and the US lost 50% of its gold during the 60s.

The Vietnam war proved so expensive for the US, that they were forced to end the backing of the dollar by gold.

1970s

By 1971, it was obvious that there were many times more dollars in the world than gold to back them. It was the classic goldsmith’s fraud (see part 1), that had to be made official to stave off global collapse. So President Nixon went on TV to take the US off the gold exchange standard, and all the world’s currencies became fiat – i.e. they were worth something because the government said they were, and nothing else. The world entered an age of fiat and floating exchange rates.

Since then, currencies haven’t been backed by anything, which has resulted in wild fluctuations, massive devaluations and currency speculation that’s parasitic, provides nothing useful, and thrives on instability. The more the value of currencies rise and fall, the more opportunity there is for profit from speculation. Also in the seventies, the US began the now-famous protection racket with oil-producing countries, and the petrodollar was born. Oil-producing countries were ‘persuaded’ to sell their oil only in dollars (as in, ‘nice oilfields you’ve got here. It would be a pity if anything happened to them’). This massively increased demand for dollars, as they were required to buy oil, which everyone needs. The US was able to print dollars freely and purchase the resources of the world, creeping ever-further into debt, whilst building the largest military force the world has ever seen – by a long, long way.

Structural adjustment: newly-independent ex-colonies were offered loans from Western banks, after years of rule by Western powers, and extraction of their resources. The interest on these loans ensured that they’d never be free of debt. When they’re unable to repay, the IMF imposes ‘structural adjustment policies’ that put control of their resources ultimately into the hands of Western banks.

1980s and 90s

There had been a ‘deal’ between capitalists and workers in the West since WW2. The deal from Western governments was: don’t become communists and we’ll give you healthcare, social security and education, plus council houses, and we’ll tie wages to productivity. But the deal changed in the 80s to: we’re going to wind back those benefits, but you can have as much credit as you like.

Banking regulations were removed, and credit went through the roof. Banks hugely extended their influence over the economy, and would be bailed out by the public if they failed. In the UK, Gordon Brown removed any last vestige of government control over the money supply when he made the Bank of England entirely independent in such matters.

Banks took advantage of gaps in the law to buy up mutually-owned savings institutions (savings & loan companies in the US, building societies in the UK). Only building societies with ‘asset lock’ clauses remain mutual in the UK.

Now banks don’t have to hold any percentage of the money they create on reserve at the central bank. There were liquidity reserve ratios, which are similar, but which allow banks to buy government bonds, and the government will just put the money received into another bank – and on it goes. There were no real limits on the amount of money banks could create. Liquidity ratios were themselves abolished in 1981. There are ‘capital adequacy reserves’ – the Basel Accords – to make sure banks have a buffer if lots of loans start to go bad. But this doesn’t limit them if the economy is doing well. The ONLY limit on the amount banks can create is their confidence that borrowers can repay. The Glass-Steagall act was repealed (which means that the investment and retail arms of banking are no longer kept separate).

What could possibly go wrong?

140 years in 10 minutes. His idea is to go back to gold, which is maybe not the best idea.

Coming soon:

Part 3: the 21st century

Subscribe now

Here’s a very quick history of money, to counter claims that ‘money evolved from barter’, or ‘Kings introduced coins so that their subjects could trade more easily’. Money, our means of exchange within capitalism, is also used to store value, and so stored it is - billions are accumulated in the hands of very few, taking the exchange medium out of circulation and effectively destroying democracy in the process. In a commons world, we could do much better.

Part 2 (1400 to 2000)

Part 3 (the 21st century)

Keep in mind that we mustn’t think of ‘money’ in long-gone societies as being similar to ours. Their words for money may have meant very different things – maybe receipts or IOUs or even tax vouchers. In modern Europe, coins were introduced about 1000 years before banking, but in ancient Babylon, banking was introduced about 1000 years before coins. Both banking and coins disappeared and reappeared at various times and in different places. It’s impossible to generalise when it comes to the history of money.

Overview

We have to understand that most people throughout history never used money, as in notes or coins. Most ordinary people got the things they needed through a system of credit of some sort – either recorded officially, or just held in people’s heads. In a medieval inn, for example, everyone could get beer without paying anything, because the innkeepers needed lots of things from their customers – eggs, meat, dairy, fish, vegetables, fruit, cereals, blacksmithing, masonry, thatching, carpentry, furniture, clothes, baskets etc. – all of which were supplied by local people who wanted beer, as well as the things that other people produced. They didn’t have to bring these things to the pub though – it wasn’t barter; it was a kind of mutual credit in people’s heads. Everyone knew who was pulling their weight and who wasn’t. Most people didn’t stray far from home. This kind of mental (or recorded) tallying happened in most places, in most ages.

But in some places, in some time periods, people used (or were required to use) coins. Why? Well, possibly due to war. It’s unwise to offer credit to passing soldiers, and so in times of upheaval, war and empires, coins appeared. Rulers issued them to soldiers, who could buy anything they needed from the citizens, because the rulers decreed that citizens needed the coins to pay their taxes.

There seem to have been 4 great eras where either credit dominated (during times of relative peace and scattered kingdoms) or coinage / commodity money (corresponding to times of war and empire-building).

1. Pre-Axial age (before about 700 BCE): mainly scattered kingdoms, pre-coinage, money was credit.

2. Axial Age (c. 700 BCE – 600 CE) – an age of empire, conquest, war and coinage.

3. Middle Ages (c. 600 CE – 15th century) – a relatively peaceful period, scattered kingdoms, money was mainly credit; coins were scarce.

4. Modern Era: (15th century – present) – back to coinage / commodity money, conquest and war.

The earliest coin that we know of – from Lydia, in what is now Turkey, made from electrum, a naturally-occurring alloy of gold and silver. It’s over 2700 years old.

Origins of money

Let’s start with a theory that’s been discredited, but that can still be found in many economics textbooks. The story is that people were struggling to trade in a barter economy – they had to find someone who had what they wanted, and wanted what they had, which is difficult. They might have to cart sacks of potatoes around until they could find someone who wanted them. Someone came up with the idea of using something as a medium of exchange, like cattle, dried fish or salt – something that was useful in itself, so that you knew the value of it. This eventually changed to tokens that could be carried around more easily – like cowrie shells or precious metals. Then one day a wise king decided to mint coins, stamped with his head to ensure weight and purity, and give them to his grateful subjects as a medium of exchange that they could carry around easily, and that everyone would accept, so that trade could be facilitated in the realm. But this is not what happened. Throughout history, people have lived without money, in communities in which ‘everyone simply keeps track of who owes what to whom’ (Graeber, Debt, the First 5000 Years). And again, this wasn’t barter, due to the difficulty in finding a direct reciprocal trade. In fact, there’s never been a society in which the main means of exchange was barter, and money didn’t evolve from barter, but from mutual exchange within communities – where the vast majority of exchanges took place. Barter was always marginal and between strangers, and in fact the root of the word can be found in ways to cheat, deceive or to have sex with (and there are many other words for that!). That this is a theory still usually taught to economics undergraduates is scandalous.

Pre-700 BCE

Lots of ‘origin of money’ stories are lost in pre-history, and some sort of money was needed – for dowries, for religious ceremonies, ornaments to display status, protection money, fines for killing a member of a family etc. And the things used could be a whole range of different objects, depending on the culture. No-one is absolutely sure of the details of ancient monies.

Origin of money 1: ancient grain receipts

After the agricultural revolution and the development of the first cities, the ruling class didn’t develop by seizing the means of production, but by gaining a monopoly over the means of exchange and distribution. Farmers put their grain in collective granaries for safe storage, and got receipts for the amount of grain they’d delivered. As towns grew, so did the number of administrative, urban jobs, and a management class took over this central grain-based accounting system; and grain began to be lent in lean times. In the Sumerian empire, farmers deposited first grain, then other crops, tools and precious metals, in temples and palaces that had thick walls and guards to keep the deposits safe. They obtained receipts for their deposits on clay tablets, and these tablets could be used to collect their deposits if necessary, but they were also used to purchase things, clear debts and pay taxes. The earliest known examples of (cuneiform) writing were in fact accounts; and the earliest known bank was the House of Egibi in the city of Babylon, which operated in the first quarter of the first millennium BCE, although banking had existed since the third millennium BCE. They accepted deposits and provided loans and bank transfers, as well as foreign exchange (with the Assyrians, for example). Many banks existed in Sumer, and also in Egypt, where grain was the most important deposit. More here (great article).

The first Banks were popular because if you paid debts or taxes via the bank, you had an official record that couldn’t be denied.

The very earliest ‘coins’ appeared in China around 1200 BCE, although they weren’t coins as we know them. They were identically-cast tools like knives or adzes. China’s coins were always of base metal and therefore of low intrinsic value – unlike the high-value precious-metal coins that developed in the West. For this reason, banknotes appeared hundreds of years earlier in China, for high-value payments.

The first non-Chinese ‘pre-coins’ (ingots) appeared in Asia Minor before 2000 BCE. The ingots got smaller, got stamped, got rounder etc. until coins proper appeared in Lydia and Ionia (still in Asia Minor) in the 7th century BCE, during the reigns of two kings famous for their wealth – Midas (as in ‘Midas touch’) and Croesus (as in ‘rich as’ Croesus) – although both were possibly mythical.

c. 700 BCE – c. 600 CE: The Axial Age

Origin of money 2: tax tokens

Citizens of ancient empires and city-states paid taxes with grain or other produce, or labour; but at some point in Greek Asia Minor around the 8th century BCE, coins appeared, and by the time of Periclean Athens in the 5th century BCE, rulers were minting coins for their subjects to earn so that they could pay taxes with them. The coins were used to pay soldiers, who used them to obtain food, clothes, accommodation, booze, sex and weaponry, and locals queued to give them those things, to get the coins they needed to pay their taxes. Previously, soldiers had to scour the areas around their camps to requisition food and provisions, but now local people willingly came to them. It was much easier – the ruler could also pay farmers, masons, blacksmiths and carpenters to provide food for the court, horses, castles, weapons and ships, and the soldiers were used to enforce payment of taxes. Once this system was in place, it was easier for rulers to accumulate wealth and build their empires. Where a particular ruler’s coins circulated outlined the limits of that ruler’s realm, and ‘legal tender’ appeared for the first time.

David Graeber on one origin of money – to pay taxes (from 15.20)

Dominant nations or cities (like Athens) extended their power by spreading the use of their coinage, and by doing so, they spread the money system too. And on it went. Money-military-slavery complexes (from Graeber) developed (Alexander’s empire, Rome, various Indian empires, China during the Warring States period), which worked like this:

• Conquest – slaves captured;

• Slaves put to work in silver mines;

• Coins made from the silver;

• Soldiers paid with the coins (as well as shipbuilders, weapon-makers etc.);

• Conquered people ordered to pay taxes in the coins;

• People provisioned soldiers for coins;

• Armies were fed well, and conquered more lands.

Alexander captured local mints, that were then used to mint more coins for him to continue his campaign, often from melted down treasures in those cities. Similar things happened during the European colonisation of the world in the 19th and early 20th centuries – see ‘hut taxes’, below.

Often, the value of coins wasn’t stamped on them – their value was announced by ordinances. In that way, the ruler could devalue the currency, pay people high-value coins, then devalue, so that people then need more of them to pay their taxes. It was the equivalent of an additional tax. This suited the sovereign, but not the subjects.

So it was via the goods and services that rulers were able to claim from people who needed their coins to pay taxes that allowed tyrants to build their empires (and to feed soldiers, who were also their hit men to ensure that the plebs paid their taxes).

Whoever controlled the issuance of money was able to organise society to transfer wealth from ordinary people who created the wealth, to themselves. (Does that sound familiar?)

Athens was the first fully-monetised state. Coinage spread rapidly around the Mediterranean, and through Mesopotamia and Persia to India.

In Sparta, coins were iron discs, made brittle by dipping in vinegar (so they weren’t even valuable as iron). Spartan rulers deliberately avoided making the coins from precious metal, so that the coins had value just because the ruler said so. Gold and silver were only used for trade outside the boundaries of the kingdom – where their fiat didn’t work. Internal fiat money couldn’t be stolen in war, couldn’t leak out of the country for luxury goods from abroad, and as much could be produced as the ruler wanted. Also, if a state’s money was a useful commodity (precious metal) – the state would be on a constant quest for precious metal – a waste of energy and resources.

Rome vs the moneychangers

Rome’s money was stamped on thin copper (they didn’t have paper), but the value of the coins was much more than the copper itself. So the ascent of Rome was based on fiat money (money that’s only valuable because an authority says it is). Later, they conquered lands and stole gold and silver, which was used to produce coins (around 200 BCE). But this involved a lot of work to get, and could be stolen. It ended Rome’s financial independence.

Moneychangers became very powerful via usury (lending at interest). In the second and third centuries BCE, two emperors tried to restrict usury and were assassinated.

Julius Caesar brought control of the money system back to the state, in order to build large public works. He was assassinated too.

Roman coin of stamped copper, first century CE.

Jesus vs the moneychangers

Jews needed silver shekels to pay taxes. Moneychangers cornered the market and raised the price of money to what the market would bear. They did their transactions in the temple, which was considered profane. Jesus used violence for the only time during his ministry (whether the story is true or not is irrelevant – it has passed down to highlight the profanity of the banking industry) to throw the moneychangers out of the temple.

Jesus was killed too of course. There was a bit of a pattern developing, that would be repeated many times.

The Christian church prohibited usury, but in the end, was defeated by the money-men. Jesus may have won the battle with the moneylenders in the temple, but the church lost the war.

600 CE – 15th Century: the Middle Ages

After the fall of the Roman Empire, coinage began to disappear. But throughout the Middle Ages, there were various developments that set the scene for the birth of capitalism and the monetisation of everything, after the Renaissance.

Origin of money 3: bills of exchange

The Hawala system was born in India in the 8th century and was used to transfer payments between south and east Asia and the Middle East for goods that were moved along the Silk Road. It’s a system that continues to this day, and works like this: Hawala agents are trusted business people who may run shops or other local businesses. Someone wishing to transfer an amount of money to another country deposits the cash with their local Hawala agent, along with the town the remittance is to be sent to, the name of the person who will collect it, and a password. The password is sent to the receiver, who walks into their local Hawala office, gives the password and receives the cash. No bank account required. The agents charge a fee, and if the amounts they send and receive get too far out of kilter, then accounts can be settled with payments of some description between the agents – not necessarily money. It’s all based on trust, and works because the agents don’t want to damage their business reputations in their communities.

The Knights Templar had opened up trading and pilgrimage networks around Europe and into the Middle East (Charles Greenstreet Addison and Robert Macoy, The Knights Templar History, 1978), where they may well have learnt about the practice of Hawala. They developed extensive banking and financial services, so that European merchants could deposit coins, gold or valuables at one branch and withdraw them at another, in another country, by presenting a document that was in effect, a travellers’ cheque. This removed the risk for merchants of carrying valuables around the continent, and the cheques were of no use to bandits. The Knights Templar facilitated a boom in international trade, but after they were disbanded in 1312, merchants found it difficult to purchase goods abroad. Early banks stepped in by providing ‘bills of exchange’ – up-front payments for foreign goods. These bills were carried around Europe on horseback, and were accepted by sellers everywhere. When the merchants sold the goods, they repaid the banks, plus a fee, usually around 10%. They were careful not to call this a loan, as usury was illegal – it was just a money transfer for a specific purchase, with a fee attached, not interest. The bills of exchange started to be passed around as money, and the banks started issuing them for domestic transactions, not just foreign trade. There was no limit on the number of bills they could issue, and there was nothing to back them. After the Knights Templar were disbanded, they went underground to continue their activities – probably in Switzerland, which is (possibly) why it emerged as a banking centre.

Origin of money 4: ‘common tender’

We’ve mentioned the fact that most transactions for most common people throughout history was in the form of reciprocal favours – a type of mutual credit recorded in people’s heads. There were also local currencies that passed between traders on market days – people who knew each other but didn’t necessarily live in the same village. Local currencies could be issued as IOUs, by people who were known and trusted – and their produce was good. This included farmers, bakers, brewers and craftspeople. Coinage was used in the Middle Ages mostly by royalty and nobles, for luxury goods, and for waging wars. ‘Common tender’ that included mutual credit, IOUs and local currencies were used by ordinary people who rarely, or maybe never, saw or used coins. This meant that if there was an economic crash that made coinage scarce, ordinary people didn’t suffer in the way they do now (because they’re reliant on official currency). Ordinary people could issue ‘money’ whenever they needed it.

Paul Grignon’s take on common tender – medieval market money.

Bracteates – exchange but no store of value

In the early Middle Ages in the Holy Roman Empire, thin metal tokens called bracteates were made and distributed locally by princes and monasteries to serve as media of exchange. They had no intrinsic value, and were recalled regularly, often annually, with a small deduction – enough to dissuade people from holding on to them, and persuade them to spend them into the local economy instead.

Bills of exchange become transferable

Italian banking families like the Bardi and Peruzzi – in Lombardy (hence Lombard Street in the City of London) in the 13th and 14th century became very rich. But how, without usury? It was via bills of exchange (which were a bit like cheques). Merchants could deposit money in an Italian branch of a bank, then take a bill of exchange with them to pay for goods abroad. It would be no good to thieves, as it was payable only to the holder, like a cheque. The banks would charge a 10% fee for this – no usury. Or – merchants could promise to pay a certain amount after a trade was done, and ‘borrow’ money – via a bill of exchange – to do it. When the trade was done, they would pay back the cost of the bill of exchange, plus an agreed fee (usually around 10%). The supplier was happy to take the bill of exchange because he knew he could cash it at the bank.

Lots of bills of exchange started to be written, that weren’t backed by anything, and so they were produced in huge quantities. Later, the law was changed to allow them to be transferable, and so they circulated through the economy as money, at least for bigger purchases. Bankers became incredibly wealthy – wealthier than royalty. They behaved a bit like Mafia families, with intrigue, corruption and assassinations. They didn’t actually need interest to become so wealthy, as long as they had money-issuing powers and monopolies.

The Medicis were one of these banking families, who became bankers to popes and royalty, took charge of Florence and sponsored some of the great architects and artists of the Renaissance, like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. They were merely promoting their ‘brand’.

Origin of money 5: goldsmiths’ receipts

In medieval Europe, goldsmiths built strongrooms to keep their gold safe. They would store other people’s valuables in their strongrooms too, for a fee. They began to issue receipts for valuables stored, that could be used as money, so that when nobles wanted to buy property, for example, they didn’t have to carry gold and jewellery around a country infested with bandits. They could use the receipts as a way to buy things, because the seller knew that the goldsmiths were storing goods to the value of the receipt, and that the receipt was a claim on those real goods.

The goldsmiths started to lend these receipts, and charge interest. They circulated as money, and the goldsmiths started to get wealthier. Then, when they realised that people very rarely collected their valuables, they could risk lending more money than was backed by treasure in their vaults. And they did – many times more, until their lending became much more profitable than their goldsmithing. They became the first modern bankers – the beating heart of a system that was required to generate the funds for the campaigns and the palaces of royal and aristocratic families all over Europe, and later, the enterprises of the capitalists who took over the economy.

These early bankers became wealthier than monarchs. In fact, Jakob Fugger, a German banker born in 1459, is considered (adjusting for inflation) to be the wealthiest person who ever lived (Greg Steinmetz, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jacob Fugger, 2016). The bankers’ trick of lending non-existent money had to be enshrined in law, because it came to represent the foundation of European economies. It was called fractional reserve banking – the banks only had to keep a fraction (usually around a tenth) of the amount they lent out, in reserve in their vaults.

Coming soon:

Part 2: 1400-2000

Part 3: the 21st century

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The Credit Commons Society (CCS) was formed during the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK to support, promote, and educate about the Credit Commons – a globally connected network of decentralised, moneyless trading groups. Several members of the Growing the Commons (GtC) collaboration are involved in the CCS, notably Sue Bell who is organising its regular online meetings.

Once a month, the CCS hosts an online gathering where practitioners, researchers, and organisers explore different aspects of commons-oriented monetary and financial systems. The format is intentionally simple: a short reflection or guest presentation to open the space, followed by questions, shared contributions, and an open, interactive conversation. Rather than polished lectures, these sessions are chances to think together, compare experiences, and make sense of emerging practices across the wider ecosystem of credit clearing, mutual credit, and community exchange systems.

This is the third conversation we are publishing in this series, recorded in July 2025. Dil Green reflects on how commoning is a ubiquitous human activity, how we can characterise different types of commons, and how commoning shaped and continues to shape his own life.

Summary

• Commoning, as a verb, is distinct from commons as a noun – and the distinction matters. Dil defines commoning as a voluntary collaboration between people to create some value that is dependent upon the collaboration, which the participants could not obtain by themselves.

• Commoning is what humans do all the time whenever they are together: a conversation, a family, a platoon in the army, or a team inside a corporation can all be seen as examples of commoning. Like air, it is ubiquitous and comes in many qualities. It’s not even necessarily always a good thing. Commoning can be corrupted by the context in which it exists.

• Commoning is what builds society. It connects individuals in satisfying their particular desires into collaborative, prosocial relationships. Society would not exist without this ubiquitous, persistent human urge.

• Not all commoning produces a commons. Commoning is an active, living social process. When it does produce something that persists in time and space, people tend to reify it – turn it into a noun, call it “a commons” – and as soon as it becomes a thing, questions of property rights and ownership inevitably follow (at least in the West).

• But the value produced by commoning has a specific character: it is significantly diminished if anyone tries to own it, or even if the group claims exclusive ownership. In practice, existing legal systems still require someone to hold title deeds, but the aim is to reduce that to a formality that lets the commoning process get on with itself.

• Since commoning is a “hard-wired” social mechanic, it would be foolish to try to define or reinvent commoning as it ought to be. All we can do is design novel commoning contexts that may, if we pay attention and take responsibility, be more prosocial than existing ones. That’s the meta- activity we are engaged in: design in the broadest sense.

• Dil proposes four lenses through which we can examine any commoning activity: scale (number of people, duration, instances); formality (the degree to which the commoning practice is acknowledged and institutionalised); characterising the interdependence (material, social, cultural – at which level of human needs); and variety (the complexity of the commoning activity, possibly following phase changes rather than a continuous spectrum)

• Dil then applies these lenses to a commoning experience from his own life: being in a band. Sue applies the lenses to the Brixton LETS scheme (which Dil also was involved in), and the group do it together for the Housing Commons.

These are some more themes that participants explored in several rounds of questions and discussions during and after Dil’s presentation:

• The relationship between ownership, property rights, and commons, and how the Housing Commons model navigates the legal reality of land registries while keeping the social process at the forefront.

• Property not being a thing but a relationship: a bundle of rights around use, stewardship, and the fruits of use.

• The question of how to have institutions (a formalised set of relationships) without them ending up “having us”, i.e. without us becoming their slaves? Formalisation is a double-edged sword: it can be both a protection against enclosure and a potential source of rigidity.

• Material interdependence as a driver of commoning: what can draw us to be part of a commons is seeing that we can provide good material outcomes for ourselves while we do the same for other participants with different interests.

• Characteristic scale versus venture-capital-style “scaling” – the idea that commoning activities have a right size, set by their nature, and that going beyond those proportions fundamentally changes what they are.

• Competition and collaboration between different models (community land trusts, cooperatives, housing commons): rather than competing directly, the approach is to build good things and let people judge – there is a whole capitalist world to bring healthy alternatives to.

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Transcript

Dil: The title of this came from a conversation with Zoe Blackler at Kairos, who said, “Maybe you want to do a session at Kairos on commoning?” I said yes, I would, but I don’t know what exactly I would do, and she wanted it to be a forty-five minute talk, and they don’t record it, so there’s no slides, so it was hard to think about. But what I came up with was the thought that I could peg how I’m thinking about commons and commoning now onto things I’ve experienced in my life, that I’ve done that I think were commoning experiences, even though I didn’t know it at the time.

What is commoning?

So that’s what this creating and learning and making and failing and designing and building is. There’s one way of describing a sequence of events so that it’s not a map, it’s not a life story, or anything like that. But what happened when I actually sat down and tried to structure this is, what I realised I needed to do was a bit of a preamble which sets up some lenses through which to look at those experiences. Which means I might have too many experiences written down to go through them all, so I’m going to do the first bit.

So, commoning. I’m going to try and do something to tell a story of how I’ve arrived at commoning as what I think is the thing I want to spend my life doing, one way or another – what’s left of it – pegged to things I’ve experienced. And there are some themes that I think are worth tracing through, and so I’d like to set those out and get those in people’s heads.

But before that, the basis of it all, I think, is increasingly: what people do all the time when they are together – or being together at least – can be seen as commoning. It’s almost all informal, it’s almost all unacknowledged, but as soon as you see it that way, it’s very hard to unsee it. And of course people have other definitions of commoning, but if you will do me the favour of letting that be the basis of this conversation and give it a try, that would be good.

So, “commoning” as a verb, as very distinct from the noun “commons” as things. I think that’s becoming more and more important to me, the distinction. In the first place, I think we called the ‘Festival of Commoning’ that rather than ‘Festival of the Commons’ just because we didn’t want to fight with people about what commons meant, but actually the character of it as a verb I think is super important and I’ll get to that a bit more.

So, if we try and start with that and say, what is commoning, what’s my definition that I would like to bear with: doing something – collaborating, that’s the thing they are doing – voluntarily, to build some value which is dependent upon their collaboration, which they could not make alone by themselves. You could add to that: and which would be different if there were different people collaborating, but I’m trying to keep it simple.

So, it’s an active thing; it’s voluntary; it’s building some value which would be unattainable without that collaborating. Further – and I think this is what ends up making something that one might end up calling a commons – that value has a character such that it is significantly diminished if anyone tries to own it, or even if they say that together they exclusively own it. And this, I think, as I say, applies everywhere. So, a conversation is a commoning activity; this call is a commoning activity; a platoon in an army is a commoning activity; an evening in a nightclub, I think, is a commoning activity; a political party is a commoning activity.

Dil’s definition of Commoning:

Doing something - collaborating - voluntarily (in the sense of ‘willing’), to build some value which is dependent upon their collaboration, which they could not make by themselves.

Further, that value has a character such that is significantly diminished, if any one of them tries to ‘own’ - or even if they say that together they exclusively own it.

They are not all the same; they are not all as healthy or as unhealthy. Commoning is just so widespread, so ubiquitous, that it isn’t even necessarily a good thing. It’s just what humans do. It’s like, “Is the air a good thing?” Well, I mean, it’s just where we live, and there’s good air, bad air, better, worse air. At times you need this sort of air; at times you need that sort of air. It’s just air. Commoning is what humans do.

So, I think I’ll stop there and just see if that’s landed.

Questions and comments round 1 – conversation, family and platoon as commons

Sue: So, what I’m going to do is to do a round which will be quite simple. So, to ask in my portrait gallery in a round. If first of all, you have any questions, to clarify what it is for you that Dil has said. And Katja, I’m going to start with you.

Katja: What comes up for me is: if people do commoning, is that then also a commons? From what you said, probably not. And I wonder what the difference is. Maybe there is not always a resource involved with commoning. Another thing I’ve been thinking about is, I read – I think that was Massimo de Angelis who said that – the family is a mini-commons, and that always struck me as right. On the whole, I think I’ve had similar thoughts: that commoning happens a lot. The platoon, I was wondering about that, because I don’t know how platoons work. I thought that there was a hierarchy, but maybe in the platoon itself not. Yeah, those are my thoughts.

Dil: So, Sue, I’m going to take direction from you. Should I collect all the questions and then come back in one blob at the end, or shall I do them...

Sue: I would suggest you go individually because I think that will be helpful and you might end up answering someone’s question on the way.

Dil: Okay, right, so your first thought was: if people do commoning, does that automatically make a commons? I would say no. We’ll see later that I get more and more convinced that it’s the active social process that is commoning, not the value that results. And at the same time accept that humans will always prefer to use a noun than a verb because it’s cognitively cheaper – it’s so much easier to talk about a brick than talk about the process of digging up clay, forming it into a cuboid shape, baking it at high temperature. A brick connotes all that sort of stuff very cheaply. So, as soon as a commoning activity produces some recognisable value that persists in time and space, people are likely to end up labeling that as a commons.

But this call might produce a recording which we could make public under some commons license, and that might be a commons; but this call is a living thing and it isn’t a commons yet, it is just a commoning activity – that’s my take on that point. And I guess we probably haven’t got time for secondaries so I am just going to hope that that’s okay and move on.

So, this idea of family as mini-commons: there was a whole section I was going to do for this thing that I’ve decided not to, which was to start characterising commons as enforced commons, as voluntary commons, as corrupted commons, as enclosed commons, all sorts of, and in the end I just ended up saying that thing I said before, commons are like air. If you subscribe to my notion that almost all human social activity can be described as commoning of a sort, and therefore the categorisation of types of air and types of commons could go on forever. A family is an odd one because there’s so much social pressure that your participation in it may or may not – you didn’t ask to be born for a start – your parents chose you, you didn’t choose them. You didn’t even choose life. So, there are aspects of a family as a commons which are unique and strange I would say. So, it’s a dodgy version of a commons I think to base anything on.

Sue: Thanks very much, Dil, that’s great.

Dil: Well, I have one more, just the platoon one, and it’s very short. I’m not a student of this at all, but for what I’m aware of social science and studying soldiers is: what causes soldiers to risk their lives or even basically commit suicide is the family unit the platoon becomes. They are not dying for king or country or flag or a cause. In the end, they’re risking their lives for the people that they depend upon to keep them alive, and they value that. So, the process of making a platoon is, by my definition – which needs only to last the length of this call if you don’t like it – is commoning.

Sue: Thanks, Katja. So, Chik, you’re the next person, you need to unmute. Do you have any questions or comments on that part?

Chik: On the previous one - so, identity fusion is a fairly new strand of identity theory that validates that idea of a small unit as being the driver of quite a lot of extreme behaviour in human beings. I think you made it quite clear on voluntary, which I had a question mark on. It’s just that person has the agency and drive. It doesn’t mean to do it without payment, right?

Dil: Oh, a hundred percent, yes. For instance, if we think of a family, a grumpy teenager can just stop collaborating. Or they can actively disrupt. And also, if you think of the platoon, if you’ve ever read The Good Soldier Schweik, it’s perfectly possible – or seen Sergeant Bilko – it’s perfectly possible to be a soldier and completely not build what the army wants them to build. It’s very very hard, and, even under torture, you don’t actually inhabit the brain of somebody. They’re not collaborating with you, you might be able to force them to do all sorts of things, but it’s not collaboration. So, unless it’s voluntary at some level – now this is why I got into the idea of corrupted commons - because people do collaborate to form a platoon in an army, but they might be an unwilling conscript, because they have no choice. So, there are points where the human need for building connection, the human automatic habit of coming together, brings them into a voluntary commoning process which is in some extractive or destructive context, and that’s really how things get corrupted.

Sue: Thanks very much, Dil. Dave.

Dave: I just want to ask a question about the concept of ownership, or lack of. And I know that if we had a few houses in the housing commons, people are going to ask who owns the houses. And I don’t think saying “nobody” is going to satisfy them. They’re going to say, who’s got the title deeds? And then the answer will be, well, the Stroud Housing Commons organisation, or the steward group, or whoever we decide holds those title deeds. And so, as far as the world is concerned, I think they’re going to think whoever holds the title deeds holds the houses.

Dil: Yes, that has to be the case and that’s… We’ll come to this business of putting to the forefront the active social process as the thing. I think that’s probably the way to deal with that. There is no way; we can not control houses without having something in the land registry if you’re in the UK at the moment. But we can act to make that, as far as possible, just a piece of paper that lets us get on with doing things the way we want to get on with doing them.

Sue: Okay, although I am facilitating today, I’m actually going to ask a question.

Dil: Please do, it’s not exactly a big audience.

Sue: In that case, I’m grateful. What I’m noticing, and partly it’s because of my work for five decades in community, what I’m noticing is, one of the things that I hear as missing – I’m sure it isn’t, but I hear as missing – is about power or agency. And I think that’s really important because my experience is that the way we’ve been wired as humans, from birth onwards, and in fact it’s probably from conception onwards, particularly how we are schooled within European, American, so on, views. So often, what we do is, we give our power and agency away. In effect, what we do is, we say, no, mummy and daddy should do it. You know, the community should do it, or the government should do it, or the council should do it.

And in commoning, and I’m changing my language around this, it’s not about rules and regulations, it’s about rights and responsibilities, and increasingly, people are bleating, and I use that word particularly, bleating like sheep about their rights, but actually not taking on their responsibilities. And in commoning, I think that that’s an issue which maybe we could bring forward, and hopefully, helps us change our mindset about – I’m not going to use the word ownership because that’s a very European thing and there are lots of different cultures in the world – but about our responsibility for how we go forward in some kind of a way. I don’t know if that’s helpful, and François is just joining us.

Commoning as ubiquitous human activity that builds society

Dil: So, what I'm going to do is just rehearse the definition of commoning that we've just explored, and that will be a good basis. I can do that in a few seconds, and then can move on. So, I wanted to use the word commoning to define – at least for the purposes of this call, this conversation, and actually take it as if true, even if it doesn't quite fit – commoning as doing something, collaborating, that's the thing we are doing, collaborating voluntarily – in the sense of willing, not without pay – to build some value which is dependent upon that collaboration, which the participants could not make by themselves.

And further, that the value they produce has a character such that it would be significantly diminished if any of them tried to own the value, or even if they said that together, they exclusively owned that value. And I’m saying that commoning is a fundamental human social behaviour. People do it all the time, whenever they’re together. So, I’m saying a conversation is a commoning, this call is a commoning, a platoon in an army relies upon commoning, a political party is a commoning. And there are all sorts of commons, and they’re not necessarily, though there are all sorts of commoning practices, they don’t all produce commons, as nouns, and there’s no point trying to write down the list of types of commoning activities because it is a ubiquitous human behaviour.

Now I am going to break that definition out a bit, and say a bit more. So, voluntary, and this speaks to your point, Sue. These are individuals with some agency making relatively free choices and, here again is something that came up before: even if you control someone completely, you can’t force them to join in with a value creation conversation, a collaborative value creation conversation. You can be torturing someone, you can get some information out of them, but you’re not going to jointly create value.

You might force something; and another example I used is: a recalcitrant teenager can completely refuse to join in with building the family unit. So, in commoning, we have individuals with individual drives, coming together to create something which adds value for each of them. They wouldn't be there if they weren't feeling like they were going to get some value according to them from the collaboration. So, that's the individuals with agency and why they are there.

The next point is, they're making something that none of them could do alone, and I haven't got much elaboration on that until later, and then there is quite a chunky bit on that later. And then, the impossibility of ownership, which is a radical distinction from property rights as generally conceived of in the West. The modern state, all that sort of stuff.

People will always, when they can – I said this before, I will say it again – reify things when they can. By reify I mean, turn something that might have been a verb or a description of a process into a nice cheap noun. And the example I gave before was, it’s much easier to say brick than it is to say pieces of clay that you dig up and carefully refine and form into a cuboid shape and bake in an oven until it’s partly vitrified as a building material. We just say brick. And all of those other things are nicely connoted. So, it’s much cheaper to say brick.

But commoning, if it's a ubiquitous human activity as I propose, doesn't always produce something which has persistence across time, or millions of instances, or persistence in place. Whenever it does, though, it's going to get called the commons if it's that sort of a thing. And as soon as it's a thing, then, certainly in the West, people will start to think about property rights and ownership, even if we would rather they didn't. So, to counter this, is taking seriously that commoning is a verb and situating the commoning as the important thing: an active living social process.

But commoning, if it’s a ubiquitous human activity as I propose, doesn’t always produce something which has persistence across time, or millions of instances, or persistence in place. Whenever it does, though, it’s going to get called the commons if it’s that sort of a thing. And as soon as it’s a thing, then, certainly in the West, people will start to think about property rights and ownership

Whether or not it produces something which someone can point to and say, that’s the commons, if we understand that it will be the death of the commons, or at least the diminishment of the commons if the active living social process is attempted to be owned, or considered to be property. And, I was going to write, it’s impossible to own such a thing, but actually, Facebook did enclose upon people’s conversations in an incredibly powerful way. So, even calling something an active living social process, and that that’s hard to enclose, doesn’t mean that enclosing it will kill it, and make people leave.

So, the proposition here, which makes sense of the definition of commoning, is that what commoning really does – what the underlying prosocial thing about it does – is it connects individuals in satisfying their particular individual desires into a collaborative prosocial relationship with other individuals. In other words, commoning is what builds society.

So, that's why it's ubiquitous. Society would not exist without – whether you call it commoning or not – without that ubiquitous, persistent, unquenchable, unstoppable human process, human urge.

So, I think I’ll stop again and see if there’s any unpacking of that. I think there’s only one more section like this before I get onto the fun stuff.

Questions and comments round 2 – ownership, responsibility and the importance of design

Sue: François, do you want any questions for clarification or any comments.

François: Yeah, I am a little bit intrigued by this notion of impossibility of ownership. Ownership – what about the commons itself, for example. A commons itself can own what is produced. So I would have thought. For example, thinking of a small community, like a village might produce something of value which it perceives as being of common ownership amongst the community. But to the external world, wouldn’t they regard it as ownership? So, I am intrigued by this impossibility of ownership and why it is important. Why is the impossibility element of it important? I am not sure what the question is exactly, but I am a bit unclear about it, intrigued by it.

Dil: Okay, firstly, I probably said the word “impossible” out loud – ah no, I have written “impossibility”, and that is an inconsistency. What I said earlier on was that the value has a character such that it would be significantly diminished by the exertion of strong property rights. So, I resile from “impossibility”. “Non-desirability,” shall we say, is a weaker statement.

Secondly, I still do hold that the extent to which that village claims property rights over, let’s say, the food which their commoning activities have produced is a diminishment, not a destruction, of the social value of that. It is a social value we are talking about – human value, not money value, of course. That probably should have been stated.

For instance, if the next-door village has had a calamity and their crops have been burnt, then you can… Strong property rights would suggest, think: ‘They are going to pay a high price for our food now, great. Their gold didn’t burn; let’s have all their gold because they’ll starve to death, they’ll surely give us all their gold.’ And that would be a diminishment of the future prospects of the village that’s got all the food because, tit for tat, next year when their harvest fails, someone else is going to do that to them. So, ownership is a diminishment of the value produced by the process of commoning; that is the claim that I’m making. I hope that helps.

Sue: Is it okay to move on, François?

François: Yeah, I could come back, but yes, let’s move on.

Sue: Okay, Chris, you are next in the round.

Chris: I could talk for an hour on this, but I won’t. Just to say this, and it was an insight I had over a decade ago: it was Jeremy Bentham, who is sitting there to this day in UCL, who pointed out that property is actually not a thing, as Dil points out, but it’s a relationship. There is a subject-object relationship here. It’s universal. That is, it is the relationship between the person and that which is the object of his property. So, what he said was, it’s this thing that is the object of something which is proper to the man. An object that is proper to the man. And therefore, it is a relationship. It is a bundle of rights, and this is where I got my nondominion thinking from. The right of use, the right to the fruits of use, the rights of stewardship, and the key one, I think – which is where the community comes in – is this. I was having this conversation very recently, in relation to the custodian and whether that’s a proper word. And maybe there is a better word that we should be thinking about for the role of the community as a group, you know something that is held in common. And I’ll stop at that. That is where my thinking got to and that four-party relationship, I believe, is a universal potential viable system, okay. So, I’ll stop there.

Sue: I’m also going to make a quick contribution, and then, Chik, I will ask you because you were away for the round.

Firstly, I found that really helpful, Dil, François and Chris, because I have to use examples in order to understand words. I’m thinking about the place where I’m living and wanting to enable someone else to be present with me in it, and thinking of the old terms of renting, selling, all that kind of thing. What I want is joint responsibility, and what I mean by that is, I want the other person to get something out of this that they want. I want myself to get what I want out of it, plus I want the property to get what it needs.

And so, that makes me understand a little bit better, though not necessarily to put the words that make sense to other people, but they make sense to me. Which is what helps.

So, Chik, do you have any questions or comments to clarify or add to this part of the conversation.

Chik: Maybe just a comment is that the word ‘prosocial collaborative processes’, this is often used in OICD's work as well, so we talk a lot about how weaponisation of identities and cultures degrades the prosocial context towards violent action, and that OICD's work is really trying to build that cultural context in which prosocial activities can manifest. I think I have been working on how this will work together with commons as a separate thing. But, what Dil – I think you've highlighted this – it’s that actually the work I am doing with OICD is commoning. It is all part of the same package but labelled differently which I find fascinating.

Dil: Yeah, I think we’ll get to more on that. Thank you. Right, I’m going to crash on. So, this is all – slight disjoint here. This refers back to what you were saying, Sue. Collaboration takes work, and the work is the assumption of responsibility. People accept responsibility and therefore there’s some requirement upon them, and the only possible payback for that is value that was otherwise unattainable. And people might reject this quid pro quo relationship. People talk about gift economy and things like that. Well, a gift economy might be a value to you that would be otherwise unobtainable without giving something away.

The value is not monetary value. The value could be an extraordinarily high-level value that some particular individual participant or a group of participants could jointly subscribe to. So, it’s still a value that is derived from that collaborative work. And I am very strong: this is the basis of human society, this willingness to accept responsibility for the process of building something that one could not attain alone.

Since this is everywhere, under my definition, at all time, at all scales, it manifests in a million different ways. Just one nice, cute example: as David Graeber pointed out, the biggest secret of capitalist organisations is that they operate communism internally, because anything else would be insane, and there is a whole load of economics on that. The theory of the firm – the economist's name has gone out of my head, someone will have it. You don't pay rent for your desk, your boss does not rent his team to the department, the stationery cupboard is not set up as a shop. A capitalist organisation is a commons of some kind then, even though we have serious criticisms of the outcomes when society organises itself along those lines.

This is the basis of human society, this willingness to accept responsibility for the process of building something that one could not attain alone.

So, that’s saying again, commons, commoning, is not a universally lovely thing. We need to ask what sort of commoning, under what circumstances, and what sort of commons are produced. So, it would be foolish to set out to define, or invent, or reinvent, or renew commoning as we believe or hope it ought to be or could be. If we accept this, that it’s a basic, hard-wired human-sociality mechanic urge, then all we can do is hope to configure some novel commoning contexts which may, if we’re lucky, pay attention and take responsibility, be more prosocial than other ones.

Which means that, what we’re actually about in this pro-commoning world, where we all partake in one way or another, is design. That’s the meta-action that we are part of, the meta-activity: design in its broadest sense. Not making beautiful this, that or the other, or clever do-hickies, but design – and I trained and spent a long time being a designer – I am still quite happy with this definition. I am not even going to try and say, ‘believe me, please’; I am going to tell you: design is that human capacity which is innate but can also be developed, trained for, refined, practiced; the ability, the capacity to propose into a complex context – that’s one where the law of unintended consequences is the only certain law, proper complex context – to propose into such context with an optimal balance of efficiency of effort versus reliability of outcome.

Now, that’s a lot to unpack, but basically, when, say, because I did architecture and an architect designs a building, they’re proposing an incredibly complex intervention into the fabric of the city, let’s say, or the fabric of that bit of nature, if it’s in the countryside. They don’t have time to build fifteen prototypes and test this, that or the other. They’ve actually got to build a building. But the impact on the context of a building is enormous. Over time, as a huge lump, as a damage to, or at least a radical restructuring of certain parts of what’s there already.

So, if you’re a good designer, what you’re capable of is proposing an intervention into that complex setting which you cannot quite ever predict. It’s not a machine where you can see what all the parts are; it’s a living complex entity that changes over time and will respond to the building that is built in unpredictable ways. So, if you’re a good designer, you can make propositions into complexity relatively cheaply that are relatively high-quality. That’s the capacity for design, and so, if we are thinking about designing commons, we need to be thinking about how to design new commoning contexts, new commoning protocols, new commoning habits into a social situation that is much more complex than a city even, much harder to know. But we need to be designing as well as we can, with affordable effort, given how small our resources are, for relatively high-quality outcomes. So, it’s the practice of design that we’re in for at the moment.

We need to be designing as well as we can, with affordable effort, given how small our resources are, for relatively high-quality outcomes. So, it’s the practice of design that we are in for at the moment.

I’m just going to barrel on with this bit, and get through it, and then do some questions. So, what I’m going to do in the second half of this call is, do something more fun: visit some different commoning contexts that I’ve had experience of across my life and invite us all to consider those contexts through a number of lenses.

Four lenses for commoning activities

And these are the lenses of design freedom, I think, or some of them. We might well propose some others. But the ones I’ve got in front of me are:

• The scale of the commoning activity, the commons involved. That could be across time or space. It could be the number of instances. It could be the number of people. Scale changes things dramatically. So, scale of commons, or commoning, matters.

• Another lens is formality. The degree to which the understanding of the commoning practice involved is abstracted from the actuality of the practice. That’s a lot of words, but people generally can have conversations without thinking about the rules of conversation or how to have a good conversation.
  
  If you were in the court of the sun king in Versailles, you probably were not in that thing. You were probably incredibly, or wish you were incredibly highly trained in the art of conversation to be able to survive in that milieu. But generally people just strike up conversations without referring to abstract guides. On the other hand, when we do a housing commons, if we haven’t got an abstract formalisation of what that commons is, we are cruising for bruising.
  
  So, there's a degree of formality that is variable across different commoning contexts, and I've said you could also describe that formality as acknowledgment. In other words, you might enter into some commons, you're just commoning, you're just chatting¸ just turning up to this call thinking it will be fun. You might be inducted into the army and have no bloody choice. But there are other commoning things where you acknowledge the rules of the space, or the culture of the space, or the habits of the space, or the aims of the engagement beforehand in a formal way.

• So, scale, formality and characterising the interdependence. Now, this is where we get to what you were talking about, Chik. I’ve talked a lot about material interdependence, and in some places as a ‘without which not’, a sine qua non, for the ability to stand up a commoning experience. And if we talk about material independence and think about the Maslow ladder of needs, material stuff is about the bottom rung, or maybe the bottom two, depending on your definition of materiality. And of course, there are many other rungs on that ladder, and I think there are interdependencies at all layers of existence, some of which might be material and some might not; a conversation at the bus stop is not a material interdependence, though you might come away with a slightly raised somatic feel for having a good one.
  
  Oxytocin apparently is what gets people - it used to be known as the love hormone, but they discovered it’s also the risk-your-life-for-your-platoon-mates hormone; it’s the same deal. So, there are interdependencies at various different levels, and material interdependence is probably the one that we’re focusing on because we’re trying to buy back the world from capitalism. So, we need money, so we’re talking about leveraging people’s materiality, where it’s under stress, to encourage them to make this effort to join in with commoning, to take the responsibilities that they might have preferred mummy and daddy to do for them. Go and ask your MP for rent controls. No, during the housing commons, you have to involve conversations about setting your own rent with people who have got different interests than you, about what the level of rent should be.
  
  So, characterising the character of the interdependence of the commoning. Okay, I’m just going to reiterate again: scale, formality and characterising the interdependence.

• Variety. Variety is the cybernetics term for the quantity of complexity. There’s a load of words I’ve written here, I’m probably not going to do them, but if anyone knows the cynefin framework - Dave Snowden - he suggests that there are phase changes of complexities. There are things which are simple, things which are complicated, things which are complex, things which are chaotic, and that it’s not a continuous spectrum, it’s more like the phases of matter: solid, liquid, gaseous, plasma.
  
  Actually, mostly, things fit into some buckets, and the interspace – the limited space between solid and liquid – is quite narrow, quite specialised, and almost nothing exists there. And I think, we might be able to look at commoning in that sort of phase change way and talk about a range, maybe phases.
  
  There’s an individual commoning, maybe internally, internal family theory, maybe you’re a commons inside yourself. Conversation is a relatively small number of actors. Collaboration is usually persisting over some time in pursuit of some more specified goal than a conversation. Cooperation tends to be even more formalised. Collectivisation is a particular form of collaboration. Intentional commoning, I am going to say, that’s a thing. And federation. These are the different phases maybe.
  
  So, the level of variety, the complexity of the commoning activity, or the commons, to be produced. And there might be anti-patterns of that complexity, like incorporation, legal personhood and statism.

Okay, that’s the end of the theory bit, so I’m going to stop and see if anyone’s got any more clarifications that they would like.

Questions and comments round 3 – applying the lenses, material interdependence

Sue: Katja, you want to ask a question?

Katja: Possibly. Yeah, it was a quite a lot.

Dil: Yeah, it was. I decided not to break it into two, maybe I should have done.

Katja: I think, where the most things came up for me was about the formality because in your example it can be positive. That is certainly quite true that, if you acknowledge the commons, then it is more difficult to enclose it, potentially. It’s very easy to enclose it if people don’t even know it’s there. And I think that has happened a lot. I mean that’s the whole thing in a way.

But there was also a part in me that said sometimes making things too formal can also be detrimental. You do something naturally and then when you put too much attention to it, it might become contrived. Those were some thoughts I had. And some of the other stuff, I didn’t completely follow it all; I think I’ll just leave it at that.

Sue: Thanks, Katja. My sense is that’s where we are. We’re not really sure, but we’re in the process of finding.

Dil: I just had a response to that. What I really want to do is explore – and this is also the work that Chris has spent years and years on – is how can we have institutions, in other words, formalised sets of relationships, without them ending up having us, and discovering that by formalising something we’ve become its slave, rather than it becoming a context where we make ourselves more alive.

This is, I think, the fundamental question that anyone who calls himself an anarchist seriously has to answer: how can we have institutions without them having us. And it’s a big question. But it’s probably a sidestep from this call.

Katja: Can I say something. I don’t know where I read that recently, but somebody coined the term ‘exstitutions’.

Sue: Okay, Chik. Do you have any comments or clarification. And you’re muted.

Chik: I’m still pondering on the material interdependence and I think it was Bruce’s comment about how in certain contexts, like in Kenya, the trade networks broke down first, before the election. They were thinking whether the economic network activity or the social identity networks are the earliest indicators of division happening and which would be the first to signal the divisions happening in communities, and so I’m still – I haven’t seen enough or read enough or understand it enough to know whether this is what binds people together or whether this is still as fragile as a cultural narrative. That would be my question mark at the moment. The the other question mark is, more recently, when I came across several research around Maslow’s ladder being out - what’s the word for it - that there are more fundamental needs that drive human beings; that if in certain contexts the need for belonging would overpower the need for housing or food, and they would then commit suicide for the group . So, in certain contexts, the human needs shift; it seems like it’s not a a strict hierarchical ladder, but quite a malleable thing that seems to change.

Dil: Okay, good. The material independence - I am absolutely with you. I’m definitely still pushing it - for instance in relation to the housing commons - I think, because we can produce with the housing commons, if it can be made viable, a really significant material benefit to three different kinds of actors at least. It’s worth doing. But actually, you could absolutely criticise it as a ‘homo economicus’ view of people; that the only thing which will justify them making the effort to build the commons is if they get something physical out of it. I still think there’s stuff there, but that brings us to the Maslow point.

I think that critique of Maslow is rooted in a massive and almost complete misunderstanding of Maslow. Many people don’t even call it a ladder, they call it a pyramid. And they act and talk and write about it, even quite serious people, as if it’s a bingo card – as if you cannot possibly have anything further up the pyramid unless you’ve got a full house at all the lower levels. And that is absolutely not my reading of Maslow at all.

It’s a ladder. Once you get to the top, people can kick out the bottom rungs and you’re still there. Which is exactly agreeing with that critique. But it’s not a critique of Maslow’s proposition, it’s a critique of the inadequate messaging about what it means. There is a perfect example. There is a woman called Louise Michel. Louise Michel was one of the main actors, or an important actor, in the 1870 Paris commune revolt. And she was exiled to one of those Papillon-like French penal colonies of Papua New-Guinea, just utterly desolate, given no food, just given a bit of land and some canvas, and told to get on with life.

Many of them just died. She managed to not only – all of her bottom rungs were kicked out viciously – she not only managed to survive, she managed to foment a revolution, a revolt among the Indigenous peoples against the French overlords and was eventually pardoned and lived her days out in South East London. She had all the bottom rungs kicked out and yet remained a powerful human being. It was more valuable to her to be herself because she had achieved self-actualisation. Once you got self-actualisation, they can starve you and you might well be one of those people who says, okay, burn me at the stake then, I am me. I will not become somebody else to save my life. So, I think that critique is a hundred percent correct, but it’s not a critique of Maslow’s ladder as I understand its meaning.

Chik: Yeah, makes sense.

Sue: Okay. Dave. Do you want to...

Dave: A question about variety. It is probably too big a question for this meeting, but it’s something I’ve been struggling with in various ways. How do different ways of organising relate to commoning? And there’s plenty of real-life examples of people who contact us and say, “We’re building commons, let’s work together.” And you have a look and it turns out they’re building community land trusts or cooperatives and the question is: can we use the tools and ideas we’re developing with them, or are we actually in competition with them for investment and customers, etc.

Dil: So, the nice thing about where I’m at at the moment, that I’m proposing here is, of course they’re commoning, because it’s just this thing that humans always do. There are different ways of doing it. At one level, we’re in harmony with them; they are commoning for prosocial intent and they are approaching it through a design lense. They are trying to think of ways of building prosocial commons in capitalism and so we are absolutely in many ways shoulder to shoulder with them. But if you think of it as ‘different architects have got different propositions for the town hall’, somebody is in the end going to choose one of the designs for the town hall, so in a sense those architects are in competition.

But the best way for one of those architects to win the competition is probably to build seven other really nice buildings so that people can look at the pretty picture they’ve drawn and say, “yes, but they’ve actually managed to make seven other pretty pictures turned into really good buildings as opposed to these people who have made only one pretty picture.” So, I think, we don’t need to directly compete with them. It’s the Buckminster Fuller thing. We need to build some nice things and say, “well, you judge, we think these are good.”

And there is a lot of space out there. There’s a whole capitalist world to bring healthy things to. So, yeah, I think we can not worry too much. We’re so small, we’re not really competing that hard with anybody at the moment. But we think we’ve got some good design.

Sue: Thanks a lot, Dil, that’s great. François, do you have any question or comment around those?

François: I was going to say no, but this very last comment that you made, Dil. sparked an alarm in me with the idea that there are hundreds of thousands of people who are competing for different varieties of commoning. I don’t think that’s what you meant but that’s what...

Dil: Well, I was saying, let’s not compete. Let’s just build nice things. And hope that people choose us to do things with as a result of having built some nice things.

Sue: Thanks, Dil. Is that okay, François? Chris, do you want to ask any clarifying question or make a comment.

Chris: This last thing and this whole thing about collaboration on costs and competition on quality: I was having a very long conversation the other day with somebody, Izabella Kaminska, who is one of the best brains I have ever come up against, well not come up against, known.

And we were very much focused on this whole area of, you can say, authenticity, and I talk about qualitative easing. And Dil, you and I, I remember talking on Liverpool, about the quality of the relationship, right. That we were going to go to a relationship and to the quality of services rather than the quantity of objects. I think that’s a huge point. This, again, this takes us to Pirsig and the metaphysics of quality which is, if I have a guiding light in my life, that’s what it is. It’s the metaphysics of quality, the metaphysics of value. That’s one point or one thought.

And the other one of course, you referred to it again, is the collective, and it's about incorporation. And this is where identity comes into it. If you have a legal – I would think of it as an unnatural, so you got natural persons, real persons, and unnatural persons which is what a corporate body is, at least on the face of it. And within that agreement, you lose your identity and people on the outside of that corporate, and even the people within it become alienated from it; and the other problem is, of course, in order to act in the real world, you have to have a natural person acting on behalf of an unnatural person, and that person has a conflict of interest, the famous principal-agent problem.

So, for me the whole art, my search, for this legal holy grail, which I think I have found – or I am not a million miles away – is to have a corporate which is open. I mean, we talked about open corporates long since. But I think, then you’re looking at something that is associative. A corporate within which you maintain your identity. And I think that is for me fundamental, that we are able to do that, and therefore develop a living system of legal protocols, to go with the machine protocols to create these legal protocols.

And I thought that for a long time, as you know, but it’s only in the last six months to a year, maybe even less, that I’ve finally found all the legal building blocks, the tiny little last blue pieces in the sky in the jigsaw. To actually finish that. So, I’ve never been happier that there is a solution which is completely mutual that doesn’t require any relationship with the existing system other than what we want to have. I’m absolutely convinced of it. That’s why I’m here and that’s why I’m so happy to be talking to this group. Because we’re here. We’ve all got identity. We are a collective but we’re still open. And I’ll stop there because I’m getting carried away. And Dil, this is for you and I really respect everything that you are saying here, it’s wonderful.

Dil: Thank you very much, it’s great to have you.

Examples of commoning from Dil’s life – being in a band, Brixton LETS and the Housing Commons

What I'm going to do now. As I said this is also potentially going to turn into a 45 minute one person talk if I do it to Kairos, and also into a couple of thousand words in Henry Leveson's magazine (The Mint), so I might be able to expand it.

Sue: Can I just mention, Dil, that we’ve actually got 15 not 45.

Dil: What I am gearing up to is, I am just going to cherry-pick a couple of things and what I want to do is just to remind ourselves of these lenses: scale, formality, characterising the interdependence and variety. And look at just a couple of these life experiences of mine and talk about them. I will talk about being in a band.

Being in a band

So, a band is definitely a commoning activity, and the bands I was in and eventually one that was vaguely serious although never made any money or anything - we never formalised anything. We were forced to formalise things at some point. We had suddenly got sent a contract. We agreed that we were all joint authors of everything that we produced. I think that was the only formal thing we ever did that was not mandated by some external bureaucratic process. Being in a band is a very interesting commoning thing. You’re a band and the audience are not the band. People argue for a long time before you let someone join a band. We didn’t have a songwriter. We all made the stuff and you can probably tell that when listening to it, I’m not recommending you do.

It emerged from us all doing the thing we wanted to do, and we didn’t give up because the others did what they did in a way that didn’t piss us off too much.

So, in terms of scale, it was tiny. The serious band I was in was three people. We actually liked being three.

Formality: it was extraordinarily informal. We weren’t even really mates down the pub much. Two of us were sometimes.

Characterising the interdependence: there was enormous interdependence. We got up on stage in front of strangers in foreign countries and acted like they ought to have paid to come see us and that they should listen to us. And yet, two of us couldn’t really play. We’d learned by doing and we didn’t rehearse that much. We all just expected that it would somehow work, and so there was this extraordinary interdependence at one level, but when we split up, we just split up. We didn’t go to the pub. We only talked about reissues of the records or things like that.

Variety: it’s pretty simple. When you’re in a band, everybody knows everything about the shape of the space you’re in. You’ve only got to play songs. Make noise honestly, and fit into the venue, and make a record. So, actually, there was almost no variety there. And I’ll shut up, see if anyone has anything to say about that experience.

There might not be much to debate about. I realise maybe this is not a very interesting one to share but it is an interesting formative experience realising I was commoning but didn’t know anything about commoning at the time. I didn’t consider it that way.

Katja: It is really interesting.

Sue: Chris?

Chris: No, it’s okay. You don’t need to sign one of your albums for me, Dil.

Dil: Don’t worry. We never made an album. Okay, so I’m going to come more into where we’re all at, so that actually, I don’t need to explain. Then that would be quite interesting so I’m going to go straight to the housing commons, or maybe via the LETS scheme.

Brixton LETS

Brixton LETS scheme. Both Sue and I had considerable involvement at different times in that history of Brixton LETS. Sue, would you like to look at LETS through those lenses of scale, formality, the type of independence, variety, or would you not?

Sue: I can be relatively quick about it. Scale I think is really important, because out of that, and also local exchange and trade schemes, we’ve learnt that what you have to do is to create a small enough and large enough group in time and space that is trustworthy. In fact, exchange often doesn’t happen, and if it becomes really trustworthy, like it did with the baby sitters, they don’t even bother to put it into the account system. So, I think that’s really important.

The formality, the acknowledgement of it - for me, one of the difficulties is that people have a background experience, and mindset, and learning, and schooling, for want of a better word, of how they ought to exchange and trade.

And so, they were always looking at ‘what do I sell into the market, what job do I get’. It wasn't about ‘what can I offer?’ And my experience in Egypt outside tourism is, nothing has a cost until someone wants to buy and someone wants to sell. And I think that formality needs to melt into a different way of us understanding, and because it's people that are doing it I think that's really important.

Interdependence: at the moment, particularly this side of the planet, we’ve really learnt how to be independent. And to become interdependent is almost our next step of consciousness for want of better words. And also, learning, so that you’re not completely independent and not completely dependent, and actually, it’s an exchange. And I’m not sure we even know what that looks like, or feels like. In local exchange and trade schemes. I’m talking about.

And the variety: there were so many different local exchange and trade schemes, it was amazing. In fact, Michael Linton created an account system for it, and he forgot to tell everyone, “you’ve got to do it my way.” And so everyone modified the system. And he said, “I can’t do anything more with it now, I can’t update it or anything, because you’ve all changed it.” Fascinating in terms of variety. Does that help at all, Dil?

Dil: That’s great, it’s really good.

Housing Commons

Sue: Can we go to housing commons now.

Dil: I think we probably should. Maybe, what we could do with housing is, do a round on each of those four lenses. We’d probably have to be quite quick.

Sue: Katja, because you’re with Bristol Commons, I don’t know if you have housing commons there.

Katja: No. There’s a big interest in the topic, and we met up with one other person from Bristol Commons and me and Stroud Commons, and that was really interesting discussing it. So, there is certainly interest. And if I should have a go, I would pick scale and say, it could potentially become quite big. So, more in terms of scaling out. Not big houses or something.

People picking up the ideas and setting up housing commons in other towns, and also within a town, it could grow.

Sue: Thanks very much, Katja. Chik and Dave, do you have your reins in gear yet?

Chik: A bit more on the scale. The reason why I’m involved in the commons in the first place is because it has the most potential to scale. And housing commons. There are many barriers I think. One of them is the transition of the culture of ownership. To see a different form as viable as owning and to build that with evidence but also with cultural narratives. And then, if we can do that, and build rails that makes it frictionless for people to adopt, pilot and create an environment where people could be housed affordably, then I think it can grow quite quickly.

A lot of my time and thinking outside of my daily work is thinking about what do we need if it does explode. How do we make sure that there is a support mechanism, making sure that it’s done well and that it doesn’t get co-opted or skewed in a way that then could be damaging to the reputation of the commons.

There’s a lot of potential consequences for growing too quickly, and how the Commons Lab could become the mitigation mechanism for that, and what would it take to make that happen.

Dave: This is exactly what we have been talking about this morning for about two or three hours.

Sue: Do you want a reply to that, Dil?

Dil: There is just one thing I would like to say about scale which is that the way that the word scale is very often used these days is, in the VC culture term of how quickly can you make this model go global and take over the world. I'm thinking more in terms of this lens of looking at particular commons of something about the right size, or the implications of the size of a particular commons for its character. And I'm increasingly interested in a thing which comes up in a few scientific articles, which is characteristic scale. That things have certain size relationships and they're set by the nature of themselves, and that if you go outside those size relationships it stops working, or it can't function, or it becomes something else.

There is a JBS Haldane essay called On being the right size about biology which is beautiful to read, very short, and what I’m trying more to get at here with scale.

Sue: Thanks very much for that. François, do you want to have a look at one of these characteristics in relation to housing commons?

François: What’s not quite clear to me – I’m not very well versed in things housing – what is the difference between the housing commons and a housing community, or a housing cooperative? I don’t know if these are just variations of the same things or whether they are fundamentally different.

Dil: Very briefly: they’ve got a fundamental difference in that what we are trying to do in the housing commons model is, bring together the funders of the purchase of the house as commoners, tenants as commoners, and stewards as commoners into a win-win-win context. So, they’ve got different rights and responsibilities with regard to the estate of houses and the finances pertaining to those. But they’re all getting value out of it, which they could not get if the others weren’t willing to participate in it, and that they therefore can hopefully find it worth the collaboration effort to participate and grow the commons.

So, there’s a radical distinction between this housing commons model and most other even progressive housing approaches. There are things like Mietshäuser Syndikat in Germany which have commonalities.

Sue: François, did you want to come back on that?

François: No, that was very interesting, I’ll leave it, thank you.

Sue: So, Chris, I realise, we are slightly over time. Also, I recognise that there’s a lot more we need to chat about.

Chris, do you want to you have a look at one of these characters in relation to housing commons.

Chris: There’s so much to say, isn’t there? I have been looking at this for twenty-odd years.

I come back to a thought about how the rules, the institutions, determine the instruments in some ways. If you’re setting out to play football, then a round ball of a certain size - you wouldn’t use a golf ball, and you wouldn’t use a beach ball, for instance, with the rules of the game. Because you need to pass it with your feet. And the goal - you don’t want an ice-hockey goal, and you don’t want a goal all the way across the pitch.

So, the instruments come about from the rules of the game, and I think that’s the same with property as well. There’s a very interesting architect I work with, James Simpson, up here in Edinburgh, and he spoke very interestingly about how the tenements were determined by the property law up here, and I heard similar things said about the Georgian buildings when you had 99-year leases and so on. And then you get into cohousing, and the fact that you got private spaces and personal spaces, and how 15 percent of new Danish building is cohousing, and how actually that’s a very – having done it myself – it’s a bloody good model for a developer in that he squeezes a lot of money out of people. But equally, for the people there, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. So, by god it’s complex, and the whole question of variety in the different forms of tenure, having been in a fully mutual coop myself that was the least cooperative coop on the planet bar none.

And yet it’s a superb system if you get it right. And coming back to, there’s a really interesting fundamental point because it’s something that’s intrigued me for twenty-odd years, and I only just recently think I’ve cracked it. And that is that we have a limit on leases in Scotland of twenty years, and typically in England and Wales, twenty-odd years comes into it as well. The Jessamine project I was involved in, they didn’t have a lease more than 21 years. And if you look at a piece of work that John Law did – John Law proposed a system that was genius, to actually monetise land, and it was about twenty years purchase of land, and another angle is: There is a guy I’ve had a backwards and forwards dispute with or argument with. He was pointing out that twenty years rent is typically roughly the value of the typical house. And I know that Dil was not a million miles off with work he’s been doing. And it made me think, where do these twenty years come from? What is the fundamental reason in our relationships, where does it come from?

Dil: It’s a characteristic scale.

Chris: In terms of the holistic economy, I think I’ve actually come up with a reason why, within the viable system. The reason why it is twenty years. But that’s for discussion another time. It’s taken me a long, long time for the penny to drop.

Thank you guys for such an entertaining - it is way more than entertaining; thought-provoking and stimulating conversation, pleasure to be here.

Sue: Thanks for your reflections, Chris, and Dil, thank you very much for what you provided. But mostly I hope the reciprocal is that it’s created an environment for you to move on to Kairos.

Dil: Yeah, I’m very grateful to all of you for all of your comments and thoughts, and letting me do that in such an experimental way with you.

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This is one of a series of 24 articles that I hope to compile into a book – working title: The Commoners’ Manifesto: Neither Capitalism Nor Communism. Here’s an introduction to the series. Comments welcome, including disagreement and debate. I want to present commons as a decentralised alternative to both of those systems of centralised power. When I use the words capitalism and communism (unless I state otherwise) I mean what has been manifested in their names, rather than theory.

In the previous article I looked at what Marx got right, from a commons perspective. Commoners and Marxists share many values. Marx saw that capitalism needs to be replaced, not reformed, and he debunked capitalist myths about peasants moving to urban slums and factories voluntarily and the first capitalists becoming wealthy due to their hard work.

Here are the main points I’ll cover in this article:

1. Marx’s idea that the falling rate of profit inherent in capitalism will cause its collapse hasn’t materialised because the state steps in to ensure profits.

2. He saw capitalism (and therefore enclosure of commons) as a necessary historical stage on the way to communism.

3. However great ‘pure’ communism might be, violent overthrow of the state means that a Stalin or Mao will turn up eventually. Dictatorship of the proletariat can never be ‘temporary’.

4. Communism promotes growth and ‘development of productive forces’ that destroy the biosphere.

5. Marx’s vehicle for change was a proletariat that’s disappearing in the West, and has anyway rejected Marxism.

6. In his later years, Marx produced more commons-like work that could provide bridges between commoners and communists.

Overproduction and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF)

Marxists describe these two crisis tendencies within capitalism that will weaken it and make revolution more likely and easier to achieve.

TRPF: Competition encourages overinvestment. Firms pour capital into machinery – which is faster, cheaper, and more reliable than human labour – to outcompete rivals. All firms do the same, so the market becomes saturated, and profit per unit of capital tends to decline. Whether the overall rate of profit has fallen over time is debated, and factors such as cheaper inputs from new technology, profits from financial instruments rather than production, and global expansion opening new markets have prevented the collapse of capitalism so far. State intervention has also played a major role (see below).

Overproduction: I think Marx is on more solid ground here. It doesn’t actually mean that there are huge stocks of unsold goods – what it means in the real world is recession and unemployment. Capitalists are constantly trying to a) reduce their wage bill, and b) persuade the public to consume more. These two goals contradict each other. If wages fall, people have less money to buy what’s produced. Wealth is concentrated in fewer hands, and there’s a limit to how many luxury items the super-rich buy (how many private jets do you need?). So it’s invested, resulting in more production, which exacerbates the overproduction problem. Lenin criticised unions for raising wages and thus helping solve the overproduction problem and saving capitalism.

The initial response was to expand markets into poor countries, to help them ‘develop’ (become capitalist). But capitalism is the dominant system now, with few new markets to open.

Capitalists argue that the problem has been overcome in practice – but that’s only because the ‘solutions’ cause even more problems for capitalism.

First, the explosion in credit, along with reduced interest rates to encourage borrowing. Consumption rises, but inflation means that interest rates rise, credit is restricted, there’s a credit crunch, recession, bankruptcies wiping out debt – and the boom and bust merry-go-round continues.

Second, the state steps in to pump money into the economy and save capitalism. As well as benefits, public works, the military and various ‘new deals’, after every ‘bust’ in the boom and bust cycle, the state introduces quantitative easing, bank bailouts and various other corporate welfare programmes that we pay for. TRPF only happens in a truly free market (which we don’t have), which is why it doesn’t apply today.

Historical materialism

Marx’s view of history is often called ‘historical materialism’. Human history progressed from hunter-gatherer bands, through slave societies to feudalism, then capitalism, and will lead to socialism and communism. The transition between each stage is caused by contradictions and conflicts between different groups and forces in society. So for example, the transition from feudalism to capitalism was due to the conflict between feudal landlords and the growing merchant class. Medieval guilds had already attracted peasants to towns, where they could escape feudal ties, but feudal privileges and obligations still held back capitalist economic development. A struggle played out via the English Civil War, ‘Glorious Revolution’ and French Revolution. Capitalism ultimately outcompeted feudalism because of its superior forces of production, and as capitalists became wealthier and therefore more powerful than feudal lords, they were able to drive change through control of the state.

Marx didn’t say that these transitions were inevitable, but that they require political struggle. His views were formed using dialectics – a way of thinking about change via contradictions and tensions that push systems to transform into something new. Marx was influenced by Hegel, but dialectical thought can be traced back to ancient Greece and China. Reality is dynamic, not static. Simply put, a ‘thesis’ is contradicted by an ‘antithesis’, and the struggle between them results in a ‘synthesis’. So:

Thesis: industrial capitalism.
Antithesis: growth of the proletariat (working class).
Synthesis: socialism.

Marx saw capitalism as a necessary stage in human progress towards communism. Capitalists will develop industry and infrastructure that communists will inherit. ‘Progress’ here doesn’t mean ‘morally better’. It means supercession due to changing circumstances.

Now if capitalism is a necessary stage, and capitalism could only take off after peasants had been driven from common land into the new factories via the enclosures, then from Marx’s perspective it follows logically (doesn’t it?) that the enclosures were also necessary, so that there could be industrial development and the eradication of ‘backwardness’ to pave the way for socialism. With common land, peasants could eke a subsistence living and say ‘no thanks’ to urban slums, factories and cholera. This is the clearest indication for me that the Marxist approach is ultimately anti-commons – although Marx called enclosures ‘ruthless terrorism’ (but necessary ruthless terrorism?).

Worse conclusions can be drawn from historical materialism – that colonialism, slavery and genocide were also necessary steps on the way to communism. It can lead to Marxists writing things like: ‘Slavery, in its day, represented an enormous leap forward over barbarism. It was a necessary stage in the development of productive forces, culture and human society.’ God knows what they mean by ‘barbarism’ – maybe small farms and artisanal production. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that no slave has ever thought that slavery was ‘necessary’ or a ‘leap forward’.

Colonialism was necessary too, because Western countries brought capitalism to ‘backward’ countries like India, and moved them forward from their ‘vegetative state’(!). Never mind that if we consider ‘productive forces’, the Indian economy comprised around 25% of the global economy when the British arrived, and around 2% after they left. His focus on progress via the proletariat meant that he undervalued or left out colonised people, peasants, indigenous culture, unpaid workers (mainly women), the unemployed and nature. I’d say that’s a pretty important list of omissions. Silvia Federici says (in Caliban and the Witch) that Marx would never have suggested that capitalism was a step towards human liberation if he’d been a woman.

Capitalism in the Americas was born via slavery of Africans and genocide of the ‘barbarians’ who were already there. All acceptable though, because capitalism is a necessary stage. To be fair, Marx did criticise genocide and slavery, but stuck to his ‘stages’ narrative. Europeans had a mission to civilise the rest of the world (and to appropriate their resources in the process). Small farmers have to be driven off their land and into sweatshops – otherwise how are we going to reach the socialist promised land?

For me, this is the least impressive aspect of Marx’s writing. If capitalism is a necessary stage, then the whole world has to be subjected to the nightmare of power centralisation, extraction, enclosure and environmental destruction.

Lewis Mumford (in Technics and Civilisation; The City in History; and The Myth of the Machine) showed how we could have developed technologically without a capitalist phase. Early human societies developed agriculture, crafts, metallurgy, windmills, water mills and urban infrastructure without capitalism. There’s no reason that technological development wouldn’t have continued all the way to smartphones and AI. It might have happened more slowly, but surely that would have been a good thing – innovation for human needs in communities could have avoided the social upheaval, wealth concentration, corporate corruption and environmental destruction of capitalist development.

Technology developed the way it did because power became concentrated in the hands of capitalists, whose aim was profit maximisation, not human need. And this was certainly not inevitable. If the state hadn’t formed the first corporations (the Dutch and British East India Companies), and given them huge advantages ever since, the world would have developed in a very different way. Capitalism required a huge amount of state coercion to implement. The state introduced many ‘combination’ laws to punish workers, for example for coming together to demand better conditions, but not employers who came together to blacklist them for doing so. From the early days of capitalism, the state mobilised a strong police force and judiciary to stop workers providing charity for other workers, disseminating information and opinions, or generally getting uppity. It happened in the UK and Europe first, then in the colonies, with the same result. More in future articles, but meanwhile, here’s something to whet your appetite.

Seizing the state

Marx saw that states are always captured by the most powerful in society, and used to serve their interests. So in capitalism, states serve capitalists – not much to argue with there. In The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels were the first to identify the proletariat as a revolutionary class with a mission to capture the state.

I’ll look at what actually happened in Russia in 1917 in the next article, but is this a good plan? Even if defeating Western military power were realistic, the idea of violent overthrow alienates almost everyone. It requires violent men to seize power, after which it’s never redistributed. Violent men don’t give up power voluntarily. If a government is overthrown, there’ll be chaos, huge opposition and probably civil war. It’s never possible to get everyone on board, and there’s always the temptation to abandon principles to maintain power.

Talk of overthrowing power makes people feel unsafe – for good reason. In the West, as long as you don’t rock the boat, you’ll get the protection and some of the material benefits of a powerful empire. It’s been the same deal with empires throughout history. You don’t even have to swear loyalty nowadays; and most people aren’t loyal to the empire – it just keeps them safe, in an age when they can see what happens to regimes that don’t comply. These aren’t bad people – they just see compliance as a reasonable price to pay for protection. Most people don’t understand the damage being done to the biosphere, and even if they did, collapse seems a long way off, so not rocking the boat in exchange for bread and circuses seems like a good deal. Having said that, I do agree with Benjamin Franklin, that ‘Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety’.

Even if successful, though, Marxists can only overthrow one state at a time, after which that country will be instantly competing against global capitalism and its military. But with commons, we start everywhere, and federate. Force may be required at some point to defend gains in communities, but not to seize centralised power. Marxists see economic and political democracy as something for the future, with change towards it led by a vanguard and introduced by a violent event. Commoners don’t see the need to wait for those things. It’s something we can do now – all of us. Marxists understand that reform (or at least enough reform) won’t be possible via a capitalist-captured state. Socialist state reforms are anyway fragile, because they only last until a different party wins power. But commons isn’t about reforming the state; it’s about building new institutions with protection from co-option baked in.

After the revolution, Marx envisioned a temporary ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, to consolidate workers’ control, dismantle capitalist institutions and ensure that vested interests – capitalist, aristocratic or external forces – can’t take power from the workers. Lenin makes clear the implications of this, in The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government (1918): ‘the revolution demands, in the interests of socialism, that the masses unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of the labour process’.

But means dictate ends. We need participatory, decentralised, autonomous means to achieve those same ends. Hierarchical, uniform, centralised methods lead to a hierarchical, uniform, centralised society and crush spontaneity and innovation, when, really, we can have a plurality of models for the new commons society. A powerful state is not a vehicle for freedom – it’s what we need to be freed from.

Under dictatorships dissidents get locked up (or worse). Usually they’re just writing and spreading ideas – but Marxists are supposed to be materialists, so what’s the problem? Ideas aren’t going to change anything! Capitalism doesn’t usually jail people for their ideas (although that may be changing), because they know they have the economic base. In a commons society, anyone can write what they like, and I hope a commons world doesn’t have (even commons-owned) prisons.

Some influential Marxists rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat. Rosa Luxemburg wrote (in The Russian Revolution, 1918): ‘The whole mass of the people must take part in economic and social life. Otherwise, socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals … Corruption becomes inevitable’.

Council communism, which developed after WWI, rejected centralised state control and focused on workers’ councils as agents of change. This influenced the Autonomists (from the 1960s on). Many Marxists left the faith and moved towards anarchist solutions because of Stalin’s authoritarianism – like Murray Bookchin, who was influential in the Rojava experiment. This accelerated after the Soviet Union collapsed, although none of these were mass movements like Marxist-Leninist communism.

However, when Marx used the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, he wasn’t thinking of an authoritarian regime. The word ‘dictatorship’ in the 19th century was closer to its older, Roman meaning: who holds power in society. He was thinking of the Paris Commune, where power was held – albeit briefly – by working people, via elected and recallable delegates.

So Lenin’s wasn’t the only interpretation of Marx. And Marx can be interpreted in commons-like ways, so I’m criticising authoritarian interpretations, rather than Marx himself.

Growth and progress

I’m assuming you know that we can’t have perpetual economic growth on a finite planet without destroying the biosphere – but if you don’t, I’ll cover it in a future article, and you can debate me. But in this article, I’m looking at Marx’s position on growth and the concept of ‘progress’, assuming and understanding that GDP growth can’t be decoupled from material and energy use.

Marx’s historical materialism requires a capitalist phase en route to socialism, but capitalism has a ‘growth imperative’: it has to keep growing, like a cancer, destroying its host – the biosphere of the only planet we know for sure has one. In fact, Marx was the first to see that perpetual growth is systemic and inevitable in capitalism, and not just due to policy decisions.

In Capital, Vol. 1, Marx lays out his General Formula of Capital: M—C—M‘. Money (M) is invested in the production of commodities (C) in order to make more money (M’). The problem is that little ‘ after the second M. Each capitalist has to reinvest profits, increase productivity, adopt labour-saving machinery and expand markets. If they don’t, they’ll be outcompeted. So growth isn’t optional under capitalism – it can’t be stabilised. Ecologists predicted that this would result in extensive damage to the biosphere, which is exactly what’s happening.

Commons doesn’t have this growth imperative, so a commons economy can exist in harmony with nature.

Marx was as fond of the quest for growth as any capitalist. He believed that socialism will come via industrialisation and the growth of the proletariat, and that peasants should be removed from their land to introduce large-scale, mechanised farming, and to bring ‘wastelands’ into production. Communism requires growth to ‘develop productive forces’ and abolish poverty. The contradictions of capitalism will be removed, making growth and industrialisation easier. Industrial development is the goal, not a problem, and communism will accelerate it.

He went further: ‘Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man’ (Capital, Vol. III, Ch. 48), and so did Engels: under communism, ‘man ... for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature’ (Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Ch. 3).

We can only lose a wrestling match with nature, even if we think we’re winning. What would ‘winning’ against nature look like? It sounds anachronistic now, but it’s still the aim of many Marxists. Talk of ‘savages’ and ‘conquering nature’ unsurprisingly generates anti-Marxist sentiment in indigenous cultures – ‘Marxism, like industrial society in other forms, seeks to “rationalize” all people in relation to industry –maximum industry, maximum production. It is a doctrine that despises the American Indian spiritual tradition, our cultures, our lifeways’.

Marx prioritised human emancipation over environmental protection, but he did (a little incoherently) hint that perpetual growth will destroy the metabolism between humans and nature, even in his earlier writing: ‘the forest, the mineral deposits, the sources of water, the very forces of nature, are treated as mere instruments of production … with no concern for their renewal.’ (Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 13), although ecology wasn’t a well-developed science in his day. Modern Marxists don’t have that excuse, and indeed, some (e.g. John Bellamy Foster) have combined Marx and ecology to argue that perpetual growth is incompatible with finite natural systems. Others, (e.g. Aaron Bastani, Fully-automated Luxury Communism) promote techno-optimism and perpetual growth, without addressing the biosphere (or at least not sufficiently). As with Marx, I applaud Bastani’s critique of capitalism, but I’m not sure he’d support commons.

I’m not anti-technology (although I am a Luddite) – I just don’t want capitalist billionaires to own and control it. I want it to be under democratic control –- but under communism, it won’t be under democratic control any more than it is in capitalism, and what we’ll get is nuclear weapons and war in space.

The working class as the vehicle for change

Workers will bring about revolutionary change, according to Marxists. Workers don’t own productive assets (businesses, factories, land, stocks etc.), but have to work for a wage to put food on the table. It’s a bit fuzzy because many doctors and lawyers have to work to eat, but you’d hardly call them working class (I heard recently that a good way to work out if you’re working class is whether you shower before or after work). There are people who make their money a) from profits, dividends, capital gains, interest and rent (who Marx called the bourgeoisie); b) by working for those people (the proletariat); or c) by facilitating the above (the middle class). There are far more of the proletariat than the other two groups globally, and even in wealthier countries, so if they organise, they’re unstoppable, according to Marxists.

Are they right? Well, to organise, they’d have to be in close contact – in factories, mines, foundries, docks, etc. But in the West at least, those institutions are disappearing. Employment in manufacturing in the UK fell from 8.6 million in 1970 to 3 million in 2016, and there are fewer than 300 coal miners, compared to 247,000 in 1976 and 1.2 million in 1920. And revolution only happens when people are desperate, but social safety nets in the West, however flimsy, prevent the kind of extreme situations that we see in many parts of the Global South, where living and working conditions are such that working-class uprisings are more likely, but still fragmented, tied to specific industries or demographic groups, and often including youth movements or urban protest cultures, not just traditional organised labour.

Unions are stronger in the Global South too (union membership is less than 20% of the population in most Western countries), but unions are generally more concerned with claiming a bigger slice of the capitalist pie than with baking a new pie. But even if workers’ uprisings happen in the Global South, they’re still faced with the same problems around seizing the state and authoritarianism.

My father was a working-class Tory who I’m guessing would be a Reform supporter now if he were alive. He hated Marxism – which is why I was drawn to it (read into that what you like). I read everything I could, but slowly (and unwillingly) came to believe exactly what he said about Marx – that his critique of capitalism was valid, but his proposed solutions were disastrous.

The proletariat Marx described was mainly in Europe and North America, and is now shrinking in size and influence due to the loss of traditional working-class employment, and the rise of the gig economy, precariat, AI, driverless vehicles, robots and self-service checkouts. The UK economy is now largely a casino, and hardly about production at all. And it’s difficult to generate working-class solidarity when many in the working-class don’t even want to be in it. If they see ways out (education and starting a business are the most likely), they take them. Whose childhood ambition is working in a factory all day, every day? Not yours, and not most people’s.

Anyone who thinks the working class in the West are going to rise up and throw off their chains doesn’t know the working class. This article in The Communist, for example, covers a pop-culture exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery exploring the importance of revolutionary ideas, as if that will get the working-class fired up. In the West, the working-class is generally turned off by Marxist ideas. For every working-class Marxist (based on membership of Marxist parties), there are hundreds if not thousands of Reform supporters. They’re much more likely to be divided by football than united by socialism. Talk of communist revolution is more likely to divide the working class than unite it against capitalism.

Academics’ claims that Marx was writing for workers don’t wash with me. His ideas are very difficult to grasp for non-academics. Driving or laying bricks all day, then reading Marx all evening only really exists in the fantasies of Marxists. Marxist critiques could make a comeback and replace empty, dishonest right-wing faux opposition to ‘the establishment’ – the working-class still believe that wages are too low, prices are too high, the system is rigged in favour of the rich, and corporations are corrupt. But I don’t see any fertile ground for Marxist solutions.

The commons has to work for working people of course, and we’re going to need working-class franchisees, employees and customers – but we’ll get them by being useful, not lecturing. The class of activists to get us to that point is irrelevant. It’s not just the proletariat who are the vehicle for change. There’s a role for the unemployed, homemakers, small farmers, small business owners, sole traders, co-op members, students, retired people, artists, hippies and the middle class. Everyone can be an active member of the commons, as a customer, employee or investor.

Overthrow of the plutocracy isn’t possible, not just because they’re too strong, but also because the working class are wannabee middle class, the middle class are wannabee plutocrats, and ‘radical’ students are headed for careers in ESG. No, the only way to challenge plutocracy is to prevent extraction, and therefore the source of their power. And the only way I can see to do that is by building the commons.

Marxists label anti-capitalists who don’t see workers’ revolution as the route to change ‘pessimists’. But it’s not pessimism. It’s realism.

Central planning

One more criticism of the Marxist approach – that a planned economy just doesn’t work. Information about the economy – preferences, local conditions, needs, skills etc.– is spread across millions of people. Planners can never gather or process all of it. Some information, such as practical know-how, can’t be collected at all. And things are always changing – central planners can’t keep up. A five-year plan may be completely out of date in a couple of years, especially in a digital world.

This argument comes from both the right (Hayek, Mises), left (E. F. Schumacher, Ivan Illich) and (most) anarchists. It’s a huge topic, that I’ll cover in a later chapter, about commons and markets.

Marx’s later writing

There was a big difference between the ideas in the Communist Manifesto (1848) and Marx’s later work, after 1870 until his death in 1883, in which he comes across (to me at least) as more of a commoner than a communist. Three books were brought to my attention that looked at Marx’s later writings: Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies and The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads by Kevin B. Anderson, and Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism by Kohei Saito.

Anderson looks at his previously unpublished works, about India, Indonesia, China, Algeria, and other regions, in which he was less Eurocentric and more critical of colonialism, rather than seeing it as removing ‘backwardness’. He also moved away from a single development path, from feudalism to socialism via capitalism, and focused on different social formations, including communal ownership and indigenous communities, without violent overthrow of the state.

He studied collective landholding (the mir system) in Russia, and said (in a letter to Vera Zasulich) that Russia did not necessarily have to pass through full capitalist development, and that existing communal structures could potentially become a starting point for socialism, if linked to broader revolutionary change. The 1882 preface to The Communist Manifesto explicitly states: ‘If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.’ This is where commoners might build bridges with Marxists.

In his Notes on the Critique of Political Economy and Ethnological Notebooks (studying soil, agriculture, and non-Western societies), he developed ideas on the ‘metabolic rift’ – capitalism’s disruption of natural cycles. He emphasises environmental limits, sustainability, and a critique of growth/productivism.

Marx was heavily influenced by the Paris Commune, and his ultimate vision was of a society without central government and professional politicians, where decisions are made democratically in communities, in workplace assemblies (factories and farms) and local councils, which send delegates to councils covering wider areas. Again, no argument from me – that’s exactly what I’d like to see the commons movement achieve.

Some Marx-inspired movements developed in the Global South that fit well with commons thinking – like the Zapatista movement in Mexico, or the Ujamaa system in Tanzania (later destroyed by the state).

But however much I agree with Marx in his later years, in reality, actual communist revolutions have involved seizure of state power, centralised party control, rapid industrialisation and forced collectivisation. His later writing was less well-known, and contradicted the ‘scientific socialism’ narrative, so was often sidelined.

In China and Vietnam after their revolutions, there were strong peasant bases, village-level organisation and local autonomy, but that was soon overridden by state control. With communism you eventually get a Stalin; with capitalism you eventually get a Trump. In a commons world, those kinds of people would be kept well away from power.

Conclusion

I’m arguing against communism as it’s been implemented in the real world, based on Marx’s earlier work, rather than against Marx himself. Blaming Marx for Stalinism is like blaming Jesus for the Spanish Inquisition. Capitalism suppresses commons via extraction, communism via forced collectivisation and crushing civil society. Let’s not do it again. Communists arguing that the Soviet Union ‘wasn’t real communism’ makes no more sense than capitalists arguing that the current system isn’t real capitalism. It’s what happens in the real world that matters, rather than theory.

Marx’s accumulated wisdom in later years led him to be much more favourable to growing the commons in the cracks in capitalism than to rousing the working-class to seize the state. Libertarian Marxism was a strand of Marxism that developed during Marx’s life and split Marxists after his death. Instead of state ownership, workplaces would be run by workers themselves, and local decisions made democratically in assemblies. There would be no political elite ruling on behalf of workers. This tension led to 20^th century developments like council communism and later, autonomism. There seems to be a blurred line between these libertarian threads of Marxism and anarchism / commons (more in the next article).

Conditions might change soon to increase desperation and make communist revolution more likely – especially in the Global South, but even in wealthier countries as temperature rises accelerate and wars spread, causing resource shortages, price increases, civil unrest and mass migration. I’m hoping that commons are in place and spreading by that time, staving off violent uprisings that could make the situation worse, not better.

My aim with these articles is not to persuade diehard Marxists (if you’ve ever debated one, you’ll know why). I’m writing for anti-capitalists who recognise the impotence of the electoral system, and might be dabbling with communism. I’d like to steer that revolutionary energy towards the commons.

Marxists have a programme. Commons isn’t part of it, and tends to get closed down by Marxists in power. I’ve been advised to not alienate Marxists, and I don’t think I will alienate libertarian Marxists. But serious, traditional Marxists won’t help build commons. They want working-class revolt, and my message to them is, ultimately: ‘are you kidding?’.

Centralised power itself is the problem, and has been throughout history. As real-world communism doesn’t decentralise power, we end up with just another form of authoritarianism – as the 20^th century demonstrated so clearly. The vanguard party becomes the new elite, and elites don’t give up their power. A centralised, hierarchical route to a decentralised, non-hierarchical society isn’t going to work. We have to build a system in which those who desire power most are least likely to get it. That system is commons.

In the next article, I’ll look at how the Bolsheviks won by the skin of their teeth, and how things could have gone very differently in the 20^th century if they hadn’t.

And by the way, if you are one of those anti-capitalists trying to work out the best way to contribute to replacing it, do contact to discuss how you might help do it via the commons.

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Foraging commons in action

Example 1: The cultivated landscapes of Turtle Island

There is an abundance of examples of communally managed landscapes, built for foraging, from Turtle Island (North America). Many communities of First Nations people would burn, cut, and tend the landscape in ways that created food-rich forest-gardens that do not resemble the labour-intensive agriculture of the colonisers. For decades, and even now, this has been misconstrued as First Nations people being “backwards,” and the landscapes of Turtle Island being “untouched wilderness.”

Andy Ciccone of agroecologies.org has written and spoken about many examples of First Nations landscape cultivation. As an example, I will talk about the cultivation of the tekeneipen, or Apios. Apios were foraged and were also purposefully planted along trails and in clearings that would be traversed during hunting, providing an additional boon for hunters and foragers travelling along them. In the Apios article, Ciccone states that the settlements and hunting paths of the First Nations were surrounded by a cornucopia of edible plants: oak, hickory, pawpaws, Apios, and others. The bounty was remarkable enough that the colonisers made note of the fact.

This surrounding bounty was not “untouched wilderness,” but an ecosystem resulting from varying degrees of human management. Food plants (and particularly desirable varieties of each plant) were shared amongst communities and planted at each other’s settlements, sharing in the literal fruits of the Earth. This is purposeful cultivation, but distinct from a concept of farming or gardening. Native, useful forage is planted and re-planted to ensure its availability and to have it grow in convenient places, but without the labour costs of growing a vulnerable domesticated plant.

Example 2: Online knowledge sharing with fallingfruit.org

Fallingfruit.org is an online resource where people can drop pins on a map, signifying (urban) food resources. Each pin contains information on the food (species, if it is on private property, etc) and people can leave reviews to corroborate the information. It is a global knowledge-sharing platform, enabling anyone anywhere to let their local community know what food grows where.

While fallingfruit.org is mainly a knowledge-sharing platform, it does have some capacity to reclaim land in common to a minor degree. Public land (government-owned) is opened up as a resource. Additionally, private landowners can either put information on the map themselves, or provide permission for others to do so. While neither truly wrests legal ownership from the government or private landowner, it does provide small inways to these lands and allows a landowner to open up their land on a temporary basis.

I would encourage every private landowner reading this to put their food resources up on fallingfruit.org, to provide permission to their community to walk on their land and pick some of its bounty.

Example 3: “Forestizenship” and the extrativistas in Brazil

Reservas extrativistas (RESEX) are state-owned lands in Brazil where access and use rights are given to predominantly indigenous communities (Pinzón Rueda & Ruiz Murietta, 1995). The communities make their living off these lands through small-scale gardens and extraction of forest resources. Their close, long-term, and often spiritual or moral connections to the forest results in these communities defending the RESEX from encroachment, including to the death, as in the case of the murder of forest-defenders Ze Claudio and Maria do Espírito Santo.

RESEX are structured both by the social and environmental conditions impacting the “interspecies common” (a term used by Barca, 2024) (Brown, 2001). Connectivity to other settlements, family history, encroachment by mining and logging, rainfall, de- and re-forestation, all of these are factors. Within the RESEX, the communities generally create a mosaic of landscapes: pasture, forest, and cultivated plant growth at different stages of maturity (Brown, 2001). The close association of forest and shifting cultivated lands allows fallow land to quickly “re-wild” into yet another participant in the mosaic (Brown, 2001). Remember: this kind of mosaic landscape is an enabler of increased biodiversity!

Moreover, the mature forest provides essential goods to the communities, disincentivising logging (Brown, 2001). The survival of the community and their forest are inextricably linked, enough to cultivate a feeling of florestania, or “forestizenship” (Barca, 2024). This is the kind of deep connection that is enabled by a foraging relationship, and ultimately protects the forest.

Example 4: Thengapalli and the jungle loko in Odisha, India

Singh (2013) describes a community in Odisha, India, that is protecting its forest, even while economic and legal incentives push them in the other direction. The community respects and cares for the forest, and in exchange, foraging is a prominent part of their lives and provides psychological, spiritual, and physical nutrition. Much like the extrativistas of the RESEX, the community considers the forest and the act of caring for the forest as fundamental to their identity. They know themselves by the term jungle loko, “forest people” or jungle-jati, “forest caste.”

Forest-care is a community ritual that strengthens interspecies and intra-community bonds. One component of this care is thengapalli, where the role of patrolling and protecting the forest (thenga, a wooden baton) is passed between families, which take turns (palli) performing the patrol. The duty of thengapalli is shared and rotated, preventing the cementing of a guard-class. In some cases, thengapalli is not needed as the community spends so much time in the forest anyway. Using the forest regularly attunes the community to the forest’s health: what it needs, and what threatens it. Both foraging use and thengapalli represent labour that builds a connection and a sense of simultaneous belonging/ownership.

David Bollier interviewed Singh about her publication on Odisha. If you want to learn more, I would recommend checking that out.

What might a foraging common in Britain and Ireland look like?

The quick answer is that foraging commons in Britain and Ireland; climatically similar, and both contending with high enclosure of the commons) should not follow a particular set of instructions. The ecology will be different for every location. Is it a mown park? Is it a brownfield? A back garden? An ex-farm? A reserve? On top of this, every community will have its own pressures and inclinations. Some might go for a guerilla-gardening strategy, just going ahead and doing it without asking for permission. Others might want to avoid potential legal trouble and attempt to establish something like a RESEX.

I do have some thoughts which arise from my own context: my city has surrounding ex-tree-farm forests, and numerous parks. I believe these activities can be deployed in most contexts.

1. Eyes on the land. As in the case of the jungle loko, if foragers keep in contact with one-another, we can form a very deep knowledge of a landscape’s health, threats, and needs. If we are frequently interacting with the landscape, we can identify areas that seem to need help. This is one of the repeated phrases in Tomi Hazel Vaarde’s Social Forestry.

2. Low-level cultivation. Foraging is not gardening or farming. Foraging commons are also not ignoring the landscape for most of the year. We must care for the land, but in a way that is lower labour-input than farming. This includes:

   1. Clearing out invasive species.

   2. Coppicing and pollarding trees at intervals, especially if they are on the edge of the forest (e.g. a forest that borders on a park or pasture).

   3. Clearing thorny plants out of the way of paths.

   4. Spreading desirable, native species short distances to sensible locations (for example, planting blaeberry at the base of a birch tree approx. 50m away from the source plant).

   5. Spreading native seed and scion to areas that need them (erosion-prone slopes and waterlogged areas)

3. Pooling labour and resources. Processing acorns or hawthorns is more fun with friends. Tools cost less when you split the cost. If someone finds a particularly good variety of elderberry, they can share the scion and the location of the plant with the others.

There are also some precautions/considerations which can be broadly applied:

1. Foraging close to a road may not be a great idea. Cars can shed toxic chemicals like lead and cadmium onto their surroundings (Stark et al., 2020), which you don’t want on your food. This is on top of petrol and microplastics.

2. Foraging below waist/knee level, right next to a path or pavement, is a great way to increase your daily intake of dog urine.

3. Leave some for the animals. If something is way out of reach, that’s best left for someone else.

4. Don’t just buy any old foraging guides. Get ones that come recommended by experienced foragers. The ease-of-use of LLMs has led to a swamp of LLM-generated foraging guides, which, as is the nature of LLM-generated content, are not accurate. They might well kill you.
   

   (I use Bloomsbury Concise Foraging Guide by Tiffany Francis-Baker, and Collins Gem Food for Free by Richard Mabey.)

Beyond these general suggestions, I can describe two specific foraging commons I can dream about actioning in my surroundings. These examples are both different, with different barriers and levels of involvement.

The first example is effectively taking on an aspect of stewarding already-existing foraging spaces near my house. There are multiple ex-plantations which are now public land. In these landscapes, there are already numerous wild foods I harvest: elder, sloe, hawthorn, jelly-ear mushroom, few-flowering leek, grey squirrel, blaeberry, dandelion, nettle, bramble, acorn, hazel, and so on. I can help maintain and bolster the existing resources and promote overall landscape health. Here are some things that I could do, or have done:

1. Remove invasives (few-flowering leek, grey squirrel).

2. Spread a native plant within a close range of where it already exists. As an example: having seen blaeberry growing at the base of birches, I learned about the blaeberry-birch association. They both like acidic soil. There are birches near the blaeberry-birch without the berries, and the berries might be successfully grown at these berry-less birches. I might transplant microbiomes as well. Don’t spread non-native plants, and don’t spread things too far.

3. Regularly harvest “weedy” plants like nettle and dandelion.

4. Talk to passers-by about what I am doing.

The second example is more effortful and requires a group of people backing it up. This is the transformation of park-forest boundaries into a foraging area that is maintained by a community. Let’s look at a satellite image of what this boundary looks like right now (on Google Maps):

Here, we see a hard border between (mown) grass and a forested area. This is a very artificial thing. Forest-adapted species on the very edge are likely exposed to stressors they’re not built for, such as stronger wind and sun. What would be more ecologically sensible, and provide more habitat variety, would be to have a zone between the traditional park and the forest which has trees at lower density. Spaces for this exist on the borders of parks/gardens/farms and forests, and in currently-mown areas that aren’t great for human use (sloped or waterlogged).

Above: where a “forager park” might fit into the landscape, softening the border between a conventional park and a forest. It would provide new land uses and new habitats on the local scale.

These “border spaces” are ideal for a “forager park.” Such an area could be maintained by a community by coppicing and pollarding to keep trees at a human-appropriate height. Trees would be planted further apart, making it easier to navigate and allowing sunlight to reach the ground, encouraging potentially-useful undergrowth to come in. The primary labour activities would be pollarding and coppicing, which only need to be done every few years, removing invasives, and keeping trails clear and the canopy open. These can be done as a community activity, something not possible with mowing grass. Foragers can go in and out as they please, and organise as a community to address issues and prevent overharvesting.

What might a forager park look like? To work through my thoughts, I sketched a landscape inspired by my research and by things I have seen in real life. Coppiced and pollarded trees keep the canopy open. Some trees can have undergrowth cleared around their base, so we can reach them easier – I think this would make sense for trees like oaks which drop nuts we can use. The area can be buffered from the traditional park uses using unmown stretches without woody plants, or by espaliered willow.

Above: a sketch of a forager park. Widely spaced trees kept trimmed to allow sunright to get through the canopy. Mown and unmown stretches provide a variety of habitats. Nettles and brambles are cleared from the path. Public art-infrastructure, such as a large bowl sculpture, encourages park-goers to collect fallen nuts and place them in the bowl.

As always, this is not a blueprint or a concrete set of instructions. This is best taken as inspiration, which can and should be heavily adapted to your own community’s circumstances.

If you don’t have a go-to group, then tackle what land-stewarding you can with your own hands (and don’t forget to talk to passers-by to get them on board). Turn your own yard into an informal public space, or if you are willing to take a risk, do what Macnith Community Garden did and just start using otherwise-unused space. If you have a group, you might have the means of formally (legally) moving land into common ownership, or to advocate for a forager park, or to fight for a local version of RESEX.

In any case, go out and get your hands dirty!

Thanks for reading. Before I go: if you’re in Scotland and want to see if we can get something going here, please email us (FAO Otto), or even better: why not post on our forum? I cannot receive DMs on my personal Substack.

Works cited

Barca, S. (2024). Workers of the Earth. Pluto Press.

Brown, I. F. (2001). Extractive Preserves and Participatory Research in as Factors in the Biogeochemistry of the Amazon Basin, in McClain, M. E., The Biogeochemistry of the Amazon Basin. Oxford University Press.

Pinzón Rueda, R., & Ruiz Murrieta, J. (1995). Extractive Reserves. IUCN - World Conservation Union.

Singh, N. M. (2013). The affective labor of growing forests and the becoming of environmental subjects: Rethinking environmentality in Odisha, India. Geoforum, 47, 189–198. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.01.010

Stark, P. B., Miller, D., Carlson, T. J., & Rasmussen de Vasquez, K. (2020). Open-source food: Nutrition, toxicology, and availability of wild edible greens in the East Bay. PLOS ONE, 15(9), e0239794. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0202450

Vaarde, T. H. (2023). Social Forestry: Tending the Land as People of Place. Synergetic Press.

Read part 2 here.

Foraging Commons

When most people in the Global North think of “food production,” we think of farms. When we think of “food commons,” that usually means small farms, community supported agriculture (CSA), and community gardens.

I’m going to be so bold so as to nudge you in a different direction.

Foraging is the act of searching for resources in your environment. It can be picking berries, gathering firewood, and even hunting. Compare this with the above examples of food commons, which involve more cultivation. Foraging is something that unites humans with other animals. Humanity has been foraging since before we were humans.

Why foraging?

Reason 1: Farming is a whole lot of work.

Farming is great. There are a lot of reasons why we farm. Spending the time and effort to tend to a field of crops creates a field full of human-edible plants that is easier to harvest. Farming, or at least gardening, is also necessary for some plants to be grown. As we cared for plants and selected the best ones, we also produced conditions where more sensitive plants could survive. This leaves us with a lot of plants which are very delicious and have large fruits, leaves, and/or seeds, but which struggle to manage without human intervention.

Farms and gardens often grow a lot of annual plants (an exception here would be orchards). These plants are re-planted and harvested every year. That’s a lot of work. That work is amplified by the aforementioned “sensitivity” of a lot of these plants. They need to be looked after. They may also be native to a different climate, requiring glasshouses or polytunnels.

Not everyone has the time for all of this. Some people might love the idea of working as a farmer, but other people prefer other activities. Foraging fits more flexibly into a variety of lifestyles. The act of foraging itself can be time-consuming (very dependent on what you’re foraging), but you spend dramatically less time tending the land. A lot of edible plants have no problem spreading on their own (nettles and dandelions, anyone?), so you don’t need to spend effort planting them. A lot of edible plants are also perennials, like trees, blueberry, raspberry, and bramble. Once you know your area, you can forage quite efficiently.

Reason 2: Foraging fulfills different needs than farming.

In much of the Global North, we get sufficient calories but insufficient nutrition, especially insufficient micronutrients (Gómez et al., 2013). Rice, maize, and wheat accounted for 60% of calories humans got from plants in the 2010s (Moore Lappé & Collins, 2015) and these three alongside potatoes represented more than 60% of calories in the early 2020s (Food and Agriculture Organisation, 2020). Just over 100 out of the 30,000+ edible plants in the world provide 90% of our calories (Prescott-Allen & Prescott-Allen, 1990). While these plants provide important nutrients, they don’t provide everything we need. Such a limited range of food crops leads to worse nutrition (Pingali, 2012), especially among the poor. You can see a cause-and-effect relationship by going to the store. How much would a variety of vegetables cost? How many loaves of the cheapest bread could you buy for the same amount?

Not only that, but current evidence indicates that store-bought produce is less nutritious than other produce. The priorities of the “Green Revolution” – when we started intensely farming using fertilisers and pesticides – was to increase our ability to grow calories generally and protein more specifically (Gómez et al., 2013). Our capitalist food system follows a profit motive, and this has led to favouring crops that are sweet, easy to harvest with machines, and that don’t get damaged by shipping. This can lead to nutritional quality declining as other features are prioritised. Heirloom crops often contain micronutrients that common commercial crops do not (Dwivedi et al., 2019). The pattern holds true for wild plants, which have also avoided commercial breeding. Stark et al. (2020) analysed urban forage plants and found that they were more nutritious than the highest-nutrition produce available at the stores in the area. Therefore, even if you can afford fruits and veg at the store, you might still be at risk of deficiencies.

Familiarity with wild foods is also life-saving if something goes wrong with the commercial food system. Some readers may recall supermarket shelves going empty during COVID-19 lockdown. This is considered to be the effect of “Just In Time” (JIT) supply chains, where as few goods are stored as possible to cut down on costs. However, severe or long-term supply chain disruptions can lead to empty shelves even with a shift away from JIT supply chains. This can happen in the case of war, even if the war doesn’t involve your country. There are many historical examples, and current events that risk repeating these harms. Currently, the US-Israel-provoked war in Iran is blocking fertiliser transport through the Strait of Hormuz at the exact time when Brazilian farmers start ordering it, likely hamstringing the Brazilian soybean industry. Industrial agriculture uses soy as a major support. Experts like Raj Patel of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) are sounding the alarm. Get ready for a rough year…

What can we do? We can look to recent historical examples of what happens during a modern-day food shortage. These examples are discussed in more depth on the blog Pyrophytic Futures. The first example is from Redžić & Ferrier (2017) and focuses on the siege of Sarajevo. During the siege and invasion, people started to forage and hunt to stay alive, but they had no connection to wild foods. They relied on information transmitted via radio by the ecologist Sulejman Redžić. Something similar happened in the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944, except that the government provided information instead of an ecologist (Vorstenbosch et al., 2017). What would have happened if nobody had provided information to the public? Cases of starvation or poisoning from inedible plants would have been much higher. People can more easily adapt their diets to changing circumstances if they are familiar with wild foods. Compare the two prior examples with the example given by Sulaiman et al. (2022). Syrian people were used to harvesting wild foods and knew how to cook toxic plants in ways that made them non-toxic. Notably, the younger generation considered this a sign of poverty, signalling a cultural turn away from foraging – something which could be devastating. It needs to be socially normal to eat wild foods, and wild food knowledge needs to be commonplace. Otherwise, lean times brought on by global instability – even on the other side of the planet – are likely to cause far more cases of malnutrition, miscarriage, and death. This is exactly why establishing foraging parks (ASAP!) is important.

Foraging occupies a niche that allows people to obtain important micronutrients without committing to becoming a farmer. Through a foraging common, where commoners communicate about the health of their landscapes and help maintain them while sharing knowledge, foraging has an opportunity to be both normal and widely understood.

Reason 3: Sustainable foraging can protect biodiversity & green spaces

Before we talk about how foraging can protect biodiversity, I’ll briefly cover why biodiversity is important. You can think of biodiversity using an old adage: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Every species (and even subspecies) occupies its own niche: its own range of ideal temperatures, food sources, and so on. Every species performs its own functions in the ecology of a place, whether that be pollination, eating herbivores, digging up plants, or something else. The fewer species that perform a certain function, the bigger the problem will be if something happens to one of those species. You want a decent amount of redundancy in case one or more species has a bad year due to a heatwave, a cold snap, a disease, or one of the other myriad curveballs that the environment can throw.

Another important consideration is the fact that we know very little about the world we live in. Other organisms access wavelengths outside the visible spectrum, sounds at ranges we cannot hear, smells at concentrations too low to be meaningful, and entire sensory worlds we cannot tap into at all (If you’re interested, I’d recommend Ed Yong’s An Immense World). There are microorganisms too small for us to see without a microscope and things that live underground, underwater, or inside other living beings, where we might not find them. All of these organisms interact with each other in ways that we may or may not know about, and that may or may not be incredibly important. Every living thing is like a fly in a cobweb – its movements are impacted by the threads it is stuck to, and its movements also tug on and possibly reshape the web as a whole. We have only a partial picture of the web. We struggle to predict the impact that changing one point of the web will have on the whole. Maintaining the diversity of the landscape is erring on the side of caution.

Moving on to the actual topic of this subheader. There’s a lot of talk about humans being inherently bad for nature. Does any of it hold water?

As population plummeted during the black death, plant diversity followed suit (Gordon et al., 2026). A similar pattern emerges in the modern Alps, where farming intensification and also land abandonment both decreased plant diversity (Niedrist et al., 2009). Forests managed as forest-gardens by the indigenous First Nations of Turtle Island (North America) show higher diversity, even 150 years after maintenance stopped (Armstrong et al., 2021). Even the presence of paths, with minimal other human management, can increase diversity (Root-Bernstein & Svenning, 2018).

There are lots more examples but I believe my point has been made clear: human activity can be good for our landscapes, if we do it right.

Biodiversity can lead to resilience in a landscape, capacity to resist shocks. Take disease, for example. If a disease knocks out one species in one area, plenty of others can pick up the slack. As individuals of the same species are more dispersed and mixed with others, disease can’t spread as easily. Humans can create these resilient conditions by maintaining mosaics. Mosaics happen naturally as “climax communities” – such as forests of large, old trees – are damaged in places by things like fire. These pockets of damage allow new species to thrive where previously they could not. Humans can create mosaics more precisely and gently than a landslide or lightning strike. In creating a landscape that can host a variety of wild foods, we create a highly varied environment with plenty of food for animals as well. A great example of a European food forest can be read about here.

Moreover, if people form a connection to a place by foraging there, they might fight harder to protect it against destruction.

Thanks for reading. Before I go: if this is interesting to you, why not post on our forum?

Works cited

Armstrong, C. G., Miller, J. E. D., McAlvay, A. C., Ritchie, P. M., & Lepofsky, D. (2021). Historical Indigenous land-use explains plant functional trait diversity. Ecology and Society, 26(2), 6. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-12322-260206

Dwivedi, S., Goldman, I., & Ortiz, R. (2019). Pursuing the potential of heirloom cultivars to improve adaptation, nutritional and culinary features in a changing climate (201906.0022). Preprints.org. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201906.0022.v1

Food and Agricultural Association. (2020). World Food and Agriculture - Statistical Yearbook 2020. Food and Agriculture Association.

Gómez, M. I., Barrett, C. B., Raney, T., Pinstrup-Andersen, P., Meerman, J., Croppenstedt, A., Carisma, B., & Thompson, B. (2013). Post-green revolution food systems and the triple burden of malnutrition. Food Policy, 42, 129–138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2013.06.009

Gordon, J. D., Fagan, B., Finch, J., Gillson, L., Milner, N., & Thomas, C. D. (2026). Black Death land abandonment drove European diversity losses. Ecology Letters, 29(3), e70325. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.70325

Moore Lappé, F., & Collins, J. (2015). World Hunger: 10 Myths. Grove Press.

Niedrist, G., Tasser, E., Lüth, C., Dalla Via, J., & Tappeiner, U. (2009). Plant diversity declines with recent land use changes in European Alps. Plant Ecology 202, 195-210. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11258-008-9487-x

Pingali, P. L. (2012). Green Revolution: Impacts, limits, and the path ahead. PNAS, 109(31), 12302–12308. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0912953109

Prescott-Allen, R., & Prescott-Allen, C. (1990). How many plants feed the world? Conservation Biology, 4(4), 341–465. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.1990.tb00310.x

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Below is a video of our conversation, followed by a summary in bullet points (with links to more info), and then the complete transcript.

Summary

• Unai’s team is looking to launch a housing commons in the Basque Country.

• They’re using the use-credit obligations idea, developed by Chris Cook, Dil Green and Mutual Credit Services.

• They’re practising first with bicycles, then cars, before moving on to houses.

• They’re using consent decision-making, based on sociocracy.

• Investors, customers and employees (who administer the scheme and maintain the bicycles) are all full members.

• They are creating an association that complies with all state regulations.

• They will also have a trusted ‘custodian’ or ‘guardian’ member with a veto vote, so that assets are not lost from the commons. This member may even be an organisation, that will provide an ‘asset lock’ for several commons organisations.

• Vouchers are denominated in days of use of a bicycle.

• Vouchers are held in an app called ‘Citizen Wallet’.

• They’re happy to connect with others wanting to do similar things - txirrin@protonmail.com

Full transcript

Dave: Today, I’m talking with Unai Gaztelu, who’s in the Basque country and is a member of several coops there. He’s also part of a group looking to launch a housing commons project in the Basque country, but first, his group is going to practice with bicycles and cars. Hi, Unai.

Unai: Hi, Dave. Great to be here with you.

Dave: The first thing I wanted to say is that I’ll put links to more information about the tools and models you’re using in the description. But before we talk about what you’re doing exactly, I want to talk about why you’re doing it. What’s the problem you’re trying to solve? What’s your motivation?

Unai: I would say I can explain it from two sides. The more pessimistic one is that I would like to increase the freedom that we humans live with. That’s the same as reducing the domination of humans over other humans or over nature, so that we can basically live with peace, harmony, doing things from love. That would be the positive way of framing things. Imagining us living together and doing things from love, from a positive place of optimism and love to nature and to others.

Dave: We’re a long way from that.

Unai: As a systemic level, yes. But then I see a lot of love, harmony, and compassion at the small level, in relationships, friends, family. So it depends on where you look.

Dave: I think humans are basically nice, but we have a system that pushes people to do things that are not nice.

Unai: Yes. There is this Otto Scharmer quote: “We collectively create results that nobody wants.” That might be true.

Dave: So tell us a bit about your background. What did you study?

Unai: I studied environmental engineering, about ten or fifteen years ago. But I don’t consider myself an engineer. Maybe I have the mindset, but I never really practised it or was interested in practising it. I started with environmental engineering because I was concerned about what we are doing to planet Earth. That was my main concern, not so much the social aspect of domination over other humans. From there, I started to think about and practice different ways of changing that, and that’s how I got to know different ideas, practices, and ways of being that we can maybe talk about.

Dave: As I understand it, your idea is you issue and sell vouchers for future use of a bicycle. With the money from selling the vouchers, you buy the bicycle. Is that the basic idea?

Unai: Yes, that’s the idea. We don’t only buy it, but we repair it. The one we got was a bit drastic, so we put it in perfect condition. We also budgeted for components like oil, a pump, some repairs, and spare parts. But that’s the basic idea.

Dave: That simple idea can be used for lots of things: bicycles, cars, houses, energy infrastructure, land, leisure centers, pubs. Vouchers for use of a resource sold at a discount, and the discount makes it worth people’s while to buy them.

Unai: Exactly. I really like this. There’s an article by Dil Green where he mentions a breach, talking about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. It’s a very contested topic with ongoing debate and no clear answer, but one simplification is how the people who had power gave it away. In a way, I see what we are talking about as creating obligations as a mechanism to do that. It offers people who are in power now, or those who have capital, a way to put their capital to work. They get more capital out of it, but what’s happening in the background is that we are growing the commons—bringing resources under the commons. It’s a kind of hack, from my perspective.

Dave: I know the article. A Transcender Manifesto. How did you come across the idea?

Unai: I’ve been following the work of Chris Cook, Mutual Credit Services, and similar people for a while. At the same time, my family and I are part of a group that wants to live in a shared house, a cohousing project. Having these two things together, I thought it would be worth trying to implement the housing commons model here in the Basque country. I started talking with different people, and that’s how we ended up here.

Dave: So ultimately, you’re looking to start a housing commons. But practising with a bicycle is a genius idea. Can I ask for more details about your project? What kind of bike is it, and how many do you have?

Unai: So far, only one. We are demand-driven. We want as many bicycles as people need, not the other way around. My cousin Eduardo, who is now a member and my partner in developing these ideas, and I both like cycling and have done tours in Spain and France. A third friend had a spare racing bicycle. We saw it as a nice opportunity to experiment with this model for housing commons. We decided to treat the owner of the bicycle as an investor. We issued vouchers and exchanged them for the bicycle and for euros from other investors.

Dave: So the person who donated the bicycle got vouchers?

Unai: He gave them to our friend, who was looking for someone to take the bike. But yes, they became an investor. They now own vouchers, and they are not necessarily users—they are investors.

Dave: Some people who own the vouchers are just investors. They might sell the vouchers to people who want to use the bike, but they don’t want to use it themselves.

Unai: Exactly.

Dave: Same with housing. Investors can hold housing vouchers as an investment, not to house themselves, but maybe as part of their pension.

Unai: Exactly. I know you guys are exploring that option of pension funds holding use-credits, and I think it’s brilliant.

Dave: The free bicycle aspect might happen with houses too. Older people with no kids might leave their house to the commons in exchange for vouchers, with a clause allowing them to live there for the rest of their life.

Unai: Definitely. My parents own a house. If I inherit it, I would put it into the commons. I hope I can convince them to do it while they are alive. They could continue living there, pay with credits if they want, but make sure the house is owned by the commons and can remain affordable for whoever needs it.

Dave: You know your house will do something good after you’re gone, and for the rest of your life, maintenance is not your problem—it’s the commons. Maybe we could also offer a package where people who put their house into the commons get some care, not professional care, but people coming to check on them and have a chat.

Unai: Yes. Care credits are an option. Chris Cook mentions how older people often have money but lack care, while young people have no assets but can provide care. There’s a match there.

Dave: Younger people have plenty of time and nowhere to live. Older people need care and have too much house.

Unai: Exactly. Perfect fit.

Dave: How many vouchers did you sell, and how did you work that out?

Unai: We made some calculations. First, we budgeted. We needed to raise €400 to pay for the bicycle repair and some tools. We checked the market price for renting such a bike but wanted it to be affordable. We decided on €5 per day. A local association rents bicycles for that price; others rent for €20 per day, but those are for-profit and maybe better bikes. We also wanted investors to get a return relatively soon with numbers that make sense. We estimated demand based on the usage it already had, since a bicycle isn’t like a house with constant demand. With these parameters, we set €5 per day and issued around 80 vouchers. Investors could get about a 10% return in maybe four years. It was a decent investment.

Dave: Did the investors become full members of the group?

Unai: Yes, definitely. That’s part of how it works. We are in the process of registering it legally as an association. The members will be the users—the cyclists—and the administrator, who is currently my cousin, taking care of the bicycle and the finances.

Dave: That’s the same as for houses. You need to maintain the houses and administer the scheme.

Unai: There’s a difference between a bicycle and a house. A bicycle probably needs more frequent maintenance. The margins are different, so we are learning as we practice. But it’s the same model. Investors are part of the commons, and we also have a Guardian figure, a person or organization with veto rights.

Dave: You’re doing that as well. That’s very interesting.

Unai: We are prototyping it, testing it. We are developing our bylaws, and the goal is to have them accepted by the state. We are trying to frame them in a way compatible with their requirements while ensuring that we are all together—investors and the commons. We want the Guardian to have veto rights, so we are encoding that legally. We are also using consent decision-making, based on sociocracy.

Dave: So you’re going full-on with custodian, member classes, and sociocracy. That’s proper.

Unai: Yes. And we are already practising even though it’s not legally registered. Making collective decisions through consent is part of the process. We had our first decision a couple of months ago, and it’s fun. Having lower stakes with a bicycle allows us to make mistakes. For example, we could test if someone tries to steal or sell the bicycle to see if our bylaws are good enough to protect it. We would only lose a bicycle. We are doing this slowly, steadily, and trying to enjoy it.

Dave: So you have meetings with investors, users, stewards, and the Guardian with veto power. How do you choose your Guardian?

Unai: We haven’t done that yet, but we’ve had conversations. When you think about ways people could hack it and sell the assets, you realize that the first Guardian is a key person. It needs to be someone we truly trust. We thought of Chris Cook, though he lives in another jurisdiction. Another interesting option is to choose an organization. We are in touch with people in Galicia who are working on locking assets under the commons by creating a second-order organization that holds veto power for many different commons. We haven’t decided yet; we will decide sociocratically.

Dave: It’s genius to work out all these things in a low-stakes system. If the bicycle is stolen, it’s just a bicycle. Then you can move on to a car next?

Unai: Yes. The bicycle doesn’t legally have a registered owner—the state doesn’t care. But a car is different; they care about who owns it. We want to do a car next. We are already looking into it, but we have a small issue with ownership and a parking spot. But we definitely want to do it with a car and add the feature of legal registration under the state.

Dave: When you get to houses, you’ll have a lot of experience under your belt.

Unai: Yes. In our case, we don’t yet have the connections or capacity to attract people for a house project. In Stroud, you went all in with a house, which is great if you can. But for people like us who are learning, this is a nice option.

Dave: We’re learning too, but the stakes are higher. What are your bicycle vouchers denominated in?

Unai: One day of bicycle use. If it were a different type of bike, like one for daily commuting, we might denominate it monthly. But for this racing bike, people use it for day tours, so we denominate it in days.

Dave: Do you print vouchers, or is it on an app?

Unai: We use Citizen Wallet, a simple app that uses blockchain technology in the background. It’s not so important now, but it might be if the group grows and trust becomes an issue. You download it, and if you buy vouchers, you can send euros to our shared account or pay with cash, and we issue the vouchers. In the app, you see your balance and can send or receive vouchers. When you use the bike, you pay with vouchers to the commons. To buy or sell vouchers, you just ask for the other person’s username and send them.

Dave: Who built the app?

Unai: It’s an off-the-shelf app. I collaborate with the project—Citizen Wallet—and they are very nice people.

Dave: Where is the bike kept? How do people get it?

Unai: Currently, the last person to use the bike keeps it at home in a safe place. We communicate on a WhatsApp group with different channels. One channel is for booking. If someone wants to use the bike, they say so in the group. The person who has it responds, and they agree on how to transfer it. If someone has trouble storing it, Eduardo, our administrator, usually keeps it.

Dave: This is a practice run, but do you have ambitions for more bikes?

Unai: If there’s demand, why not? But we don’t want to push things. As a commons, we decide what to invest in next. If there’s demand, we will. A friend, Alex, who works with a local currency, pushes us to aim for a large float of maybe hundreds of bicycles. He says that if we have 100 bicycles, people will take notice. But I’m not personally excited about that—managing that many bikes could become an issue. I’d rather try it with other resources that bring new features, like a car. I was in Barcelona recently and discovered a cooking machine that cooks for many people efficiently. It costs €5,000, but meals can be as cheap as €2-3. That could be another future project.

Dave: If you had hundreds of bikes, voucher sales and investments could generate income to pay stewards to maintain them.

Unai: Yes, that’s the idea. Scale definitely helps for that.

Dave: How is your group legally structured, and what’s the name?

Unai: It’s “Txirrin.” (pronounced chirrin) In Basque, bicycle is “txirrindula,” and “txirrin” is the sound of the bell. We liked it. Legally, we are not yet registered, but we want to try as an association. Some people suggest foundations are better for holding assets and ensuring they can’t be sold, so we are connecting with different people to learn what best fits our needs.

Dave: How autonomous is the Basque country? Are you looking at Basque or Spanish law?

Unai: I think it’s Spain. You register at offices in the Basque country, but once registered, the association works across Spain under Spanish rules.

Dave: Do you see yourself ultimately at the center of a large housing commons in the Basque country?

Unai: Of course. That’s why we’re doing this. My cousin Eduardo takes on strange challenges. When I told him I wanted to do something like this with him, he said, “We’re already doing it. Challenging the current housing market and the perception of property is the biggest challenge you can think of.” So, yes, we have that ambition. But we are realistic and take it slowly. We haven’t got any funding, and we’re still discussing whether we want it or not.

Dave: You can plant seeds. As things change, ‘realistic’ changes too.

Unai: Yes. I don’t know how things will turn out, but I trust this. We want to keep playing, experimenting, testing, and hope to include other collaborative finance tools like mutual credit. But slowly.

Dave: We’re building a commons lab in Stroud to research and develop playbooks for various commons models, including housing commons. You’re welcome to have the playbook when it’s ready. You might be ahead of us. We’d love to document the growth of housing commons in other countries. There’s potential to connect all these projects and federate to a global scale.

Unai: I hope to see it, or at least we are trying.

Dave: People could replicate your bicycle project. Do you have any documentation on how you did it?

Unai: Not super well documented. We have some documents explaining our steps, but if people are interested, we would love to talk with them. That’s part of why we are doing this—to connect with people with the same ideas and goals, maybe under different names and strategies. We are definitely inviting others to replicate, support us, or make small experiments with these ideas.

Dave: Any other background information you’d like to add?

Unai: No, nothing comes to mind.

Dave: Who would you like to see interviewed, and why?

Unai: I’d like to hear more from Chris Cook. Also people involved in traditional commons—that’s super interesting. There are many possible threads and conversations.

Dave: I’d like to keep in touch and learn from your discoveries.

Unai: Happy to do so.

Dave: Can people keep up with what you’re doing? Do you have a website or blog?

Unai: We are not publicly sharing much online. We have an email: txirrin@protonmail.com. People can write to us. We also have a WhatsApp group for practical use. If someone wants to see what’s going on, I don’t have objections, but we’d have to ask the rest.

Dave: Do you have any photographs?

Unai: Yes, we have a channel in our WhatsApp group where people share pictures.

Dave: Maybe I can get a few for the article.

Unai: Sure. Txirrin was at the Tour de France last summer.

Dave: I’ll put links to everything in the description. It’s been great talking with you.

Unai: Likewise.

Dave: Are you coming to the Festival of Commoning in October?

Unai: I’ve never been, but I was planning to. I hope so.

Dave: You’d be very welcome. Lovely speaking with you. Hopefully, we’ll talk again soon.

Unai: Thanks a lot.

Dave: Cheers, Unai.

Unai: Cheers. Bye bye.

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Below is a video of our conversation, followed by notes containing key points, and then the complete transcript.

Notes and key points covered

Links:

UK landing page: https://about.openfoodnetwork.org.uk/

Global landing: https://openfoodnetwork.org/

The importance of open source: https://about.openfoodnetwork.org.uk/open-source-tech/

The software: https://guide.openfoodnetwork.org/your-quick-start-on-ofn-given-who-you-are

Resources: https://about.openfoodnetwork.org.uk/resources/

The ‘Power of Food’ project that bridges across all forms of difference: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oSn8g-b-GlVku9g9TOKoVO0GvxSRSuCy/view?usp=sharing

Key points:

1. Nick Weir is one of 7 people making up the UK Open Food Network team. There are teams in 22 countries around the world, collaborating openly and non-hierarchically.

2. Nick believes that the conventional, supermarket-based food system is broken. We are disconnected from where our food comes from. Our food systems are controlled by powerful corporations (supermarkets, seed companies, pesticide companies, etc.) that do not have our best interests in mind.

3. The Open Food Network is an open-source platform where farmers and growers can sell food to eaters and buyers.

4. The Network stands as an alternative to proprietary systems that need to make a profit for their investors.

5. “What I’m noticing in these local community food enterprises is that there is a real sense of common need. We all need food. Food is a basic need. If we can come together around that food [...] If we can bring people together across differences and start to look at our common needs, and to talk about our common needs, and to talk about the history of our needs, [...] this can form much more long-lasting bonds than arguing across a political divide about the rights and wrongs of government policy.”

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Otto: Hello everyone. This is Otto from Growing the Commons and today I will be interviewing Nick Weir from the Open Food Network, which you can find at openfoodnetwork.org.uk. It’s really great stuff, you should absolutely go check out that website. So let’s get into it.

Hello Nick. Great to chat with you.

Nick: Good morning.

Otto: Let’s start with some broader questions about what you’re doing exactly and why you think it’s a good idea. I want to talk about why you’re doing it, to start. So, what problem are you trying to solve and what’s your motivation here?

Nick: It’s pretty simple. I’m part of a global community of farmers, growers, and community food enterprises of many different kinds with a common belief that the mainstream global food systems are broken, and we need to rebuild them from the bottom up. They’re broken mainly because there is an imbalance of power and control in food systems, a small number of large retailers controlling the distribution of food, a small number of seed companies, a small number of ag tech, a small number of land owners… the whole system is very unstable and top heavy and starting to collapse. Over the last 12 years, this global community has been building a piece of open source software that provides an alternative.

Otto: Brilliant. I know from my perspective I’m seeing the exact same problems that you are, and I’m sure a lot of people that are involved in food production and agriculture are also aware of these problems. So what is your philosophy or approach to this problem? Is there a sense of urgency? You mentioned community and trying to build networks?

Nick: I feel a strong sense of urgency, but over the 12 years that I’ve been involved with the process, I’ve realised that my urgency doesn’t necessarily translate to the change in the food system. The change in the food system relates to the need, and at the moment the mainstream system is propped up enough and marketed heavily enough that there is no mainstream perception of need.

Apart from when we have crises like the COVID crisis, when suddenly the food distribution systems were not working and we had shortages in supermarkets, and turnover through the Open Food Network went up by over 850% over seven weeks during lockdown.

Otto: That’s interesting, there have been other projects that have a sense of urgency that also noticed that during COVID [lockdown] when supply chains fell apart, people started flocking to them. The Many Trees Project over in the United States, which are trying to grow food trees, they saw a bunch more people getting interested. I think they were even founded during COVID [lockdown]. There’s an underlying sense of urgency, and then one thing goes wrong, and people are going: “we need to do something now.” It’s a matter of keeping people in that state of urgency, isn’t it?

Nick: Yeah. Especially when financial pressures are so strong and supermarkets can undercut local food systems because of their economies of scale and mainly because of their unfairness: the fact that they’re exploiting farmers and growers in poor countries and using vast amounts of fossil fuel to move food around the planet, which makes it cheaper. If people are struggling economically then they will have to go for cheaper food.

Otto: That’s a big problem with the food system. A lot of foods are very cheap because of the reasons you mentioned, but if you push prices up to pay people fairly, it becomes a problem because of the broader economic system.

So we’ll get into what you’re doing exactly, just so you can provide where you fit in in this whole complicated ecosystem. What are you doing exactly? How you think it addresses the very complicated problem that you’ve brought up?

Nick: The first thing that we did was to start to build this open source e-commerce platform that allows farmers and growers, food producers of every kind, to connect their produce and sell their produce to the eaters and the buyers. So we’re building short food-supply networks that enable local food systems to develop such that the people who need to eat the food can buy it from people locally who are producing that food, and build a strong local economy. The software does that very well, it’s open source, which means that it is in common ownership, and it also means that people all over the world are contributing ideas and suggestions to it.

The software is deployed in 21 – 22 – countries, and increasing all the time. Every week, there is an update to the software. When people say: “wouldn’t it be great if we could do this?” the software then improves and improves and improves. Because it’s open source, ideas generated in any one country will be added to the common code-base so that we all benefit from these ideas. So, that’s the first thing that’s happening. People connecting to their local farmers and growers directly either by buying directly or from what we call “food hubs.” A hub brings together multiple producers under a single online shopfront, which then takes orders from eaters and buyers. The software sends purchase orders to each of the producers, the hub aggregates the produce and then delivers it to the eaters and the buyers. So that’s happening, and steadily growing. It is very effective.

But, the most important thing about the Open Food Network is the knowledge base. The fact that people using the platform have incredibly creative and innovative ideas about how to build local food systems adapted to their local area, and then they share that knowledge. So we have lots of case studies, lots of webinars, lots of resources on our websites, which are 12 years of experience of building local food systems. And I believe that knowledge is as important as the software in terms of a dispersed, global community of local activists building better food systems.

Otto: So it’s definitely something that’s evolved over the past 12 years as people bring in their own perspectives and ideas. I was wondering if we could go back to the very start 12 years ago. Where did that original idea come from? What motivated you – but also, how far have you departed from that as you’ve been guided along the way from various other people coming in, and maybe other countries operating with the same software?

Nick: Going back to the beginning, the two founders of the Open Food Network are two women who worked for the Australian government in food policy, Kirsten Larsen and Serenity Hill. They became increasingly disillusioned with mainstream food policy and had this idea of “why not build something from the bottom up?” They started the software way back 12 years ago. We had had a similar idea in the UK but not anything as big, we were just looking to fix a small local food system problem. We had also developed some similar software, but ours was nothing quite as good as the Open Food Network and ours became out of date quite quickly. Developing software is really expensive, so we then went looking for funding to improve our software, and someone said to us: “why don’t you talk to these guys in Australia? If you’ve got this idea, this concept, this platform is already there.” So we brought the software to the UK about 10 years ago, and it’s grown ever since then.

It evolves every time a new country deploys it, because each country has slightly different cultures, slightly different ways of working, slightly different ways of using the software. An example in the UK now is that we’ve just gone into public procurement, selling into schools and hospitals, aggregating produce from multiple different small-scale agroecological producers, and then bringing it together with the hub having a contract with the large-scale buyer. That has evolved the software, and now, in Canada, France, Spain, and Australia, the whole public procurement thing is starting to happen. There’s a big chunk of funding just come in to Canada and Australia for user experience improvements for the software, and we will all benefit from that.

Otto: Brilliant. How has the response been from all these different groups? People using the website, maybe the difference between different farms that are selling, but also individuals versus public procurement? In different countries have you noticed any differences? Have you had successes in getting people who were initially skeptical excited about the idea or to at least give it a try?

Nick: It does entirely grow by word of mouth. We have very little budget for marketing, and it is just people who use the software and find it helpful. Once you start to build these systems, once you start to have even a single producer who is starting to sell direct to the public, other producers start to notice that’s working. They then start to work together, and they will start to sell each other’s produce and develop what we call producer hubs, which is a producer selling their own produce and also selling from other local farmers and growers. So it does grow organically.

In terms of the use of the software, there are many other platforms that do similar things to the Open Food Network, but almost all of them are proprietary, which means that they’re owned or controlled by an individual or a corporation. As much as that individual might be well motivated, they may well sell their business, they’re open to takeover, they will at some point die and somebody will take over that business. There is no security in terms of ownership of that software. We believe if we’re going to build a better food system, it needs to be built on fundamentally different ownership and control models. A lot of the other software out there is venture capital funded, it’s proprietary software that’s looking for a return on capital. There are very small margins in the food businesses. The farmers and growers are on very tight margins, they can’t afford to pay for expensive software.

The software we’re producing is not as glitzy and not as shiny as the proprietary software, but people like the ethics, they like that they’re investing in a platform that’s going to be there in perpetuity, forever, for the users. It works on an ethical basis.

Otto: So, the fact that it’s open sourced and a commonly owned or common project is the draw for a lot of sellers and buyers. They have other options, but if they don’t have that ethical agreement then they go to the Open Food Network, is that how it’s been working out?

Nick: It seems to be the case for a lot of the enlightened users. A lot of farmers and growers don’t really get technology, they don’t really understand open source or proprietary and think “let’s just go for the cheapest, let’s just go for the one that’s easiest.” But I think over time, as proprietary systems come and go, because venture capital funders want a return on their capital and if they’re not getting that, they’ll pull the plug on the funding. So a lot of the proprietary software doesn’t last very long. But over time, 12 years, we’ve seen a lot of people coming to us because, A, the software is still there after 12 years and is still getting better, and B, it’s cost effective. With the Open Food Network, there is a way of using the platform for free until your turnover goes over £500 a month. So when you’re a small-scale grower you can experiment with the software without any financial outlay at all.

Otto: Apart from the software you’ve mentioned procurement hubs and your website has things about food hubs. Do you mind going into that a bit, if that’s a physical presence, if that’s tying into the website, or even if that’s something led by the users of the website?

Nick: Every hub is different. Some of them are real-life farmer’s markets, which have an online version of their farmer’s markets so that people can pre-order produce from the market or people who can’t get to the market can put an online order in. Some of them are entirely virtual farmer’s markets, where there is no physical presence, where there is an online shopfront where people can shop, and there there will be either a warehouse, or a farmer’s barn, or a school hall that’s used once a week for two or three hours where all the produce gets delivered to that physical location and sorted into boxes and then collected from pickup points or delivery options. Some of them are food banks distributing surplus food to people in food poverty. Community larders. Food co-ops and buying groups for buying bulk produce from wholesalers, 25 kilo sacks of rice at wholesale price, and then split up and divided amongst their members. There’s multiple different ways of using the software.

The procurement option has one of those hubs, normally with some kind of permanent physical presence. They’re normally quite big hubs, because they’re having to process big quantities. Imagine a school wanting 100 kilos of carrots a week, a hospital wanting 500 kilos of potatoes a week. This produce needs to be sourced from multiple different small-scale producers, aggregated together, and then shipped to the buyer.

So, yeah, they vary massively. The website has lots of free case studies to show how these different hubs work.

Otto: That’s something that I think is a virtue of commoning and of the very local scale. It can manifest this capacity to have these small-scale experiments and be very adaptable to circumstances, rather than having a top-down, prescriptive “here’s what you’re supposed to do, and if it doesn’t work, then you’re just doing it wrong.” It’s great to see that in action and to have these different hubs to different things depending on what works for them and their particular needs and circumstances.

Nick: And then sharing that knowledge. You know, “this worked for us, why don’t you try it? This didn’t work for us, make sure you don’t make that same mistake.” So there’s a lot of knowledge-sharing as well.

Otto: Knowledge sharing, especially saying “this didn’t work for us,” a lot of the time people don’t talk about that and then people make the same mistakes on repeat, don’t they?

Nick: Given that it’s not-for-profit and cooperative and open-source, people are happy to talk about their mistakes. It’s great.

Otto: That’s great. So I’ll get a bit more into the specifics here, mostly for listeners who want to get involved or start something similar – lots of different options here about things like structuring, and like you’re saying, it can be very different in some cases. But I was just wondering, how is the Open Food Network structured generally?

Nick: It’s a sociocracy, which means that we have a non-hierarchical governance structure. Each country has the option to deploy the software and to manage the actual governing structure of the software in a way that suits that country. We have nine core global values, one of which is the value of subsidiarity, which means that decisions should be made at the most local level possible. Each country has freedom to design the way it’s structured, but then within each country we encourage the hubs themselves to decide how they want to use the software and to make their own plans. Some of them are not-for-profit hubs, some of them are private businesses using the platform to build farmer’s markets or food hubs. As long as they conform to our nine core values, we’re really happy for them to use our platform in whatever way they like.

The sociocracy is a way of governing that involves the UK team, which is a very small team, which has a support circle, a group of people who support the users; it has a finance circle that manages all the finance; it has a communications circle. And, each circle will have a purpose, will have a remit, will have a level of authority about making decisions, and then there will be a coordination circle that will pull together every circle and make sure everyone knows what’s going on. That sociocratic structure is replicated across all 22 countries, there will be a similar circle structure. Then globally, there will be a stewardship circle, there will be a finance circle, there will be a development circle – software development circle – so is this nested structure of circles with people taking leadership within those circles according to their experience and according to their capacity, but with no leader in terms of a hierarchy.

Otto: And this has been going strong for 12 years now, so clearly something’s working. How many people are involved at this point?

Nick: How many people?

Otto: Yeah. Can you even say?

Nick: In the UK we are a team of 7, all part time, all of us have other jobs, mostly around farming and growing. In each country there will be a similar team, some countries much smaller than others. The global community is made up of representatives from each country. Not all countries participate, since some countries are so small that all they can do is get their heads down and get the software deployed and can’t necessarily get involved in global decision-making.

I’d say, across the world – depends on how to count the people involved, because the beauty of open-source software is that anybody can contribute an idea to it. So imagine a really highly-skilled, highly-paid software developer working for a merchant bank or a merchant consultancy, earning a really big salary, but really disillusioned with what they’re doing. They have no sense of contributing to anything meaningful. At the weekend or in the evenings they will go looking for something useful to do, and some of those people will come to the Open Food Network and say, “I’ve got these skills, what can I do to help?” And they will give some of their time for free because they believe in what we’re doing and they believe in a better food system for the world. So, if you count those people, there’s probably hundreds of people who contribute to the platform. But in terms of paid staff, I’d guess globally, something like 50.

Otto: I guess that’s a testament to the fact that people are motivated by a sense of ethics or just doing something right. The fact that you’re not really able to answer cleanly – if you were able to say, “Oh, I could say exactly who!” – that’s just “okay...” There are more people than that since people think that this is a great idea: “I want to get involved, I don’t care about getting paid if I’m able to contribute to something meaningful.” That means you can’t keep track of it all, it’s out of your hands, and that’s what you want it to be, right?

Nick: Exactly. What I’ve noticed is that there’s a basic human need to look after each other and to do good things. I might sound idealistic saying this, but I believe humans fundamentally want to look after each other and to do the right thing, and then they see a project like this they are drawn to it.

Otto: I would agree with you, I’ve done reading around this subject a lot, coming from an ecology and also an agroecology background. There’s a lot of research about why people do things that – if you think of things in financial terms only – don’t make any sense. Like, “why are you doing that for free?” It’s because there are other things that we prioritise. We have a sense of morality and a sense of justice and what’s right in the world, and we’ll happily lose money doing things that we think are the right thing to do.

That takes us into the next string of questions, which will be looking towards the future and how the Open Food Network fits into the broader ecosystem of initiatives; a very large-scale, forward-looking view. To very broadly start, what are your ambitions with the project? Can you even summarise that?

Nick: If you had asked me 10 years ago I’d have very strong views about replacing the supermarket system, giving farmers and growers much more respect and position, in terms of their power in the food systems. As I get older and more worn down by the mainstream system, my ambition is that people will find something in this phenomenon which is greater than software, this knowledge base, that inspires them to do something locally, and that there will be a widespread, global uprising of initiative across a very large number of people, that will be a groundswell of change. I don’t think any one individual person or even one individual organisation like the Open Food Network is going to make a change. I think it will facilitate a change, when people are ready, when people realise we need a better way of living, a better way of working, a better way of working together, and they will then find tools like the Open Food Network and they will use them to make a difference.

I’ve given up on changing the world. I’m just doing the right thing, I think, and hoping that others will use these tools to do what they think is the right thing.

Otto: I think that’s a pretty sensible approach. Putting a lot of pressure on yourself to change the world is mostly going to exhaust you because, as you were saying, it’s more than just you that needs to get on board, and it’s a matter of getting ideas and tools out into people’s hands and get them to start using them. When you’re saying you’re being worn down, yeah, it wears down everyone, and you’ve done something very noble, which is to not give up and still try to do something.

Where do you think we’re headed, broadly? Do you envision a sustainable, commons-based world, or just complete disaster, or, you know, “I’m not going to touch that subject!”

Nick: I think they’re both possible. I focus on the former. I focus on the possibility that we will turn this thing around. In order to carry on doing the work that I’m doing, I need to believe that it’s possible, and that the more we do this kind of thing and the more of us who start to work in this way, the more likely that is. But, it’s almost impossible to ignore the other possibility that we are all going to self-destruct. If that’s how it needs to be, then that’s how it needs to be, but I need to believe that there is a possibility that we still have a chance to make it better.

Otto: So you’d say that believing in that chance is fundamental to what you’re doing, even though you have an awareness of potential disaster? That believing that something can be done is necessary to try to do something?

Nick: Absolutely. I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning if I didn’t believe that.

Otto: Yeah. So, on the more negative side, you’ve mentioned being worn down. What kind of barriers is the Open Food Network Facing? Have you managed to overcome them, or are there some that are just sticking around and causing problems?

Nick: The basic problem is that we’re throwing ourselves into a very unbalanced problem, which is the problem we started this conversation with, which is that global food systems are broken, which means the people at the bottom, the farmers and the growers, are very, very financially constrained. They have very little disposable income to build better food systems. So we can’t charge very much for the use of our software, which means that we have very little financial input. So we depend on external funding, and we’re very fortunate that over those twelve years we have had enough funding to carry on improving and building this platform.

The other problem is that there is the wider societal issue of the capitalist model, that does have venture capitalist funders that will fund proprietary software systems that look incredibly glitzy and very slick and have a big marketing budget and promise a lot to these farmers and growers… and then, burn out. But it does mean that in the meantime, because we are open source, because all of our codebase is visible and people can copy it, and because people can access our customer base, that we do lose users to these new startups. They come and promise the world, and the farmers and the growers then go to them and work with them for as long as the software is available, and then we have to struggle to get new users. And then 6 months or 2 years later, that software blows up or is withdrawn or the funding stops, and then many of those farmers and growers and food hubs will really struggle. When their software that they’re depending on disappears, that’s quite a big problem. Quite a few food hubs have gone out of business because they were using proprietary software that was then withdrawn. It’s not an easy world.

Otto: I guess it’s like the way people think of crocodiles and sharks in an evolutionary sense, being the same body plan [for a long time]. All this other stuff, all these other things, dinosaurs et cetera, and you’re just like: “yeah, I’m still here.” You’re trying to get people on board and stick around and not chase after this new thing that’s probably going to implode. You have that assurance that you’ve been around through all of this, and maybe people will start to realise that “maybe I shouldn’t jump ship, because that doesn’t seem to turn out very well when people do it.”

Nick: I hope so.

Otto: To finish off: how can we collaborate – Growing the Commons and you, but also, how can people help or even replicate what you’re doing? Is there space for an agricultural commons to start using Open Food Network, or are there other potentials?

Nick: Lots of potential. Anyone who is interested in selling their food either directly to eaters and buyers are very welcome to use the platform. We can stick some links onto the recording [in the above notes] so people can follow those links. If anyone is interested, and they’re maybe not farmers and growers themselves but they want to build local food systems, if you’re interested in setting up a hub that would make all of your local food providers visible online and then distributing that food using our software, we can put some links in there about how to set up a food hub.

I’m also interested in the wider connection, because obviously food is just one part of the ecosystem. There will be other people interested in the commons that will be wanting to develop similar community-owned infrastructure. So the Open Food Network is broadening, there is now an Open Flower Network, flower growers using the Open Food Network. There’s also people using it for textiles, so growing hemp and distributing textile-based products. There’s also an Open Timber Network, using the platform to distribute wood and wood fuel products. There’s lots of options for using this platform in different ways to distribute different products.

But I think probably the biggest way we can cooperate is that knowledge base. A lot of the learning that has come out of using this platform, I think is transferable. In terms of community building, in terms of how to engage a wider population across racial difference, across social difference, across political, cultural differences, there’s a lot of work going on locally in the Open Food Network on how to build community. Maybe we can share some of that knowledge with other commoning projects.

Otto: If people want to get that knowledge or keep up to speed, is there a best way of doing that? Would it be the website, or maybe some of the links we will put in the [notes], or is there another way?

Nick: Assuming that you’re listening to this in the UK, then openfoodnetwork.org.uk. Go to the about page, and all the links will be there. If you’re in another country, go to openfoodnetwork.org, that is the global website, and on there there are links to each of the 22 different countries. Each country will do different things in different ways. The Open Food Network has a newsletter signup, there are social media links we can put in there for the UK instance. The other way is to email, in the UK, hello@openfoodnetwork.org.uk, the global email is hello@openfoodnetwork.org. Those are probably the best ways to tap into the network.

Otto: Wonderful. Before we end, is there anything that I’ve missed that you’d want to talk about? We’ve covered quite a broad spectrum, zooming out to the scale of the whole global food system, to concepts of open source software, so there are a lot of things to talk about.

Nick: On that last point I made about community building and bridging differences: one of the projects that we are funding for at the moment is called The Power of Food. This is based on a concept that we have noticed over those 12 years, that when people come together to grow food together, to harvest food together, process food together, cook food together, and probably most importantly eat food together, they start to have a connection that can resolve some of the differences and some of the polarisation that we’re starting to see in our society. I’m very frightened by the rise of the far right and the rise of fascism and the whole othering that seems to go on in the wider political sphere. What I’m noticing in these local community food enterprises is that there is a real sense of common need. We all need food. Food is a basic need. If we can come together around that food – someone talked to me the other day about the etymology of the word companion, which means to break bread together. If we can bring people together across differences and start to look at our common needs, and to talk about our common needs, and to talk about the history of our needs – you know, people will have different recipes that their great grandmother used to make a particular recipe – to talk about where did that come from, and what’s the history of that, this can form much more long-lasting bonds than arguing across a political divide about the rights and wrongs of government policy.

Otto: That’s a really inspiring note to leave us off on. I’m excited to see both what the Open Food Network does and also what spinoff ideas might be connected. I think your ideas here around community building related to food networks are vindicated in – being proved right by – people who are trying it. I was just watching a documentary, The Last Farm in Amsterdam, last night, which is about trying to build a food park in one of the last green spaces [in Amsterdam] and how it really brought a community together more than just arguing about politics would.

Thank you so much, Nick. It’s been really great talking to you.

Nick: It’s been a pleasure, thank you for your time.

Otto: I highly encourage everyone to check out the Open Food Network website, that’s openfoodnetwork.org.uk for people in the UK, and it’s openfoodnetwork.org if you’re in the rest of the world. I will put links to everything in the [notes]. Thank you, and maybe see you again in the future.

Nick: I look forward to it. Thank you.

This is the first in a series of 24 articles that I hope to compile into a book – working title, The Commoners’ Manifesto: Neither Capitalism nor Communism. Here’s an introduction to the series. I encourage comments, including disagreement and debate. I’ll change my mind if presented with good arguments. It can only make the book better.

My aim overall is to persuade anti-capitalists (and in this and future articles, when I use the word capitalism, I mean the actually existing system) that commons is the way to replace it, and my aim in this series is to dissuade the undecided from taking the Marxist route. I want to show that commons is neither capitalist nor communist, and to present it as a decentralised alternative to both of those centralised systems.

A movement that calls itself somebody’s name with an ‘-ism’ added usually means semi-religious devotion (‘it’s true because it says so in this book’), dogma and division. Commons rejects unjustified authority, has thousands of approaches and hundreds of influential writers, not one guru (although Proudhon and Kropotkin come close, and more recently, Elinor Ostrom, David Graeber, David Bollier, and for me personally, Kevin Carson). Marx’s closest colleague Engels, quoted Marx as saying “I myself am not a Marxist”, in opposition to those misrepresenting him and turning his work into fixed doctrine. It’s less about Marx himself than it is about the implementation of his ideas. He didn’t argue for a one-party state, secret police or gulags – although I would argue that wherever his ideas have been implemented at the state level, it consistently delivered a centralised and authoritarian system.

Marxism captured most of the anti-capitalist left in the 20^th century, squeezing out alternatives that could actually have been successful, and now here we are with capitalism stronger than ever (although causing ecological collapse, so it won’t last).

He certainly did something right to have such a loyal following so long after his death. He told a compelling story about how capitalism developed, how it enriches a few on the backs of most of us, and gives power to a tiny, ruthless elite, but also about how it contains the seeds of its own destruction, if we roll up our sleeves and make it happen.

Marx’s mature vision of communism, after a (temporary) ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is that the state will wither away because it’s not required any more – communities can organise themselves to provide everything they need, including governance. Production, via a ‘free association of producers’, is for use rather than profit. Commons, in other words. So you might think that commoners and Marxists would be natural allies. But ‘temporary’ dictatorship is of course never temporary. More on that in the next article (and also more on Marx’s shift to a more commons-like approach in his later years), but first, let’s praise Marx where it’s due.

Values

Commoners and Marxists share many values – around what success looks like, what constitutes a good life, what’s admirable and what’s shameful. Capitalists may believe that success and a good life involve lots of money, luxury goods, several homes etc. They respect and admire billionaires. Marxists and commoners agree that it’s shameful to be a billionaire, not admirable, because to become a billionaire involves exploiting hundreds of thousands if not millions of people (profiting from their work rather than your own), draining wealth from communities and driving environmental destruction, as their influence ensures states and markets prioritise perpetual growth over ecological limits. Philanthropy doesn’t work for either Marxists or commoners, because it’s a tax-efficient PR exercise that involves using a small fraction of their wealth to mitigate harm caused by the system that created it.

Values shape societies. Ancient Sparta valued courage and honour, which produced a warrior society. Capitalism values profit and accumulation over everything else, which produces a money-oriented society, with all its associated problems. Billionaires have the wealth and power to make their values seem like common sense, via their ownership and control of media, think tanks, academia, advertising and the state. The message is: turn up on time, work hard, do as you’re told, save your money, invest it wisely, start businesses, and you too can be a boss, shareholder, moneylender or landlord, and have lots of money and possessions, which is the point of life.

So because of their values, capitalists see things like global warming as first and foremost a problem because it affects growth and profits, not because it destroys nature and kills millions of people – which is callous and inhumane. Commoners and Marxists push back against these values, although they have very different strategies.

The need for a new system, not reform

Marx was the first to combine a rejection of capitalism with the argument that it can’t be reformed – it’s intrinsically exploitative of people and damaging to communities (he also made some comments indicating that he understood how damaging it is to nature, although ecology wasn’t a well-developed discipline in his day). Tiny elites have existed since ancient times, but the global concentration of wealth and power under capitalism is unprecedented – true democracy and meaningful power-sharing are impossible under such conditions.

Before Marx, economics was dominated by David Ricardo, who claimed that workers’ wages were only ever going to be just enough to keep them alive and able to breed more workers. Profits hugely enrich the owners of production, so there will be conflict between wages and profits – but profits must be sufficiently high to ensure continued economic development (On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Chapter 6). It was brutal, but not everyone agreed. Marx was writing around the same time as John Stuart Mill, in the middle of the 19^th century. Both witnessed the horrors of early capitalism, and wanted to improve conditions for workers, but had very different ideas as to how to do it. Both were influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s recognition that accumulation of property allowed some people to dominate others (“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”).

Mill’s approach was to reform social structures and institutions. Education, universal suffrage and liberal institutions would improve the moral and intellectual capacities of the population, and remove oppression, but still within a capitalist economy and a liberal state. Marx saw that the state isn’t neutral, but is controlled by the most powerful in society (capitalists), for their own ends – that the state’s primary function is to manage and protect the interests of the capitalist class. Domination, oppression, wealth concentration and poverty are due to social structures and institutions themselves, not caused by moral failings. Capitalism is designed to pay workers as little as possible and shareholders as much as possible. That isn’t a flaw in capitalism, it’s its purpose. Reform isn’t enough – it just prolongs the agony, keeps capitalism alive and makes replacement more difficult. We need a new system.

He couldn’t have foreseen modern levels of environmental destruction, mass migration, disinformation, surveillance and wealth concentration. Capitalism has ramped up the insanity since his day. Corporations own stakes in each other, and pledge each other money they don’t have for services that don’t exist. OpenAI pledged $300 billion they didn’t have for Oracle services that don’t exist (cloud services that require huge data centres). OpenAI needs the data centres to make their money, and Oracle needs OpenAI’s money to build the datacentres (none of which have been built as I write). Corporate media celebrate these deals, and their share prices rise because people are excited about how much money they might make – it’s a bit like selling shovels to prospectors during the gold rush. There’s no guarantee of delivering any value, but they make loads of money anyway because so many people are excited by getting rich quickly, and hope the bubble doesn’t burst until after they’ve made their fortune. See the excellent Ed Zitron for more on this.

Marx’s focus on the means of production is a bit off nowadays (although not completely). In the 21^st century power resides more in ownership of the means of exchange, media, platforms and algorithms.

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The transition from feudalism to capitalism

Marx debunked some capitalist fairy tales – for example, that the first capitalists got rich through their hard work and putting money aside, and that workers move to cities to work in their factories voluntarily. He recognised that a) the transition to capitalism required violence (via the enclosures) to keep peasants off common land, so that they couldn’t provide a subsistence livelihood for themselves, and were forced into slums and factories; and b) the first capitalists didn’t become wealthy because of their hard work. Most of them were previously (and often still were) wealthy landowners. Capitalism in its birthplace was built with ‘old money’, from land that was stolen by Norman mercenaries.

Peasants were driven from the land and replaced with sheep to provide wool for the growing textile industry. In the new cities that they fled to, conditions were terrible for workers, at a time when the upper classes were fabulously wealthy, from ownership of factories at home and colonisation and theft of resources abroad.

Marx saw what others didn’t – that ordinary people had been separated from the means of production by the massive enclosures of common land, and forced into factories that they didn’t own, to sell their labour to capitalists, who make huge profits on their backs. Wealth concentrates, as capitalists make more money by having money. Whether you’re rich or poor still depended mainly on which family you were born into.

Capitalists will respond that workers had small incomes whereas they used to have none, which means they’re better off. This argument has been repeated for poor countries in the Global South, where enclosure and urbanisation continue. But previously they had access to land, produced their own food, built their own homes without insurance or mortgages, and had strong communities where childcare and social/leisure activities were free. Having more money (or money at all) doesn’t mean an increase in ‘wealth’ and wellbeing.

Exploitation

Marx saw that capitalists can’t pay their workers the full value that their work brings in, after fixed costs have been paid, because if they did, there wouldn’t be any profit (not just surplus, but money extracted for owners and shareholders). This underpins the Labour Theory of Value (LTV), a concept that predates Marx and was developed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

It’s now possible to envisage a world without human labour at all, or at least without human labour for capitalists – a world in which all work for corporations is done by robots, driverless vehicles and AI (including building the robots and AI). Labour for humans would only involve work that they want to do, paid or not. This causes big problems for the LTV, but whether it’s ultimately true or not, currently, without workers, there are no profits for capitalists – and workers know this. The rewards they get for exhausting, boring and possibly dangerous work is nowhere near the rewards that capitalists get just for having money, without doing any work at all.

Sole traders and co-op workers receive the full value of their work once expenses are covered, since there are no private owners or shareholders extracting profits – making co-operatives and self-employment particularly well-suited to the commons. But even if players in the market are small, local businesses, and a growing commons is shrinking the corporate sector, employing other people to work ‘for’ you (rather than with you) is still exploitative. Small business owners still can’t pay their employees the full value of what they’ve produced, or they won’t make any profit.

But small businesses don’t cause the problems for democracy that big corporations do. If your independent sandwich shop, hair salon or bakery isn’t a corporate chain, it doesn’t concentrate wealth to the extent that it can corrupt politics. However, the problem is that small businesses often don’t stay small. Tesco actually started as a market stall. I don’t know the answer to this, but building commons is a first step, after which we can devise strategies for capping the size of businesses and developing an economy of sole traders and co-ops of various descriptions. But first we have to break the power of corporations, and Marx was right that there’s no chance of doing that within capitalism.

Materialism

In scientific terms, personally, I’m a materialist, in that I don’t believe (as Descartes did), that mind and matter are different ‘substances’. I agree with Daniel Dennett that consciousness is what the brain does. Thoughts, ideas, feelings and awareness are caused by neurons, which are physical. Remove your leg, or any other body part except your brain (some will need an artificial replacement), and you still have consciousness; but no brain, no consciousness.

But Marx wasn’t talking about physics. He was a materialist in that he believed that developments in (material) social and economic conditions change human thinking, in contrast to idealists like Hegel, who believed the opposite – that developments in human thinking change social and economic conditions; or like Plato (the ideal world of forms is more real than the material world). Was Marx right? Well, do you think that the (capitalist) French Revolution happened because enough people were inspired by the ideas developed during the Enlightenment or because ordinary French people were fed up with paying high taxes, working too hard, being told what to do and never having enough of the basic necessities of life? If the former, you’re probably an idealist; if the latter, a materialist.

Marx rejected the religious idealism that maintained order in feudalism. Feudalism (and religion) had to be de-fanged. Marx was pro-capitalist in regard to feudalism, which had to be replaced by capitalism to unleash the massive productive capacity that would eventually and inevitably be usurped by socialism.

My instincts are towards materialism in the social sciences too. Wholesale change doesn’t really come about until people are hungry and desperate, regardless of people’s thinking or new ideas. You may ask what I’m doing writing articles like this then, to influence people’s thinking. Well, I do want you to support the commons, and I’m trying to attract potential activists – but I think commons will grow to become mainstream mainly because it provides material benefit to people, not because it’s the best idea (although it is!). Talking with working people about class consciousness or rebellion can be counter-productive (try it, and see what response you get).

What I’m absolutely not saying is that the sense of wonder that I feel when I’m in nature (for example) is less important than material possessions. Just that the route to replacing capitalism with commons is largely a material one. However, without the ideas of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution could just have been food riots.

Edmund Husserl’s ideas seem to combine idealist and materialist approaches, in their emphasis on lived experience rather than theory. People’s ideas and thoughts are important, but they’re always directed towards something in the real world. In other words, consciousness and material conditions aren’t separate – they meet in what people actually live through. People act, co-operate, and make decisions not just because of abstract ideals, but because of concrete needs, opportunities, and challenges. Commons, for example, grow and endure not merely because someone explains their value, but because they’re experienced as useful, practical, and sustaining in everyday life.

Marx saw that power in capitalism is economic. The economy was his ‘base’, and the rest is ‘superstructure’ (politics, institutions, culture) – which is why we have to build the commons economy before we have a hope of real political power.

Commons isn’t primarily about changing ideas, at least not for the majority. It’s a vehicle for building trusting relationships in communities through providing useful, affordable things, including jobs, mainly to the working class, and community-based, non-evil, pension-level return investments, mainly to the middle class. It’s ultimately a materialist approach to change.

Conclusion

Another positive aspect of the Marxist approach, from a commons perspective, is that conditions for building commons may actually be better in communist China than in the West, although we can’t be sure. I’ll explain why in a later chapter. But it will be fragile - a centralised communist party can take back decentralised infrastructure at any moment, especially if threatened by the West – which is looking more and more likely. We need a commons that doesn’t depend on centralised power to build, and isn’t threatened by the potential for centralised power to close it down.

So this article highlights the positive aspects of Marxism, at least from a commons perspective. But it was the need for “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” (the Communist Manifesto) and a temporary ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (see next article) that has caused so many problems and divides Marxists and Commoners.

Commoners and Marxists could potentially be allies because of the anti-capitalist potential of commons, and of course being a customer, employee or investor in the commons is not dependent on political beliefs. Many people calling themselves Marxists do so because they agree with his materialist critique of capitalism, not because they want to seize the state. But in the real world, when Marxists gain power, decentralised solutions really aren’t their thing, and they tend to close them down.

I’m not trying to alienate anyone, and I’m happy to debate. I’m especially trying to influence anti-capitalists who are sick of the electoral system and looking for alternatives, and may be dabbling with Marx. In coming articles, I want to explain why Bakunin was right, and the best path is a decentralised one, not trying to control the state.

In the next article, I’ll look at what Marx got wrong from a commons perspective, including: a) because capitalism was historically necessary for communism, enclosure of commons was therefore also necessary; b) the necessity of seizing the state; c) the imperative to maximise growth; and d) the role of the proletariat as a vehicle for change – even though it’s disappearing in the West and has largely rejected Marxism anyway.

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Today we are staying local (for me at least) and featuring the projects of a commoner based in Keynsham, between Bristol and Bath. I talked to Dave Amis who runs the community gardening project A plot in the Park, curates a directory of grassroots projects in the Avon region, and writes a blog called At the grassroots. Every few months he prints and distributes a paper with content from the blog.

When I arrive at the café outside Bristol Temple Meads station, Dave is already seated at a table with several issues of his paper laid out in front of him. Some, it turns out, are from his time in Essex. He only moved to Keynsham in 2022, in his mid-60s, to be closer to family.

We both had an interest in meeting up. Dave wanted to learn about The Bristol Commons and explore how we could work together. I had been following Dave’s writing on Substack for a while and been intrigued. Besides his community and gardening projects, he writes on local and national politics in a non-partisan way, looking at how the polarisation resulting from divisive issues might be overcome.

His projects are very much commons-aligned, so I wanted to hear his story. “How far back do you want to go?” he asks.

We end up focusing on the past 20 years. In 2007 and 2008 Dave stood for election for the Independent Working Class Association (IWCA) in Thurrock, Essex. The ICWA arose from the antifascist movement in the 80s and 90s. On a biographical note, Dave was born in Forest Gate, East London, has worked as a graphic artist and “been political since my teens. Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972 was one of the catalysing experiences that made me a lifelong anti-imperialist.”

The ICWA, as he puts it, “imploded” in 2010. Dave was then active in various anarchist factions, but eventually became disillusioned by the movement. There was little tolerance for different opinions, especially when Covid hit. He also finds, “anarchists talk a lot about what is wrong with the world, not enough of them are actively involved in building workable alternatives in the here and now”.

At the time he had already been part of various community garden projects. Gardening got people with very different backgrounds together. “We did not feel a need to talk about politics very much,” he says. “We just turned up and got to work.”

One project was Hardie Park – a neglected and vandalised local green spot, which had already concerned people he’d talked to on the doorstep. A group got together and started with simple activities like litter picking, then creating some beds to put plants in. “It brought communities together at a time when tensions were high. It kept going through lockdown.” Eventually, members set up a café and various local initiatives started. “It went from strength to strength. It‘s something to look back on with pride.” The park is still going strong.

In Keynsham, Dave and his wife Liz run A plot in the park. Coming together at regular sessions, the group plant and distribute fruit and vegetables, and take them to a community fridge that people can take from for free. The group is small, and they would like more people to get involved. But more importantly, they want to see more gardening and community-building intiatives spring up and grow, to form a resilient movement from the ground up. That is why Dave created an impressive directory of initiatives in the Avon region, to point people to places they can join.

Before starting his current blog, At the Grassroots, Dave used to write another one called Stirrings from below which was much more political, including things that some on the left might take issue with, like pointing out challenges with multiculturalism. Dave has taken the blog completely offline now, because it had become too much work to maintain. “It was becoming a liability.”

Sometimes parts of it bubble up on a new incarnation though, called The Avon Stirrer, which he started not long after At the Grassroots. Dave takes pieces from the archive that he deems relevant to the current moment. A case in point is A conversation worth having, which describes how he attended a counter-protest to an already cancelled EDL march in 2010. (“A key skill [...] is to listen”). I wonder if Dave‘s current assessment, that talking across divides has become more difficult these days is true, and whether it could be changing again. It is certainly needed.

During our conversation, Dave observes that Bristol seems quite a segregated city. When he went back to Essex, which he says is supposed to be racist, he was “struck how diverse it is.” One environment where Dave sees people from different classes, skin colour and religions coming together is certain protest movements, for example the protest against the implementation of so-called “Liveable neighbourhoods”.

While Dave criticises institutions like the council, he does not want to be confrontational anymore. His key priority is building new systems in the “increasingly dystopian” old shell. Tidying and planting on unused land “creates better places to live, and gives people a purpose and a skillset, and self-confidence and pride”.

When we talked, Dave was working on a new paper – now published – to print and distribute at festivals and other events. Besides encouraging people to do gardening and pointing them to the directory to find help and communities to join, the paper calls for unity and solidarity, “United we will thrive, divided we will fall”. Dave would like to go into more disadvantaged areas and distribute the paper there – to “get it into the heads of people who need to read it” as he puts it. That’s not so easy for Dave, who doesn’t drive, which is one reason he’s keen to get more people involved.

If you run a project in Bristol, Bath or surrounding areas that could be added to the directory, or if you are in Keynsham and would like to get involved with A plot in the park, get in touch with Dave.

Or just check the directory, if you want to get involved with any projects in the surroundings. With the coldest and darkest days of the year behind us, it will be a good time to get out to that plot.

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As of today, we will on a regular basis bring together short updates from the various projects our members are involved in. For more information about the GtC collaboration and the people behind it, visit our About page.

Editor’s note (May 2026): We originally launched this series as a monthly round-up, but have since shifted to a more flexible publication rhythm to better reflect the realities of the projects involved. The title has therefore been updated from “The monthly commons round-up” to simply “The commons round-up”, and references to a monthly cadence in the text have been adjusted accordingly.

Growing the Commons began simply enough: a loose group of people from different backgrounds – community organisers, architects, food growers, technologists, physicists, economists, and others – who had each arrived, by different routes, at a similar realisation: that the systems we rely on to meet our everyday needs are increasingly failing us, and that the institutions we might look to for solutions are either unable or too slow to respond.

What draws this group together is a shared belief that the most promising response isn’t to wait for someone at the top to fix things, but to build viable alternatives from the bottom up – and that the Commons offers a practical and powerful vehicle for that change. We believe that lasting change of this kind emerges through many local initiatives experimenting with new ways of collectively organising resources, livelihoods, and community life; delivering tangible benefits to the people they serve and sparking ripples of imitation that spread, from one town to the next, from one sector to another, quietly transforming the system from below.

All of us are involved in projects or experiments that attempt, each in their own way, to put these ideas into practice. While many of us had already known each other or collaborated informally for years, in 2025 we decided to join forces in what eventually became Growing the Commons: a simple space to share experiences, connect initiatives, learn from one another, and amplify the work that’s already being done.

With that spirit in mind, we’re launching a new series. The commons round-up gathers short updates from our members’ diverse projects, offering a glimpse of what’s actually happening on the ground. We hope this gives you a vivid, honest picture of what building the commons looks like, month by month – the many experiments, the milestones and the setbacks, and the quieter progress that rarely makes headlines. This first update spans ten projects, loosely grouped by thematic focus.

There is a great deal more of this work happening beyond our own collaboration, and we hope these dispatches inspire you to seek it out and get involved!

Are you working on a commons project? We’d love to feature your work – get in touch to find out more.

Knowledge & dialogue

GtC Knowledge Commons

An open wiki-based initiative bringing together introductory guides, resources, and practical knowledge about the Commons, with topics curated by specialist contributors.

The project has its roots in Lowimpact.org, which for more than 20 years has offered a rich body of detailed and practical information on all aspects of sustainable living, self-provisioning, and – more recently – the Commons itself. Following the recent decision to place that content into the commons, we have now imported the introductions to nearly 250 topics into a new wiki, serving as a foundation for ongoing community stewardship.

We are currently working on how to best organise and present these topics in categories that will make them easier to explore and maintain. The structure will differ somewhat from the original Lowimpact site, reflecting the broader aim of building a shared knowledge base that can gradually evolve through member contributions.

A proper launch is planned in the next couple of months, at which point we will begin recruiting specialist curators to help maintain and deepen individual topic areas over time. Please reach out if you’d like to get involved!

Credit Commons Society

Formed during the COVID-19 lockdown in the UK, the Credit Commons Society hosts a regular online gathering for practitioners, researchers and organisers interested in collaborative finance and the development of the Credit Commons – a global network of decentralised “moneyless” trading groups built on a shared open protocol.

Once a month, the Society convenes an open online discussion exploring different aspects of commons-oriented monetary and financial systems. The format is intentionally simple: a short reflection or guest presentation to open the space, followed by questions, shared contributions, and an interactive conversation among participants.

In February’s gathering, Cecilie Smith-Christensen, a Norwegian economist and founder of World Heritage Catalysis, gave a deeply personal presentation that served as a reminder of the genuine human relationships and mutual support that underpin the Commons. Recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, she spoke about how a combination of principles from collaborative finance and care economics could help people to meet immediate needs in times of crisis, while also building lasting structures of mutual support for friends and relatives. ResiliNets is an experimental project attempting to do exactly that, introducing a simple social protocol that others can adopt and adapt at scale.

Festival of Commoning

An annual gathering in Stroud, Gloucestershire that celebrates and connects the people acting together to build commons of all kinds – bringing together thinkers, practitioners, and communities from across the UK and beyond.

After being handed over to a new organising team late last year, the Festival of Commoning is shaping up to be its most ambitious edition yet. The festival will return to Stroud on Friday 2 and Saturday 3 October 2026, with daytime programming across two venues in the heart of the town – Lansdown Hall and St Laurence Church – and evening gatherings at The Long Table, Stroud Brewery, and the Trinity Rooms.

The event has grown remarkably over the past two years, from 45 delegates in 2024 to roughly 200 in 2025. This year we hope to welcome around 300 participants, with a programme combining talks, participatory sessions, shared meals, and informal exchange.

Confirmed contributors already include Town Anywhere, East Marsh United, Tamar Grow Local, Cooperation Hull, Positive Carrickfergus, and Cecosesola – Integración Comunitaria from Venezuela, alongside local contributions from Pagan Hill Community Group, Love Our Valley, Climbing Commons, and the Organisation for Identity and Cultural Development (OICD). We have been working on creating a fair pricing structure, with pay-it-forward options and free tickets for those who need them. Tickets will become available at the end of March when the new website is launched – watch this space!

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Commons infrastructure

Commons Lab

A new research lab dedicated to building enabling infrastructure for thriving commons – developing open design frameworks, field-tested models, and practical learning resources to help communities create and sustain viable commons projects of their own.

Commons Lab has been taking clearer shape over the past few months, with considerable time devoted to formulating a coherent strategy, defining core activities and workstreams, and clarifying what we aim to achieve over the next two to three years.

As of late February, Commons Lab is now formally incorporated as a UK company limited by guarantee, supported by bespoke articles of association that enshrine its role as a not-for-profit steward of shared knowledge. A basic website has also recently gone live, providing a home for the project and a clear point of contact, which we will be developing over the coming months to share more about our approach and current partner projects.

We have also submitted two grant applications to aligned foundations in the UK, in the hope of securing catalytic funding to turn years of voluntary groundwork into a more structured programme and begin publishing practical playbooks and learning materials that communities can use to establish and govern commons of their own. If you have relevant experience, leads, or an interest in contributing to Commons Lab in any way, we would warmly welcome a conversation.

Local Loop Merseyside

The UK’s first member-owned credit clearing club for local businesses, helping small and medium enterprises across the Liverpool city region solve cash flow problems, get paid on time, and build local trade.

Local Loop has had a big month, and indeed a big few months. The end of 2025 marked the technical completion of the core Local Loop platform, a significant milestone closing out an intensive period of development. Shortly afterwards, on 5th February, we celebrated the launch of a development release of the software with a group of founding members gathered in Liverpool, a moment that felt both well-earned and genuinely exciting.

The end of 2025 also brought the conclusion of our 18-month Innovate UK-supported development project, and with it the end of guaranteed funding. We had high hopes of a successful bid to Friends Provident Foundation’s ‘new economy infrastructure’ funding stream, but those hopes were dashed in mid-December when we learned that, while the funder found our theory of change intellectually compelling, they considered our propositions too risky to support. It was a disappointing outcome, and we are now in a period of fairly extreme belt-tightening as we work to secure the next phase of funding.

But in the meantime, the work continues. With a skeleton crew keeping the technology polished and progressing, we are gearing up for several months of focused effort on the ground in Merseyside – signing businesses up to the platform and beginning to demonstrate the practical value of the system we’ve built. The foundations are solid; now it is time to build the community around them.

Open Food Network

A global open-source platform that connects farmers, growers and community food enterprises – enabling them to sell directly to their communities and build a fairer, more resilient food system from the bottom up.

The Open Food Network is built on a simple but radical premise: that mainstream global food systems are broken, and that a better alternative can be built from the bottom up, in common ownership. Our network connects producers and consumers through shared digital infrastructure that supports food hubs, buying groups, and other cooperative distribution models. Across 22 countries, communities are using the platform to shorten supply chains and strengthen relationships between growers and the people they feed.

The UK platform now brings together more than 2,400 food producers and 1,100 food shops, serving nearly 19,000 shoppers who have collectively placed some 320,000 orders. In 2025 alone, over 27,000 orders were placed across almost 3,900 active accounts, with the network welcoming around 350 new enterprises and 2,500 new customers.

We are currently seeking funding for the Power of Food: a social cohesion project exploring how coming together around food can build genuine community across social, cultural, and political differences. Over twelve years of running local food networks, we have repeatedly seen that growing, cooking, and eating together creates bonds that outlast any political argument. If this resonates with you or you know of relevant funding opportunities, we would love to hear from you.

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Place & community

Stroud Climbing Commons

A community-owned climbing gym built on the principle that access to climbing should not be determined by ability to pay, and that the people who use it should own and govern it together.

Stroud Climbing Commons began in late 2022 when a group of climbing enthusiasts, tired of waiting for a commercial gym to arrive in Stroud, decided to build one themselves. After three years of research, development, and a lot of dedicated volunteer work, the project is now in the final stages of its build phase. What began with a handful of initiators has grown into a community of more than 80 active volunteers, 12 core team members, and over 400 people on the mailing list – with a community survey drawing over 600 responses confirming strong local demand. The gym is hosted within an established community hub at Brimscombe Mill, where construction work is nearly complete.

The past few months have been intense: navigating crowdfunding (we raised nearly £60,000 from 120 backers through the sale of annual memberships and bulk single-use vouchers), working through the lease, sourcing tools, figuring out compound angles, grinding through grit paint, staffing the build crew, training inductors and coaches, and setting up door entry and membership systems. Notably, we secured what appears to be the UK’s first approved insurance arrangement for an unmanned bouldering gym – a practical breakthrough that emerged directly from the commons approach to keeping operational costs low, and which helps deliver membership at roughly half the price of commercial alternatives.

A soft opening for members is scheduled for the latter half of March, with full public access following shortly after. The transition to full multi-stakeholder governance will unfold over the coming year – a process that will put the people who use and steward the space at the heart of how it is run.

Stroud Housing Commons

A community housing project in Stroud that brings residential properties into permanent common ownership, offering secure and affordable tenancies under a novel multi-stakeholder partnership structure designed to create material interdependence between tenants, investors, and stewards.

Stroud Housing Commons recently held the third of its now-timetabled quarterly all-member meetings, and it is fair to say these gatherings are hitting their stride. They are becoming more focused and practical with each iteration – which is exactly what is needed – while at the same time remaining genuinely enjoyable occasions. The community is gelling, and that matters.

This particular meeting was arguably the ‘crunchiest’ of the annual cycle: the session at which proposals around changes to tenancy agreements, policies, and rents must be considered and agreed. Given the significance of these decisions, we introduced and used the sociocratic method more formally than ever before, and the process worked well. After a focused but not overly lengthy discussion, a proposal was formulated that received unanimous consent – a result that speaks well of the trust and goodwill within the group. A suggestion that current tenants take on some stewarding duties in return for rent vouchers was also warmly received, and looks set to be implemented smoothly and to everyone’s satisfaction.

In other news, the association’s governing agreement has been published online in a form that allows members to browse the constitution and related policies, raise questions, and contribute to ongoing refinement – a rather remarkable development powered by an “enthusiastic” AI agent. This reflects a deliberate approach to organisational evolution: adopting governance that is good enough for now and safe enough to try, while building in a continuous process of iteration.

Looking ahead, the June meeting will need to review a proposal for formal incorporation – most likely as a company limited by guarantee (CLG) – to carry the project through its next 3-5 properties. And watch this space for news of a potentially powerful new funding mechanism, inspired by a modern interpretation of the tontine, being developed with the help of a very experienced former venture capitalist who describes the experience as having turned him into an anti-capitalist!

Tiny House Project

An initiative in Stroud exploring how tiny houses – small, self-contained, ecological homes – on community land could provide secure and affordable housing for food growers.

The tiny house initiative has been moving forward quickly in recent months. Two young people are now leading the project, supported by the Ecological Land Co-op on the planning side. We have completed site visits to five growing projects and identified a pilot location at Good Small Farms. A productive meeting with the head of planning at Stroud District Council explored the scope for local policy development, and the concept of a locally built, flat-pack tiny house was well received.

We are currently preparing a pre-planning application to get early advice and guidance from the local authority that will help clarify the regulatory pathway forward. Once there is greater certainty around planning, the next step will be to launch a social media campaign and begin crowdfunding to support the pilot build.

Bristol Commons

A city-wide initiative of individuals, organisations, and community groups seeking to build a culture of commoning and support broader community ownership and governance across Bristol.

The project traces its origins to 2023, when the creative organisation Coexist – having been evicted from its base of ten years – drew inspiration from the book Free, Fair and Alive to seed and launch a new commons movement in the city, seeking to promote a culture of commoning and secure shared spaces and resources for local communities.

Since then, the project has grown through a series of large gatherings and has held creative community events, from mural painting and screen-printing workshops to the regular Common Sense Sundays.

We are now gearing up to bring an old church building into collective ownership via a community share offer (more information here). We are also currently developing a mapping project as well as a newsletter to make Bristol’s already rich culture of commoning more visible and help support the organisations involved. Work is also underway to refine our membership and governance structure.

That’s all from us for February. We’ll be back with another round of updates soon. In the meantime, we encourage you to explore the projects above, follow the ones that interest you, and share this article with anyone who might find it useful!

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Once a month, the CCS hosts an online gathering where practitioners, researchers, and organisers explore different aspects of commons-oriented monetary and financial systems. The format is intentionally simple: a short reflection or guest presentation to open the space, followed by questions, shared contributions, and an open, interactive conversation. Rather than polished lectures, these sessions are chances to think together, compare experiences, and make sense of emerging practices across the wider ecosystem of credit clearing, mutual credit, and community exchange systems.

This is our second post in this series, after The Commons between markets and state. The conversation took place in June 2025. It has been slightly edited for better flow and understanding. You can find a transcript below this text.

Please note: The URL for the Credit Commons website shown in the video is not correct anymore, it will be restored at creditcommons.org.

In a nutshell

• It was always a priority for Matthew to join community currencies together, from when he started developing software for them 15 years ago. That way they could create a decentralised, people-led payment system.

• The Credit Commons Protocol takes the accounting functionality of a currency and separates it off.

• This can make managing community currency software easier.

• In a mutual credit setup, transactions happen on a ledger and account balances add up to zero. When mutual credit is nested, there’s an account on every ledger that points to the rest of the world. The balances of groups within a network add up to zero, just as the accounts within a group.

• The Credit Commons offers a way of trading between groups where each group

  retains absolute sovereignty; they get to determine their own monetary policy and privacy.

• When a group is struggling with its trade balance (when it’s either very high or very low), it will work out political solutions to balance the trade within its network.

• Matthew has done three implementations so far: the Community Exchange System (CES), Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks (HUMANs) and Svensk Barter in Sweden. A fourth one, for Community Forge which uses software written by Matthew, is on the Roadmap.

After the presentation, it was time for a few rounds of questions and comments. Matthew disappeared for a while after the first question due to internet problems, but this did not harm the conversation at all, thanks to Sue’s brilliant hosting skills.

Some of the topics that came up:

• UX, and practical implementation of the protocol

• How is sovereignty of a node ensured? Do people deciding how the software is run and what the algorithms look like have an unfair share of power?

• How to handle trade imbalances? Do they appear less in a commons world?

• Mutual credit as a route to relative independence

• What are potential routes to market for mutual credit?

• Limited scaling within a group (above 120 difficult to maintain trust), but potentially vast scaling through nested structure

• Collaborations and integrations with other software (e.g. Holons)

• Our culture and what we have or haven’t learned can be an impediment; you have to start from people

• Fractal nature of the protocol, analogy with Sociocracy

• Roadmap for further developments

Trade imbalances and how to deal with them emerged as a recurring and important theme. That’s why to conclude this text, I’ll leave you with some relevant quotes from Matthew.

Trade imbalances are natural and they occur almost everywhere. If there is no trade imbalance, then you’re lucky. What you need to do with trade imbalances is try to balance them. There is no other solution. Everything else is unsustainable. And what we see in modern economics is a lot of ways of trying to get around trade imbalances by depreciating/appreciating currencies and by other means, but they all do nothing to address the inequality.

I think that by using mutual credit accounting, where you emphasise the zero and the importance of getting back to zero, you bring trade imbalances – a perennial problem – right to the front of the queue, and you don’t try to solve the problem by manipulating statistics in units of account; you address it through politics.

There are three ways of doing that. First of all, the surplus area invests in the deficit area to help the deficit area increase production.Second, the surplus area can lend to the deficit area, maybe just temporarily.

And thirdly, if there’s no other way to do it, they just give the money back. Because trade debt should always be short term, and once it starts to get to long term, then it indicates a structural imbalance which you have to fix through structural solutions.

How would you get unsound parties to comply, why would they anyway?

Because it’s in everyone’s interest to balance trade. If money isn’t worth anything, then nobody really wants to have a surplus. And if you’re building up greater and greater surpluses and deficits, then you hit the limits and you stop being able to trade. So it’s in both parties’ interests to stay within range.

Under the gold standard, balancing trade was very important as well. Countries managed, and it also led to greater equity, because it meant that no country was developing much faster than other countries. It sort of kept them all within limits. There are prices to pay for the local economy, though. I’ve seen that criticised by some economists. So, there are always compromises, but to me it seems that for social justice, you need to have trade balance.

Further resources

Entry in the P2P Foundation wiki
Entry in our knowledge base
Read about the Credit Commons Protocol on the Mutual Credit Services website
Credit Commons whitepaper

Transcript Credit Commons Protocol

96.9KB ∙ PDF file

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Content warning for discussions of mental health struggles, including suicide.

If you’ve read my previous post on this Substack, you might recall that I am an ecologist by profession. In this case, you may be wondering why I’m talking about mental health now. There are two main reasons. Firstly, I live with my own handful of “mental illnesses,” so I have a degree of personal experience. Secondly, I am going to loop this back around to ecology and interspecies commoning.

A good deal of people reading this will have “mental illness.” I am putting the term in scare quotes out of recognition for the fact that the definition and diagnosis of these conditions are based on struggling to be normal, rather than struggling to live in a way that you find personally right. Many people, such as Dr Ayesha Khan on her Substack, rightfully point out that being able to be fine in the face of ecological breakdown, genocide, and general destruction of life, is not “human, logical, dignified.” You may not agree with Dr Khan’s entire perspective – I know from personal experience that many of us aren’t “fine”, but do a good enough job at pretending to be fine that we appear “normal” – but I agree with the assertion that many symptoms of mental illness are entirely logical responses to, well, everything going on. Assume when I say mental illness, I am saying “mental illness” with the above baggage.

Mental health & autonomy

There are a lot of headlines about a rise in mental illness diagnoses, especially following COVID lockdown. Different news outlets provide different guesses as to why. Here is my perspective, as a disabled ecologist commoner.

In his book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (2018), Dr Gabor Maté tackles the condition of addiction. He states that the current understanding of people is that, firstly, we struggle when deprived of autonomy. If decisions are made for us, even if the choices are good, we start to rebel. This is when people start “acting out,” even doing self-destructive things. Our lives are micro-managed. Work takes up the majority of most people’s waking time, and at work our autonomy is often limited. We spend a lot of this time doing things we view as, well, bullshit, as said by David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs (2018). Graeber includes survey findings from 2015 that about 37% of UK workers believe their job makes no meaningful contribution to the world. So much of our time and energy is burnt up doing tasks we understand to be pointless or even harmful. As if to add insult to injury, that isn’t where the problem ends.

During our free time, we are too tired, poor, and isolated to do a lot of the things we want to do. We are also encouraged to turn our free time into more work time, a.k.a. adopting “the grindset.” Many readers may have experienced a push to monetise their hobbies. Regardless, most of us have very little time to do things simply because we want to do them. People are trapped by the “cost of living” and by debt. People begin to seek autonomy, protest, and escape in any way they can, including suicide (described, for example, by Patnaik, 2015). At the very start of Malcom Harris’ Palo Alto (2022), which examines Silicon Valley’s culture, Harris drops the fact-bomb that the youth suicide rate in the area is three times as high as the average. This is the outcome of a micromanaged “grindset” culture, where it is encouraged to spend every waking moment under the thumb of clients or the market. This is the outcome of a system in which destroying yourself in service of a job is basically treading water. Those of us (like myself) that can’t stop working without losing access to survival needs, we have limited capacity to assert ourselves. We bear it until we break.

Secondly, our brains operate on a system of “free won’t” (as opposed to “free will”). Our developed forebrains activate to reject impulses that do not align with our morals, or that have bad consequences, and so on. Some cultures have cosmologies that reflect this, additionally suggesting that a sense of self is derived from saying “no” to impulses that don’t align with “who you are” (Morris, 1994). I won’t appropriate the specific beliefs here, but I did find the suggestion spoke truth. People who struggle with impulses, compulsions, and/or addiction might feel that their actions are “not who they are” or “not who they want to be.” We feel immense distress when we behave in ways that depart from our sense of self, or if we feel to be losing our sense of self.

I believe this suggests that humans need the ability to make meaningful life-decisions to achieve mental wellbeing, and we become depressed, anxious, and destructive when deprived of that ability. This causes suffering when we are unable to express agency in our lives, as we are micromanaged and pressured by the outside.

So what can access to a commons do about this?

Caring for agroecological commons, caring for the self

Singh (2013) documents a case study of a community maintaining a forest. They do so even if they could make more money (in the short term) by not doing this (e.g., exploiting the forest, or spending their time making money instead of doing forest-care). This flies in the face of traditional economic doctrine, the idea of homo economicus who acts for the highest possible personal material gain. Singh points out that humans are motivated by non-material meaning. Tending to the forest provides a sense of belonging, of personal well-being derived from caring for something greater than oneself. Labouring towards a goal that a person finds personally important provides a sense of self-confidence and righteousness. This one study documents what many people feel to be true in their own life. Labouring, as a community, to create positive change, creates meaning, satisfaction, a purpose. Something that might be drudgery becomes a joy when it is done for the right reason. This aligns both with E. O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, as well as findings that allowing the “insane” the chance to participate in community and communal work “cures” them (Ward, 1996; referring to Geel).

This is a function of the commons. The importance of care, and its intersection with commoning, has been raised by others in concepts like the psyCommons (though I would personally push back against putting empathy on a pedestal on its own). In this article, I provide a different opportunity, couched in examples such as Singh’s. This is an immense opportunity for food sovereignty commons, whether they be farming, foraging, food-forest maintenance, or something else entirely.

The European Coordination for the Via Campesina (ECVC) lays out the opportunity quite clearly in their 2022 Youth Articulation report (Claeys & Van Dyck, 2022). About 89% farmers are 40 years old or older, a cause for concern for the sector (Eurostat, 2016; cited in the ECVC Youth Articulation, 2021). The Youth Articulation report finds that there is no lack of enthusiasm amongst farmers younger than 40 (the barriers are instead, typically financial). Youth farmers take on unpaid or poorly-paid work, instead motivated by non-material goals. They work in agroecology out of a belief in its moral and ethical value. They value the ability to work with their hands, of “embodying social and environmental change, of having a ‘positive impact on the territory.’” This is unfair to them, but nevertheless exposes a dynamic much like the commoners described in Singh (2013).

There are two important things to note here. Firstly, agroecology (ecologically competent farming) provides the essential intangible benefits necessary for well-being. It provides the ability to make choices, to commune with something greater than the self, and to assert the self upon the world by making positive change. Secondly, a proportion of the youth (who are often portrayed as the most mentally ill demographic!) is chomping at the bit for a chance to participate in agroecology.

All of this can be synthesised into a single activity, of opening opportunities for agroecological commons. By collaborating, the financial barriers blocking the eager youth from getting out into the fields can be more easily usurped. Older commoners might find themselves surprised by the youth joining their enterprise, bridging the generational divides. In the case of older commoners, it is important to note that many small farmers are being gouged on both sides – inputs such as fertilisers are sold to them at a high markup, and they can struggle to find people with the money to pay a fair price for their goods (Moore Lappé & Collins, 2015; Moyo, 2015). Competing against foreign mega-producers, which might even use slave labour (Haiven, 2022), contributes to their economic difficulties. In many countries, peasants have greatly increased rates of suicide (see France; India (Patnaik, 2015)).

Everyone gains from the mental health benefits of being able to act in accordance with what they feel is ethically just and ecologically sensible. All get a chance to contribute to a project greater than themselves, and see the fruits of their labour (sometimes literally). All get to see they’re not alone in caring about the environment, about farming, about good food. Agroecological commons are considered the basis of food sovereignty, and the primary manner by which impoverished communities can wriggle out from under the yoke of megacorporations and finance (Wong & Sit, 2015). This kind of commoning, which involves labouring to nurture other living things, has been shown to improve problems like drug use in communities like Kailash Ecovillage. Farms such as the Boterbloem in Amsterdam operate as “care farms,” providing fulfilling activity and a sense of belonging to people who might otherwise be institutionalised. (They also let people harvest their own veg for a reduced price-per-kilo). The act of communal care, and the benefits of nutrition, shade, and beauty, have brought calm and stability to marginalised groups.

I don’t mean to propose agroecological commons as a panacea. Instead, I aim to show how thinking about concepts like “farming commons” as solely a food system or environmental thing is reductive and pessimistic. Food is a survival need and food systems have formed a basis of community, culture, and identity for a long, long time. As I hope I made clear, there is an incredible opportunity to revive this dynamic in the UK, a country where most people have little connection with land, community, and environment.

To finish, there are a few take-aways directed at particular readers. If you or your loved ones struggle with mental illness, it may be worth considering the (agroecological) commons.

1. Is there an abandoned or derelict space, even if barely wide enough to stand on, that you/they could begin caring for (litter picking, guerilla gardening)? Could this be done visibly, to encourage others to take up the practice?

2. Do you have a yard or garden, or know anybody with one? Could you work together to turn this into an informal community space?

3. Is there a wild or semi-wild space near you, that you could cultivate a feeling of “forestizenship” in – cleaning it, learning how it changes with the seasons, propagating its native plants in your own garden? (Foraging is a great way to establish this connection!)

4. Do you notice anyone else also doing these things, or interested in what you’re doing? Perhaps you could do it together.

Thanks for reading. If you have thoughts or if you connected personally with this idea, we’d love if you’d let us know by contacting us or commenting below.

Works cited

Claeys, P., & Van Dyck, B. (2022). Working and Learning Conditions of Young Agricultural Workers, Interns and Volunteers Across Europe (ECVC Youth: Navigating Dreams & Precarity). European Coordination of Via Campesina (ECVC) Youth Articulation.

European Coordination Via Campesina. (2021). Position Document on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Reform. https://www.eurovia.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/EN_position_document_CAP_ecvc_youth.pdf

Eurostat. (2016). Young people in farming. https://ec.europa.eu/info/food-farming-fisheries/key-policies/common-agricultural-policy/

income-support/young-farmers_en

Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs. Simon & Schuster.

Haiven, M. (2022). Palm Oil. Pluto Press.

Harris, M. (2022). Palo Alto. Riverrun.

Maté, G. (2018). In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. Vermilion.

Moore Lappé, F., & Collins, J. (2015). World Hunger: 10 Myths. Grove Press.

Morris, B. (1994). Anthropology of the Self. Pluto Press.

Moyo, S. (2015). Rebuilding African peasantries: Inalienability of land rights and collective food sovereignty in Southern Africa? In The Struggle for Food Sovereignity (pp. 56-82). Pluto Press.

Patnaik, U. (2015). The political-economic context of the peasant struggles for livelihood security and land in India. In The Struggle for Food Sovereignity (pp. 109-118). Pluto Press.

Singh, N. M. (2013). The affective labor of growing forests and the becoming of environmental subjects: Rethinking environmentality in Odisha, India. Geoforum, 47, 189–198. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2013.01.010

Ward, C. (1996). Anarchy in Action. Freedom Press.

Wong, E., & Sit, J. T. (2015). Rethinking ‘rural China,’ unthinking modernisation: Rural regeneration and post-developmental historical agency. In The Struggle for Food Sovereignity (pp. 83-108). Pluto Press.