A commoners' manifesto: 24 articles on how commons can change the world

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Growing the Commons is a team with diverse interests and priorities, including land, food, housing, community, tech, knowledge, governance and finance. Mine is political economy. I want to know:

a) how various ideologies and institutions help or hinder the commons;

b) how we develop and promote commons-friendly ideologies and institutions;

c) how we get wise leadership to deal with what’s coming, in a world where power is ultimately economic.

The Commoners’ Manifesto

I’m going to explore those questions over the coming months in a series of 24 articles (listed below) that I hope to compile into a book – working title, The Commoners’ Manifesto: Neither Capitalism nor Communism.

I’ll argue that the dominant system today is plutocracy disguised as liberal democracy and capitalism. I won’t go into the problems caused by plutocracy – moral bankruptcy and decimation of community, democracy, human wellbeing and nature - because I’m assuming that you know them already. Plutocracy isn’t wise. It’s put us into a battle with nature that we can only lose. A light at the end of the tunnel is what you’re looking for, not more grief.

The subtitle is to make it clear that ‘anti-capitalist’ doesn’t mean communist, as is often assumed. A commons world is decentralised, stable and unified, not statist, growth-obsessed or 'left’. I’d like to persuade the left away from statist ‘solutions’, and yes, to recruit the 'right' as well – why not?

I want to reach people who’d like to see power decentralised, quickly, before it becomes so concentrated that we don’t even know what it’s doing. I’ll compare commons to communism, liberalism, right libertarianism and technocentrism – and show how all of them except commons are guaranteed to centralise power just as much as feudalism did.

My aim is to recruit good people to help build commons. I’ve been successful at that so far, but we’ll need many more to build a strong movement. So do subscribe to the blog, to be alerted when new articles are posted. I want your comments, to improve my arguments (or change them altogether – I’m open-minded). I’ll also try to interview relevant specialists, and post recordings and transcripts to accompany each article.

I believe that power should be decentralised as much as possible - to communities where locals negotiate their own rules around common property and the way they relate to each other. The academic word for this is 'anarchist', which might be scary for some people because it's been deliberately distorted to denote chaos - the exact opposite of its true meaning. I’ll be trying to help rehabilitate the word - but it’s not essential for commoning.

I just don’t trust states to do the right thing. I’m from a working-class background, non-academic, autodidact (left formal education at 16 to work in factories, although I left in my twenties to live in intentional communities, so I've spent 30 years working in 'household provisioning' and the last 10 in the commons world, in various roles), and I don’t write in a dense, academic style, but, dare I say, in a more populist way.

Commons needs working-class franchisees, employees and customers, so we need to reach ordinary working people. I think I can write accessibly about complicated subjects like communism and anarchism. I can be blunt, some terms I use might appear loaded, and if pushed, I might admit that I sometimes write in a way intended to surprise. But I’ll explore everything much more in the articles, with nuance and sources. Just take it that these are my opinions, and I’m more than happy to debate – I just don’t want to have to write that before every point I make.

Approach

Commons is about providing benefits for people and communities. Our message for most people is benefit-led: commons can provide secure housing, affordable food and jobs, and allow you to park your pension with something you believe in, rather than something you suspect is evil, and still give you a reasonable return.

But you’re looking for more than that, aren’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t be here, reading this. You’re looking for a radical change in direction, and you’re bored with books that are critical of the system, but in the final chapters, you find that their ‘solutions’ are policy proposals for governments to ignore. You’d like to see, and even be part of, big, historically-significant change, but you’re not sure if or how that’s going to happen. Of course, we need to make the current system more bearable for those struggling the most, but you want more radical change than that. This system was foisted on us at birth. We never asked for it – there’s no ‘social contract’.

Change isn’t about solving problems (that may not be solvable), or making firm decisions about situations that are changing even as we’re trying to form opinions about them. It’s ‘just a ride’ on a flow of experience for individuals and for our species. From our 21^st century vantage point, we critique the events of 1492, 1789 or 1939, but it’s not so easy now, because we’re in it, part of it. The world won’t change until it’s ready, and corporate and state power being what it is at this moment, it doesn’t seem very ready. But we can steer, and constantly update our expectations, observations and responses.

We can change direction in millions of tiny ways, away from empire and towards community. It’s about relationships, ultimately. Dogma isn’t useful in a constantly-changing universe. Commons doesn’t confront capitalism, or try to reform it – it’s about planting seeds in the cracks in capitalism, and then widening those cracks until they converge (and there are lots of cracks).

List of articles

In the articles below, I’ll be covering several non-mainstream ideas and pointing to ways to find out more. You’ll be familiar with some of them, but I’m guessing not all of them, although I think you’ll find them interesting (if possibly counterintuitive at first). I’ve curated them to deliver a narrative that I hope will steer more people towards the commons. I’ll be diving into these topics over the coming months, and I invite you to explore and discuss them with me, suggest new tools and ideas, and tell me where you think I’ve gone wrong. Let’s write a Commoners’ Manifesto together.

1. Commons not communism

• Part 1 - what Marx got right from a commons perspective: shared values; the need for a new system, not reform; the transition from feudalism to capitalism; exploitation; materialism.

• Part 2 - the problem with communism, from a commons perspective: historical materialism; overproduction and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall; overthrowing the state; growth and ‘progress’; why Marxism isn’t working for the working class.

• Part 3 - how the 20th century almost turned out very differently: capitalism suppresses commons via extraction; communism via forced collectivisation and crushing civil society. Communism isn’t the only alternative to capitalism. Other models were suggested in the ‘Internationals’ at the end of the 19^th century, but Marxist ideas dominated; there’s plenty of academic support for the idea that we could have taken a profoundly decentralised direction in the 20^th century. The Russian Revolution in 1917 almost produced a decentralised alternative to capitalism, but Bolsheviks prevented it. The left has been as much or more of a barrier, historically, to decentralisation efforts than the right.

2. How corporations capture the state

• The modern, corporate state is not a counterbalance to corporate power. Corporations and states are the economic and political branches of capitalism.

• Think-tanks are extremely important in the corporate capture of states – along with lobbying, campaign finance and Super PACs, academic funding, media ownership, capital flight and various other tools and tactics.

• The revolving door: states and corporations are the same people. Same lives, same opinions, same jobs, same investments. Voting can’t deliver the level of change we need.

3. How the state props up corporations and harms small businesses

• Concentrated wealth has always needed the state. That was as true in empire, feudalism and mercantilism as it is in capitalism. States formed the first corporations, and still prop them up. Without state intervention, small businesses would outcompete bloated, inefficient corporations, whose managers don’t understand their operations.

• Neoliberalism is not at all ‘laissez-faire’. Capitalism isn’t a free market. The state intervenes in the economy to the benefit of corporations. Companies are kept artificially large. To compete with small businesses, corporations need the state prop, which includes providing contracts, effective monopolies, corporate ‘personhood’ and intellectual property laws, tax loopholes, subsidies for long-distance transportation and ultimately, bailouts.

4. Why most regulation doesn’t ‘tame’ corporations – it supports them

• Transnational corporations are beyond national regulation. There are no global institutions with teeth to regulate them. Global mechanisms are non-binding.

• Corporations want and invite regulation, to manage capitalism’s inherent instability and to prevent competition. They support the welfare state, because it suppresses dissent and resistance, and is paid for with taxes, which they can avoid.

• Regulation erects barriers to entry into the market for small-scale competition, which maintains corporate monopolies, and the finance sector largely regulates itself.

• Corporations have big legal departments and deep pockets. They can comply with regulation in ways that small businesses can’t – we’ll look at those ways.

5. Why capitalism’s ‘growth imperative’ is so dangerous

• Capitalism has a growth imperative (i.e. it has to grow forever – you can’t ‘degrow’ it or stabilise it), but commons doesn’t.

• If global GDP is around 2% per year, then the economy and its energy consumption get about ten times larger every 100 years, which leads to absurd results. Hardly anyone is talking about this, because a stable economy can’t be capitalist, and corporate-owned media, think tanks, academic institutions and states exist to defend the status quo.

• Energy efficiency measures within a constantly-growing economy will increase energy use overall (Jevons Paradox).

• Addressing symptoms (e.g. climate change) while ignoring the disease (overshoot via perpetual growth) will make the problem worse.

• Overshoot and biosphere destruction can’t be decoupled from global GDP growth.

• A growth economy in recession is not the same as a stable economy.

• Nature will stop global GDP growth if we don’t, but it won’t be pretty.

6. Why money is a problem

• In capitalism, money is a commodity. In fact it’s the commodity. It can be used to buy and sell things, and it can be used to store, hoard, accumulate and become wealthy with. As long as that’s the case, money will gravitate towards stored wealth, because money makes money and gives access to the political system.

• Money didn’t evolve naturally from barter. The root of the modern money system is state ‘tax tokens’ - a way of building empires stretching back to ancient times. A king stamps his head on coins, pays soldiers with them and demands them as taxes, so that all subjects have to provide goods and services to his soldiers to get the money to pay taxes.

• If money is a thing that can be extracted from communities and concentrated, it will be – after which it flows into the political system and prevents democracy.

• The founding of the Bank of England in 1694 brought together state and private issuance of money and gave monopoly control of the money supply to banks.

• Banks create money when they make loans. Loans don’t come from deposits.

7. Why the state-corporate nexus is the problem

• Because the nexus is the plutocracy. For 80-90% of companies in the S&P 500, the biggest shareholder is one of just 3 corporations (BlackRock, Vanguard or State Street, to be precise).

• Corporations are legally obliged to maximise returns for shareholders, regardless of the consequences.

• Voting every few years doesn't equal control by the people. The state as an institution is an instrument of corporate power, regardless of who forms governments. The Democrats appointed a corporate arms dealer (from Raytheon) as secretary of defence. Even if decent governments could be elected in the West, it will mean capital flight, and they wouldn’t last very long.

• Liberalism is the political wing of capitalism. Economic power owns everything and decides where credit goes. States are not going to decentralise power any more than turkeys are likely to celebrate Christmas. Focusing all of our efforts on state solutions wastes time and resources that could be spent building commons.

• States provided welfare for working people after WW2, at least partly because they were scared of communist revolution. That threat has gone now, and welfare provision is being withdrawn.

• States allow unwise people to get into positions of extreme power. A future ‘partner state’ (that supports commons rather than trying to close it down) would be good, but electoral politics is secondary to organising in communities.

8. Why commons is the best way to prepare for ‘collapse’ (if that’s what’s happening)

• Increasing growth and complexity brings benefits up to a point of ‘diminishing marginal returns’, where an ever-increasing proportion of available resources are required just to feed unproductive complexity for its own sake. From that point, greater complexity brings more problems than benefits. We’re past that point.

• Complex societies develop barriers to simplicity, or even advocating for it, including advertising, media, international competition, academia and career progression.

• Research into collapsed societies shows a consistent pattern: extraction exceeds regeneration, complexity outpaces adaptive capacity, systems that looked permanent prove fragile.

• Most people understand what’s happening to nature nowadays. Whether we call it collapse is moot – there’s going to be a lot more famine, war, civil unrest, suffering and biosphere destruction anyway.

• Debating whether the collapse label is ‘demotivating’ is as irrelevant as debating whether pointing out the iceberg on the Titanic was demotivating. Realising that the current system is collapsing isn’t ‘giving up’ - it’s just the start.

• 30 years of pointless, corporate COP jamborees, and growth in carbon emissions and temperatures are accelerating. But we can build commons safety nets in communities, to prepare for what’s coming, and stop making it worse.

9. Why we have to unite and reject left/right labels

• Conservative families teach children discipline and toughness (especially male children), because it’s a hard world out there and you’ll have a better life, with more success, if you’re competitive. Liberal families teach children kindness and compassion, because you’ll have a better life, with more friends, if you’re co-operative.

• Both groups believe they’re doing what’s best for their children, but it lays the foundation for the left-right split in society.

• There are no ‘bad’ people, only damaged people – no-one is born bad.

• Corporate media don’t want people to notice centralisation of power, so encourage the culture wars, to distract us.

• Commons is neither left nor right. No movement is going to succeed if it’s opposed by half the population. Community is difficult if we’re divided into left / right camps. We have to stop fighting, talk with each other and build commons. Commons can help dilute the left-right split until it eventually disappears or becomes marginal.

• The left tends to oppose capital, the right the state. But it’s the nexus that’s the problem. It kills both freedom and justice. Left and right have more in common than we tend to think – we’ll look at the views of some left and right philosophers as examples. People will come to commons from all ideologies (and none).

10. Why we have to decentralise wealth and power

• How centralised power invites authoritarianism, alienation and ‘single point of failure’.

• Centralised power might assure us that it won’t clamp down on personal freedoms, but as they say: ‘can’t is better than won’t’ – commons institutions help stop them.

• The true costs of centralisation are hidden or externalised to communities and nature.

• If you can become a billionaire in a ‘decentralised’ system, it’s not really decentralised.

• Decentralisation allows for a multitude of small experiments (economic, political and social). There’s a rich history of decentralising movements.

• ‘Predistribution’ rather than redistribution: stop wealth concentrating in the first place, because it’s impossible to redistribute once it is.

11. Why political and economic problems resist technological fixes

• Why the narrative of linear human ‘progress’ – tech innovation and economic growth until all countries are like the US – is truly dead.

• Technological ‘solutions’ often fail to recognise the social, political, ecological and systemic nature of our crises, and so often intensify the dynamics that caused them, including centralisation of power. They address the ‘how’ questions but not the ‘why’.

• Technical innovations increase labour productivity, which means that the economy has to constantly grow to maintain employment levels.

• Technological innovation plus centralised power means more destructive weaponry and surveillance.

• We need wise oversight of potentially dangerous tech (nuclear, AI, nanotech, genetic modification etc.) that’s not possible in the current system (see no. 23, below).

• Jevons Paradox negates attempts to reduce energy use with technology.

• Technology won’t ‘feed the world’, because there’s no food shortage – hunger is caused by wealth concentration and therefore poverty.

• I’m suggesting, not that we somehow prevent technological innovation, which would be impossible, but to decentralise the power structures that control it, within an economy that doesn’t require perpetual growth.

• Some technologies could contain the seeds of decentralisation, by enabling federation of previously isolated groups.

• Some technologies can’t be improved on, and we can choose the ‘best of all ages’ (internet and anaesthetics plus cob cottages and local, organic food etc.), but not if power is centralised, and doesn’t want us to.

12. How commons delivers unity and decentralisation

• Commons are non-extractive, don’t concentrate wealth and don’t have a growth imperative.

• We can sow the seeds of a new commons system ourselves, in communities (in the ‘cracks in capitalism’ – and there are lots of cracks). People crave community in the West. Commons can rebuild it.

• New tools exist to grow the commons exponentially and resist attacks.

• Commons is not to ‘fix’ this plutocratic system, it’s to manage its collapse.

• Commons provides practical solutions that require no persuasion, or understanding of wider issues.

• Commons principles appeal to both ‘left’ and ‘right’.

• A new commons movement can complement and surpass the co-operative movement.

13. How trade happens in a commons world

• Mutual credit takes the decisions about who gets credit away from banks and centralised authority and brings it back to communities.

• It begins with a community of traders, before introducing the technology (not the other way round).

• It’s a means of exchange, but not a store of value. It’s an accounting system, not a commodity that can be extracted or concentrated.

• Money can’t concentrate and be used to buy power if there’s no money.

• Mutual credit is no more difficult for businesses to adopt than cards and cash (that have handling costs, and often involve chasing customers for payment).

14. How commons reduces the need for money, interest & banks

• Mutual credit doesn’t require banks, interest or money.

• Credit clearing can be a first step to introducing mutual credit to trading networks, almost by stealth (a ‘gateway drug’, as someone described it). It reduces the need for money in communities, and helps find groups of trading businesses that can trade without money between themselves.

• It helps solve cashflow problems for small businesses, and therefore requires little in the way of explanation or persuasion.

• Credit clearing schemes can be national. Slovenia has had one since the early nineties.

15. How savings and pensions work in a commons world

• Discounted commons vouchers can be used as pre-payment for life’s essentials, like housing, energy, water and care. This is the ‘store of value’ function that mutual credit doesn’t provide.

• It’s a way to bring essential infrastructure into the commons without incurring debt or giving away equity, while providing pension-level returns for investors.

• A portfolio of different vouchers can represent a solid, community-based pension, without having to deal with the finance sector.

• Denomination in real ‘stuff’ (kWh, square metres, hours of care, hectares) makes vouchers effectively inflation-proof.

16. How commons can repair a broken housing sector

• The housing crisis is not because there are not enough houses, but because they’re too expensive. This forces people into debt, via mortgages, and wage slavery to be able to pay them off.

• Young people can’t buy houses (a crack in capitalism), but housing commons can house young people and allow them to stay in their communities.

• Housing commons provides a good example of future-use vouchers – for rent, denominated in square metres.

• Older people can put their house into the commons to release some equity, receive (some) care and have the maintenance of the property taken off their hands.

17. How we resist buyout by capitalists or cancellation by states

• The state can change the law to make commons difficult or impossible. We have to make that really difficult for them by using legal forms that mean cancelling commons will damage the economy too much to make it worthwhile.

• Asset-management corporations are trying to hoover up as much of the housing stock as they can. A ‘commons safeguarder’ or custodian member class, with a veto vote to ensure that commons principles are adhered to, and that houses are never sold out of the commons, can keep commons assets safe. Also, commons housing can undercut their customer base by providing greater affordability and security.

• In this way, commons assets are held by the community in perpetuity.

18. How commons & markets interact

• Capitalist markets can never be ‘free’ with their monopoly players and captured states. The ‘left’ party in the UK appointed the ex-head of Amazon UK to run the Competition & Markets Authority, which sounds like satire, but isn’t.

• In a commons world, free, local markets (via mutual credit, with more information, like reputation, provenance, etc. than is normally given by markets) provide personal possessions and consumables, while essential infrastructure is provided by commons.

• In a mutual credit market, members ‘pay’ with their own work, not cash. Those who can’t work are still supported by the welfare state until we can build commons alternatives (like friendly societies).

• Economic planning doesn’t work at the national scale, and won’t work at the local scale either, because of the difficulty of collecting information, and ‘meeting fatigue’. Markets can allocate goods and services without planning. And self-sufficiency is just too difficult.

• Local markets are community hubs.

• Weakening and eventually removing the state prop for corporations will mean that businesses remain small and community-based, including co-ops and sole traders.

19. How commons & household provisioning relate to each other

• We can provide for ourselves as individuals and as households (construction, crafts, consumables), as well as providing for our communities via commons (essential infrastructure).

• Household provisioning could be considered ‘micro-commoning’, as it’s non-extractive, based in communities, provides affordability and resilience, and can help develop useful skills for a resilient commons economy.

20. How commons provides affordability and jobs in working-class communities

• Commons won’t be built or run with volunteers. Work has to be rewarded or working-class people can’t afford to do it.

• Commons will bring jobs, affordability and utility, which will work well in working-class communities, unlike other change movements, which have been rejected by working people. And it has to work in working-class communities, because that’s where most people are.

• In a commons (and/or co-operative) world, workers and owners are the same people. There’s no need for a middle class to sit in between them – because there is no ‘between’.

• If we want local, non-corporate, organic food and other goods, then we have to pay proper prices for them – otherwise we get poisons, cruelty, wealth concentration and damaged communities. But we can’t pay proper prices if we don’t get proper wages – which is where commons comes in.

• There are two sides to affordability – prices and wages. Commons, alongside a genuinely free (i.e. non-capitalist) market (impossible in capitalism) comprising small, local businesses, can reduce the cost of housing, utilities, water etc., provide more job opportunities and increase wages (rather than minimise prices).

21. How commons can conquer the world

• If you can’t get what you need from your local community, that’s where the ‘Credit Commons’ protocol comes in. It’s a tool for connecting local trading networks together to get to global scale without centralisation.

• Local groups maintain their autonomy. Each community or network has its own ledger, and multiple communities can connect their ledgers to form larger networks.

• The global Credit Commons is something we can all plug into, like the internet. Money in the modern world is credit, and that credit can belong to all of us, in common, not the banking system.

• It’s a way to revisit John Maynard Keynes’ idea for mutual credit relations between countries, instead of the IMF.

• We’ll explore whether China or the West might be a better nursery bed for commons.

22. Commons in history vs commons today

• Brief history of commoning, including the ‘golden age’ and how it was ended.

• Examples of modern commons and the barriers and dangers they face.

• How the appropriate use of technology can prevent enclosure.

• Researching new commons models; digital commons; knowledge commons.

23. Governance of commons vs governance as commons

• How Sociocracy lends itself to governance of commons institutions. Commons requires negotiation. We have to talk and learn to trust each other.

• Wise leadership: how citizens’ assemblies could support commons in the same way that liberal democracy supports capitalism.

• How we encourage and develop a future ‘partner state’, based on regional and local citizens’ assemblies, with a parallel commons economy - we can’t have political democracy without economic democracy.

24. What now?

• Time frames: will we end up looking after each other or eating each other? How do we make the huge but necessary cultural changes quickly?

• Everybody loves commons (but only when they know about it): how we spread the word and make it a buzzword.

• Getting more working examples of commons models.

• Connecting it all together: festivals, franchises and fractal federation.

• Become an advocate, investor, customer, franchisee or employee of commons.