Commonfare
= how the ‘commons’ might become the basis for new forms of ‘welfare’ [1]: "Commonfare, or “welfare of the common” is a participatory form of welfare provision based on collaboration among people".
Context
Vital solidarity mechanisms once embedded in the welfare state models are being dismantled. To close the gap left in their absence, people are reconstructing distributed solidarity mechanisms. Commonfare, or “welfare of the commons”, is a participatory form of welfare provision based on collaboration which enfranchises all of society, even those not tied to the labour market. Commonfare addresses the exclusionary, hierarchic and bureaucratic shortcomings of the welfare model by creating open-source, democratic, and multi-constituent social provision networks and practices. Labour Mutuals, freelancer coops and prefigurative solidarity networks are in the vanguard, but Commonfare mechanisms would ideally be financed by a Partner State.
Description
"Commonfare, or “welfare of the common” is a participatory form of welfare provision based on collaboration among people living in Europe that want to develop new ways of collectively responding to the everyday problems they face, improving their own lives.
Our welfare states are in need of an update: too many people slip through the net. This reality is experienced by almost 25% of the European population. In the Netherlands up to 50% are flex-workers such as those who work on temporary contracts or are self-employed. This is a huge group with a high risk in need of, but with little access to, financial aid. Commonfare.net wants to support the emergence of an alternative. People in Croatia, Italy and the Netherlands and the project partners are designing and building an online collective awareness platform with the goal to make existing state welfare provisions more accessible, to share good practices and to promote networking and collaboration among people across different locations and countries in Europe."
(http://waag.org/nl/event/commonfare-update)
The "Commonfare Hypothesis" in Academic Literature
DeepSeek:
The concept has been used by several theorists, most notably in a 2019 book and by social movement researchers.
The primary academic text is Cognitive Capitalism, Welfare and Labour: The Commonfare Hypothesis (Routledge, 2019) by Andrea Fumagalli, Alfonso Giuliani, Stefano Lucarelli, and Carlo Vercellone . They frame commonfare as a necessary response to the shift from industrial to cognitive capitalism, where value is derived from collective knowledge. In this context, commonfare is about the social re-appropriation of the gains from this collective labor. They make a key distinction between:
Common Goods (water, healthcare, education): which should be provided as public, de-commodified services.
The Commonwealth (the fruits of social cooperation, general intellect): which cannot be managed by the state or market but requires the self-organization of commoners .
The term has also been identified as a circulating concept within social movements, particularly in Southern Europe, as noted in an academic companion to urban anthropology . One source frames it as the third, most utopian demand in a progression from "flexicurity" and basic income toward a new paradigm beyond "workfare" ."
Comparative Table: Commonfare vs. Welfare: A Paradigm Shift
Table 1
| Feature | Welfare (The Bureaucratic Model) | Commonfare (The Relational / "Welfare of the Commons" Model) |
|---|---|---|
| Core Logic | Distribution of state-collected resources to individuals based on eligibility. | Co-production of resources and care through collaboration among people. |
| Primary Actor | The State (a bureaucratic, professional elite). | The Community (grassroots, self-organized groups, "labor mutuals"). |
| Method | Top-down, service-based, hierarchical, and impersonal. | Bottom-up, participatory, democratic, relational, and networked. |
| Recipient | The client, citizen, or 'victim'—an individual in need, often isolated in a registration system. | The co-producer, neighbor, or 'commoner'—a person embedded in a web of reciprocal relationships. |
| Source of Care | A professional class paid by the state, acting on behalf of a distant bureaucracy. | Direct, personal relationships; mutual aid; gift economies; and traditional practices (e.g., Ayni, Gotong-Royong). |
| Relational Logic | Treats care as a service delivered to a category (e.g., "the homeless problem"). | Treats care as an act of presence and intimacy, specific to particular people in a particular place. |
| Type of Solidarity | Forced / conscripted solidarity (like jury duty). Creates resentment and "performed" care. | Consensual solidarity. Entered into consciously by a sovereign self that chooses to belong. |
| Boundary Logic | Draws administrative borders to determine eligibility (insider/outsider by law). | Draws "membranes" of belonging. A fluid, self-regulating boundary that makes consent and mutual accountability possible. |
| Key Weakness | Exclusionary, bureaucratic, creates dependency, and atrophies local civic muscle and mutual obligation. | Risk of burnout, under-resourcing, and potential co-optation by the state to justify austerity (e.g., "Big Society"). |
| Financing Model | Payroll contributions, general taxation, debt-financed deficits. | "Common pot" financed by income from common wealth (e.g., fees on pollution, usage of financial infrastructure, dividends from state-owned assets). |
| Scale Strategy | Vertical scaling: aggregating power and resources into larger, more abstract and distant institutions. | Horizontal scaling (federation): linking small, functionally sovereign circles into nested networks (e.g., bioregional federations). |
Table 2
| Assumption | Welfare (Bureaucratic Individualism) | Commonfare (Relational Interbeing) |
|---|---|---|
| Nature of the Self | The self as a fortress: bounded, pre-existing its relationships, and complete in isolation. A "rugged individual." | The self as an eddy in a river: co-created by its relationships. "The throne is built from the web." |
| Core Problem | The "tragedy of the commons": without top-down control, individuals will free-ride and deplete shared resources. | The "tragedy of the bureaucracy": impersonal institutions cannot care, because care requires presence, intimacy, and relational feedback. |
| Role of the State | Essential Leviathan: the ultimate guarantor of rights, the enforcer of contracts, and the provider of last-resort care. | Partner or midwife: should finance and scaffold commoning, but not replace it. Risks "purchasing distance" from those in need. |
| Sovereignty Defined | Negative sovereignty: freedom from intrusion, non-interference, the right to exclude. Underwritten by state violence (police, military). | Functional / community sovereignty: the capacity to cohere, to enforce boundaries through peer agreements, and to steward shared resources. "You cannot be sovereign alone." |
| Boundary Metaphor | A wall or border: rigid, impermeable, drawn by cartographers and enforced by guards. | A living cell membrane: firm enough to maintain integrity, porous enough to allow exchange, crossed only by consent. |
| Nature of Freedom | Freedom as absence of constraint (negative liberty). The ideal is to be left alone. | Freedom as the capacity to belong meaningfully (positive liberty). "To be truly sovereign is to belong, on purpose, to a particular people and a particular place." |
| Risk of Failure | Codependence disguised as solidarity: pooling resources from depleted individuals, creating binding that limits agency rather than expanding it. | Isolation disguised as self-sufficiency: the bunker fantasy, the fortified compound stocked with canned goods. "There is no 'away'." |
| Core Ontological Claim | Separation is the default state. Connection is a choice, a contract, or a necessary evil. | Interbeing is the default state. "To be is always to inter-be." Separation is a useful fiction, not a ground truth. |
| Classic Statement | "The absorption of all social functions by the State necessarily favoured the development of an unbridled, narrow-minded individualism." – Peter Kropotkin | "Sovereignty and solidarity are not opposites at all. They are mutually co-arising... The tension between them is not a contradiction to be resolved. It is the structure that holds everything up." – Benjamin Life |
Characteristics
Commonfare according to Benjamin Life:
(please note that Benjamin Life does not use the commonfare concept; but this DeepSeek synthesis is based on his article Sovereignty is Solidarity)
The Relational Paradigm: The Core of the Contrast
The central theme from the P2P wiki and Life's essay is that the fundamental flaw of the welfare state is its non-relational nature. Bureaucracies see categories ("the homeless problem") not people, and their "solutions are always imposed from above, never gripped into actual relationship" . This process, as Peter Kropotkin noted, relieves citizens of their obligations towards each other, fostering a narrow-minded individualism .
Commonfare directly inverts this. It begins with the understanding that care is an act of presence and relationship. This aligns with the P2P wiki's focus on traditional practices like Ayni, Bayanihan, and Gotong-Royong—non-monetized, reciprocal labor systems . Commonfare's goal is to re-embed care into the "web of particular relationships" that a bureaucracy cannot see .
⚖️ The "Solidaristic-Libertarian" Critique: Rejecting False Polarities
Benjamin Life provides the most powerful synthesis, arguing that the commonfare model resolves the false choice between individualism (libertarian) and collectivism (liberal).
The Libertarian is right that handing care to faceless institutions removes the individual's responsibility to show up for their community. "When care becomes the government's job, it stops being mine" .
The Liberal is right that leaving the vulnerable to fend for themselves is a moral catastrophe, and that infrastructure for care is essential.
The commonfare synthesis is this: we keep the infrastructure, but relocate it into direct, place-based relationships . It replaces forced solidarity (like jury duty, which we resent) with consensual solidarity, which we enter with our whole selves .
🏡 Functional Sovereignty & The Necessity of Membranes
A crucial element of this synthesis is the concept of functional sovereignty. For commonfare to be real and not just a sentiment, the solidarity circles must have the capacity to delineate and enforce their own boundaries. This is not about force, but about creating "positive-sum relationships through shared agreements," where the cost of defection is loss of access to shared resources .
Life uses the metaphor of a cell membrane to describe this. Real solidarity requires thresholds to define who is inside a circle of care. This membrane must be real (an inside and outside exists) and fluid (porous enough to allow entry and exit) . This is not exclusionary but is the very thing that makes belonging and consent possible. Forced solidarity, with no boundary, breeds resentment.
🗺️ Scaling Through Federation, Not Abstraction
Commonfare addresses the question of scale not by growing into a larger bureaucracy (vertical growth) but by federating (horizontal growth). The P2P wiki points to "Open Cooperativism" and "labor mutuals" (like SMART in Belgium) as real-world examples where freelancers coop to gain social protections .
Life’s essay suggests a fractal, nested model for this federation, where you belong to different circles of solidarity for different shared stakes:
- Economic solidarity with your cooperative members (shared fate).
- Social solidarity with your community organizing group (shared project).
- Ecological solidarity with your bioregion (shared watershed).
The bioregion becomes the "largest scale at which we still have a genuinely material solidarity relationship...the widest point where our feet still touch the ground" . Knowledge about stewarding a commons can be shared globally, but the stewardship action itself remains local and relational.
Discussion
by provisionaluniversity:
"While the current regime of austerity makes it impossible for the state to provide for the material well-being of the population it is wrong to imagine that a return to a golden past of publicly-managed goods and services is possible or even desirable. Clearly the production and organization of water and energy infrastructure, social housing, healthcare and education at the level of the state allowed for huge investments and developments. But putting the provision of such basic social needs in the hands of a professional elite and state bureaucracy have also meant a separation between the many different needs and experiences of people and the institutions and expert knowledge that provide for them. The hierarchies that are built into state institutions have meant that narrow, often elitist visions of the public good have prevailed. Indeed this has ensured that the very notion of the public good has been eroded for some time as the provision of social needs, such as housing, has become little more than a form of charity or ‘service’ subject to chronic under-funding and poor planning, thereby reproducing of long-standing social inequalities. The exclusionary dynamics of the state have only been exacerbated with the financial crisis as governments have been quick to limit and put new conditions on welfare payments and access to basic social services that affect the most vulnerable.
The ‘commons’ thus arises in a context where the crisis of social reproduction, experienced everyday by millions across Europe, is not being met by either the state or the market. In response, many grassroots, community initiatives are occupying the space left open, developing new ways of providing and caring for one another. All across southern Europe, pragmatic, practical experiments are underway as people develop new ways of collectively responding to the everyday problems they face.
Greece is the obvious example, where the disasters of crisis and austerity have forced many people to develop their own networks of social and material support. In Madrid, Frossos, a woman from Thessaloniki, painted a vivid picture of how the social model in Greece had suddenly and shockingly been blown apart. The force of this change has not just played out in the political and economic spheres, but has also radically altered the fabric of social life. This has meant a tremendous amount of pain and suffering, which has partly been channelled into everyday racism and violence against migrants, but it has also been channelled into progressive social ‘experiments’. Frossos, for example, works in a solidarity health clinic run on a volunteer basis by doctors, nurses and other health-workers in Thessaloniki, Greece. The clinic offers free health care five days a week to anyone who needs it. Over the past two years it has treated 12,000 patients alone. It does this by raising funds for medicine and equipment through donations and fundraisers, such as hosting children’s music concerts in local schools. This is just one of a network of forty self-managed health clinics in Greece that have emerged since 2011.
Frossos is constantly being invited to be part of new projects and initiatives that are attempting to create new networks of solidarity and reproduction (food, health, childcare etc.) She said that these projects are emerging all over Greece because people have no choice. For example, only those who are officially employed can receive health insurance. This means that 3 million Greeks and countless undocumented migrants have no access to health care. New laws also mean that if you are taken to hospital for an operation or emergency and are unable to pay, the hospital is able to access the assets you own through the banks, including your house. There are stories of people losing their homes because they couldn’t afford the cost of an operation. Not surprisingly, people with no money don’t go to hospital even if they are dying.
Vangelis, who also volunteers in the solidarity health clinic, has been unemployed for four years. Because he works in the clinic for free he sometimes can’t afford the bus fare from his home. He relies on the kindness and support of those who are part of this new ‘community of healthcare’, as he put it. He explained that in this community the concept and practice of care extends beyond the normal hierarchical relationships between doctor and patient. The clinic does not function like the state medical institutions where patients are treated like objects and with expensive drugs. New relations and practices of healthcare are being established that recognize that health is not simply a technical, individual issue but a social, collective one. This community of healthcare also cannot exist without a wider network of solidarity and support. In this way, healthcare is not a discreet part of social life, a practice ‘owned’ by professional doctors and nurses, but rather the ‘common’ responsibility of all those involved.
The health clinic in Thessaloniki is a good example of how new forms of the commons are emerging in the wake of crisis and austerity. It illustrates how the commons is not simply about providing a material response to immediate social needs, but about the production of new social relations and practices at the level of everyday life. At the same time, the people who worked in the health clinic were acutely aware that what they were doing was not a panacea for the problems in Greece. There were many more people who were sick and dying than they could take care of. Everyday is a struggle with limited resources and labor. The minimal provision of services by under-resourced communities can also obscure the fact that while millions of people go without basis necessities, the common wealth of society is hoarded by private economic interests. This is a concrete reality for the health clinic as they struggle to pay for drugs and medicine that are privately owned by multinational pharmaceutical companies.
As well as the immediate difficulties of sustaining self-managed initiatives during a time of crisis, the organization of de-centralised, self-managed forms of social reproduction, such as healthcare, can be encouraged and used by governments at a time of crisis to placate and manage the population. While this is less the case in Greece, participants from the UK discussed the legacy of the ‘Big Society’ where the government has actively encouraged community management of basic public functions. This does not just function to obscure political questions of re-distribution, normalizing austerity, it also allows the government to more effectively police communities through various disciplining mechanisms tied to funding. In Dublin, the creative uses of vacant spaces is another way in which voluntary collective activity is being used to cover up the continuing failure of developer-led planning in the city. The positive aspects of these localized commons can also draw our attention away from the powerful financial dynamics that continue to create a topsy turvy situation in which austerity is normalized at a time when more wealth exists than ever.
...
One way in which the discussion of ‘commonfare’ attempted to address the apparent gap between the everyday grounded commons and the need to construct new forms of organization capable of sustaining real alternatives was to distinguish the self-managed commons from the idea of the common good. Where the self-managed commons can take many different forms, always situated and negotiated between a particular community and the resources they depend on, the common good refers to the universal need for healthcare, housing, knowledge, culture and so on. The common good is something like an axiom or principle that can guide action from below. In this sense it is not just an empirical description of our basic needs. Claiming that water, the city or even money is a common good means that it belongs to all of us, that we should have a say in how it is produced, managed and distributed. The clearest example of how this has been articulated through a concrete struggle comes from Italy where the successful campaign against water privatization was made on the grounds that water was a common good, not simply a public good that could be bought or sold by the government. As a common good it belongs to everybody and thus should be accessible to everyone. Similar demands and struggles are arising around Europe as people come to recognize that their demands for greater democracy and a life worth living go far beyond the miserly existence that the existing political and economic systems can provide."
(http://provisionaluniversity.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/the-abduction-of-europe-iii-commonfare/)