From the Commons for Capital to Capital for the Commons
Note
The article below, part of my substack editorials and in this case, introducing a guest editorial, should not be confused with my own article:
- From the Communism of Capital to a Capital for the Commons, which has been published as:
- * Article: From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons: Towards an Open Co-operativism. By Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis. Triple C, Vol 12, No 1 (2014) [1]
The excerpts below are rather from:
* Article: From the Commons for Capital to Capital for the Commons: How an important book, Assets in Common, introduces the shift towards a Stewardship Economy
URL = https://4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/from-the-commons-for-capital-to-capital
Text
From the introduction and context by Michel Bauwens:
Quote 1:
< "The United States economy is overdue for a shift towards equity and democratic wealth building. As authors, we set out to reveal lesser-known corporate forms and financial structures that leaders can use to enable widespread transformation. We have compiled a curated selection of case studies that demonstrate outstanding examples of an alternative economic paradigm in action. In particular, we are excited about the potential of using shared ownership forms as the core instrument for business ownership and community asset stewardship.
This body of work is an attempt at figuring out how to scale steward ownership and shared ownership.>
Quote 2:
"Two powerful ideas—shared ownership and steward ownership—are driving a radically different way of thinking about assets these days. The first is the domain of worker co-ops, ESOPs, and community land trusts, for example.
The second is a strategy—still better known in Europe than in the U.S.—by which a company preserves its purpose by using a trust to separate governance from economic interests.
These two powerful frameworks meet in a new book jointly published and just out today from Infrastructure for Shared Ownership (sharedownership.us), Common Trust (common-trust.com), and the Purpose Foundation (purpose-us.com). Its authors are Charity May, Jay Standish, Chelsea Robinson, Zoe Schlag, and Derek Razo."
Elias Crim
Some Context:
Dear Readers, I am posting this guest editorial, from Healdsburg, in Sonoma County in Northern California, where I am attending a workshop on network sovereignties. Some of you might find this topic of interest, so here is the program at
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11z1zhtn0ld8aqkf-RJ6Diid2LXM0QWKNVTeR6hng51M/edit?pli=1.
On this occasion, I have written a specific essay on new forms of globally networked governance, which you can find here,
But this week, I present a guest editorial, by Chelsea Robinson, who is one of the guest editors of an important new book, Assets in Common, and it describes the shift towards a ‘Stewardship Economy’. With her permission, I am excerpting the basic information about the book from the Introduction. This will make it a bit more ‘cut and paste’, but I think this book warrants special attention, as it is an entirely pragmatic review of how the ‘pulsation of the commons’, i.e the return of mutualism at times of civilizational transition stress, is a very real occurrence, happening right now in the heart of the world’s dominant Empire.
The forms of the last historical cycle, cooperatives, are not discarded, but have been transformed and updated to the needs of the current age, resulting in new forms of stewardship based ownership and governance. This is a real and important historical shift you should be aware of, so thanks for paying attention to the following presentation.
* Book: Assets in Common: Stories of Business and Community Leaders Remaking the Economy from the Ground Up. By Charity May, Jay Standish et al. Infrastructure for Shared Ownership, 2024
Find out more at https://www.assetsincommon.org/