New tools for growing the commons, and how I discovered them

Part 1 of a new series exploring an emergent toolkit for building thriving commons

This is part 1 of a series about new tools being developed to help build the commons. It’s about my journey - how I discovered these tools, and why they excited me. If you’re interested in building a new system, I hope they excite you too.

Coming soon:

• Part 2: how these tools protect the commons from co-option, purchase or cancellation.

• Part 3: building a strong movement.

• Part 4: what a commons town might look like.

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I wonder how many of you are in a similar position to me as regards the state of the world and what to do about it. From an early age (nudged by David Attenborough), I could see nature being destroyed more each year, power becoming more concentrated, and society becoming more corporate, bland, ugly and nasty. I saw some good things happening, but I could also see that our problems are systemic, with absolutely nothing challenging the corporate system.

So I started to look into what might. I read, talked, asked questions, listened, got involved with and ultimately rejected various approaches, in roughly this order:

1. Marxism (good critique, terrible solution)

2. Electoral politics (captured)

3. Protest (barely registers)

4. Intentional communities (take too much energy internally)

5. Behavioural change / global consciousness raising (not enough people will do it)

6. Divine intervention (just kidding)

I ended up supporting an ecosystem of co-operative, mutualist and individual initiatives to replace capitalism, first in communities, and then at scale; and for 25 years, via Lowimpact. I blogged about them and provided information, books and courses. But I knew it was a long shot, because of the power of capital and because co-ops had been around for 150 years, and were beginning to be bought out by capitalists. But what else could work?

I’m guessing that quite a lot of people are in this position. After the financial crash of 2008-9, I started to discover tools and ideas that I thought were promising, but discrete and disconnected. But they’re not: they can be (and are being) used together to form networks that have the potential to grow exponentially to challenge the status quo – to build a commons economy, a commons society, a commons world. I was inspired by them. I hope you are too.

Below are those tools and ideas in the order I discovered them, with links to go deeper. Over the coming weeks, I’ll blog more about how these new tools can prevent commons from being bought, co-opted or cancelled; a possible roadmap for building a commons economy and society; and what a commons town might be like. Subscribe to be alerted when those articles are posted.

A new money system: mutual credit

In 2011 I stumbled across an animated movie by a Canadian, Paul Grignon, called Money as Debt. Its central theme is that almost all money in circulation comes into existence when banks make loans. Banks don’t have the money they lend, sitting in an account anywhere, or in a vault, in the form of gold. They just type in numbers, and suddenly, the borrowers (including homebuyers) magically have money in their account, which they have to pay ‘back’, with interest.

It sounded like a giant scam to me, designed to concentrate wealth and power in the corporate financial sector. So I started to read more about it, including how to challenge it. I discovered that it was true, empirically proven by Richard Werner and confirmed by the Bank of England.

I wanted to find alternatives, and one of the first (and still one of the best) books I found was The End of Money and the Future of Civilisation by Tom Greco. His focus was mutual credit – a way of trading that doesn’t require bank-issued money. It’s just an accounting system, for who’s done what for whom – no money required. A few years later, I interviewed Tom about why mutual credit (not Bitcoin) is the future of money.

This made sense to me. Let’s not use corporate money, and if we don’t, then corporations wouldn’t have anything to extract from communities, to concentrate their wealth and power. But wasn’t it similar to Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS), which didn’t really work out? Not really, because it’s aimed at small businesses, whereas LETS were mainly for individuals, and some LETS groups were hostile to businesses, which didn’t seem likely to change the economy. I interviewed Sue Bell of Brixton LETS, and Michael Linton, inventor of LETS, to find out more.

Here’s more on the history of the money system, and on mutual credit, from Lowimpact, MCS, P2P Foundation Wiki and Wikipedia.

Federating the commons economy: credit commons

Tom Greco urged me to read the Credit Commons White Paper by Matthew Slater and Tim Jenkin. I did, and although I didn’t understand all the technical details, I understood that it was a tool for federating, not just mutual credit schemes, but ultimately, all parts of the commons economy.

I was very interested, and contacted Matthew, who at the time was a digital nomad, couch-surfing and working on the Credit Commons Protocol. I invited him to visit, the next time he found himself in the UK. He came to stay, and explained more about the credit commons concept, which he’d used to federate LETS groups in Europe. His colleague Tim (the subject of the movie, Escape from Pretoria) had used it to federate LETS groups in South Africa.

Commons projects can be connected together via the ‘Credit Commons Protocol’ – a language that they can all speak that allows them to connect – but in a federation, with no centre. Each local group retains full autonomy. Everything is interoperable, so that housing, energy or care vouchers are transferable between groups, and people can buy them, do their local shopping, and receive wages etc. in mutual credit. I interviewed Matthew about the credit commons.

Matthew introduced me to Dil Green, who lived a cycle ride from me in London at the time. Dil and I met, and together with Oli Sylvester-Bradley of Open.coop, we launched a national-scale mutual credit network for the UK, called the Open Credit Network. Unfortunately, we didn’t take Tom Greco’s advice – that these schemes shouldn’t be launched at the national level. They have to be implemented in communities first, and then federated to get to national scale. The OCN failed, and Dil and I moved on to implement commons tools in Stroud and Liverpool.

Here’s a conversation between Matthew, Dil and Tim, and here’s more on credit commons from Lowimpact, MCS and Creditcommons.net.

Building commons without debt or extraction: use-credit obligations

After the failure of the OCN, Dil brought the work of Chris Cook (of Island Power) to my attention – especially his ideas on ‘use-credit obligations’.

Imagine a community energy group wanting to put up a wind turbine. To raise the money, they’d need to go into debt or give away equity, which means the infrastructure will be in the hands of capitalists before long (as happened with many co-ops and building societies). Chris’s idea was that instead, the community energy group issues energy vouchers, denominated in kWh, not £ (which makes them inflation-proof). People will want them because they’re sold at a discount, and they can be redeemed for electricity when the turbine is built, or they can provide a store of value – interest-free security for old age or sickness. I interviewed Chris about this.

Dil saw that this basic idea can work in every sector of the economy, and vouchers (especially housing, water, food, energy, care) could form the basis of a pension that doesn’t involve money. The vouchers are denominated in ‘stuff’ (kWh, cubic metres of water, hours of care, acres of land, square metres of housing etc.), which makes them inflation-proof and doesn’t involve banks. Dil discussed this with Chris, who agreed, and I took the idea to Stroud, and talked with everyone I could about building commons infrastructure here, including Chik Shimasaki, who’s developing a housing commons and a climbing commons in Stroud.

Here’s more on use-credit obligations from Lowimpact and MCS.

Introducing mutual credit via credit clearing

My articles about mutual credit, credit commons and use-credit obligations caught the attention of Tom Woodroof, a nuclear physicist who realised that his career was going to involve building nuclear power stations or nuclear weapons – neither of which he supported. He wanted a change, and he found it. He came into our circles, and set up Mutual Credit Services with Dil, designing and adapting commons tools and models for real-world application. Together they launched Local Loop Merseyside, a city-wide credit clearing scheme in Liverpool. They have the city council, university and Chamber of Commerce on board, and they’re talking with interested groups in Manchester, Leeds and other cities.

Credit clearing can massively reduce the amount of bank-issued money required for a local economy, and therefore prepare the ground for commons to be built. It’s something the banks already do, to reduce the need for cash to pay debts. But we can do it too. Imagine A owes B £10; B owes C £10; and C owes A £10. If everyone has all the information, debts can just clear – be cancelled out – without any money changing hands. For networks of trading small businesses, this can be done with algorithms, covering large areas.

It’s a medieval idea that’s been adapted for the 21^st century. Here’s my interview with Hans-Florian Hoyer about the history of credit clearing.

Within a large credit clearing scheme, smaller clusters of businesses can be found that trade with each other regularly. They can share a ledger in which members get an account, and trade with each other via mutual credit, without using money at all. It’s a way of introducing mutual credit without having to explain it – it just makes sense for small businesses, helping them save money and solve their cashflow problems. Successful credit clearing schemes will speed up the spread of mutual credit.

Here’s my interview with Tom, talking about why he switched from nuclear physics to mutual credit.

Here’s Tom’s interview with Tomaz Fleischmann, who’s been involved with a national credit clearing scheme in Slovenia for many years, about how credit clearing could change the global monetary system.

And here’s more on credit clearing from Lowimpact,MCS and Wikipedia.

Keeping assets in the commons: custodian members

How do we prevent appropriation of commons assets by capitalists (as happened to the Co-op Bank and most building societies)?

Another idea developed by Chris Cook, and adapted by Dil Green and MCS, is the ‘custodian’ member class, in a multistakeholder organisation. Commons groups have different member types – users / customers, investors, stewards (employees), but also ‘custodian’ members (a bit like trusted ‘village elders’), who have a veto vote to make sure that commons principles are not violated (e.g. commons houses are never sold again). Citizens’ assemblies could help find custodian members in all communities.

We’re still developing ideas around organisational structures into which custodian members fit well, including forms of ‘nondominium’ (Chris Cook again), where groups (or parts of groups) constitute informal associations, bound together by consensual agreements. More on the P2P Foundation Wiki.

Other tools

We’re calling this range of tools the ‘Integrated Commons Toolkit’ that we’re testing out and tweaking via the emerging Commons Lab, trialling in Stroud and Liverpool, and promoting via the blog, forum, wiki and annual festival. We’ll be producing playbooks, so that commons in all sectors can be replicated in communities everywhere, and networked together.

We think that our toolkit could work well with a range of other existing tools that are already being developed by groups that we’re in contact with, to do great things, such as:

• Sociocracy For All, making decisions equitably and transparently within commons groups.

• Open Food Network, providing local food hubs and an online shopfront for small food producers - just what we need to allow land commons tenants to make a living.

• CSA Network, also helping small food producers sell their produce.

• ISWE, building tools for a ‘governance commons?

• OICD, healing divisions in communities - essential for building commons.

• Equal Care Coop, building a care system with recipients as full members, internal mutual credit system and sociocracy.

• Civic Square, creating physical spaces and fostering community.

Let us know if you’d like to help develop or promote these tools, or whether you might be interested in starting a commons project in your community. We’ll be producing playbooks to help you build commons that can provide you with a paid role. If you have queries about the tools, post queries on the forum. We’ve got specialists lined up to answer them for you.

The next article in this series is about how these tools protect the commons from co-option, purchase or cancellation.

Related articles:

• Michel Rauchs’ Introduction to the Commons series