Maximalism

Produced by ChatGPT, prompted by Michel Bauwens:

The meaning of "Maximalism"

The word maximalism is deliberately opposed to the idea of "minimalism" as a general philosophy of organisational life.

Compañía Maximalista gives four reasons for the name.

First, it rejects the idea that cooperation should merely provide a minimal legal framework for a business. Cooperation should instead be an expansive way of organising work, knowledge and community.

Second, it rejects the "minimum viable" mentality when applied to social and productive projects. The cooperative argues that projects should begin with ambitious long-term objectives and use the best means available to achieve them.

Third, the term has an aesthetic meaning. The organisation explicitly rejects extreme functional minimalism and advocates traditional materials, colour, decoration, joy and belonging.

Fourth, maximalism is a disposition towards collective goals: modesty is considered a virtue in interpersonal relations but a limitation when defining what a project should try to achieve.

Thus "maximalism" is not primarily a political ideology in the conventional sense. It is a theory and practice of organisation.

Intellectual genealogy

The most revealing account of the origins of maximalism is provided by the CEM itself in its essay "¿De dónde sale el maximalismo?".

(https://maximalismo.org/maximalismo.html)

The genealogy presented there begins not with conventional cooperative theory but with the emergence of free software communities in the late 1990s.

These communities demonstrated that thousands of geographically dispersed people could voluntarily collaborate to create complex productive artefacts whose results could then be freely copied, modified and redistributed. The CEM describes these as new "comunales digitales universales" (universal digital commons).

Two characteristics are particularly important in this interpretation:

• membership is determined primarily by contribution rather than ownership or status;

• governance can operate through continuing deliberation and consensus rather than through conventional hierarchical management.

The CEM argues that the first maximalist worker cooperatives emerged in the early 2000s around these digital commons. Their members could participate in producing freely available knowledge while generating income through consulting, implementation, customisation and training.

This produced a crucial combination:

open knowledge + paid productive work + worker ownership + community benefit

Rather than treating the free availability of knowledge as incompatible with economic sustainability, the model sought to make the labour required to produce and maintain open knowledge economically sustainable.

Juan Urrutia and the economics of abundance

The intellectual background becomes clearer through the figure of economist Juan Urrutia, whose work on the logic of abundance is repeatedly identified by the maximalists as an important precursor.

Urrutia introduced the concept in the early 2000s in connection with the emerging network economy. His 2001 paper "Redes de personas, Internet y la lógica de la abundancia" analysed the economic implications of networks and near-zero marginal costs.

The basic distinction is between scarcity logic and abundance logic.

In a traditional medium such as a newspaper, physical space is scarce. Publishing one additional item means allocating scarce space and therefore potentially displacing something else.

In a digital network, however, the marginal social cost of publishing an additional piece of information can approach zero. One person's publication does not necessarily prevent another person's publication.

Urrutia's argument, as subsequently popularised by David de Ugarte and others, was that the disappearance of marginal costs changes not only production but also the logic of organisation. Where scarcity requires collective selection, abundance makes it possible for many actors to act simultaneously.

This became associated with the concept of pluriarchy developed in the Spanish network-theory milieu around de Ugarte. The P2P Foundation's existing entry on abundance logic explicitly identifies Urrutia's 2001 work as the source of the concept.

1. P2P Foundation: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php/Abundance_Logic_vs_Scarcity_Logic
2. P2P Foundation, "Pluriarchy": https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/index.php/Pluriarchy

From abundance economics to cooperative organisation

The maximalist project takes the abundance argument one step further.

The original network-economics insight concerned the declining marginal cost of reproducing information. The maximalist question is what happens when this logic is connected to the organisation of human work.

If knowledge can become abundant, the argument goes, then intellectual property regimes which artificially restrict its reproduction become increasingly difficult to justify.

But simply declaring knowledge to be a commons does not solve the problem of who produces it, maintains it, teaches it, adapts it and pays for the time required to do so.

The maximalist answer is the worker cooperative.

The cooperative provides an institutional home for the people whose work generates the knowledge commons. Commercial services can generate income while the underlying knowledge and tools remain available to the wider community.

This creates a model in which the market is not necessarily abolished but is subordinated to the development of a wider communal.

This is one of the key differences between maximalism and a purely technological interpretation of open-source production.

The question is not simply:

How can knowledge be made open?

It is:

How can the people who produce open knowledge organise their work, ownership and economic life so that openness becomes materially sustainable?

The communal

A central concept in maximalist cooperativism is the comunal.

The term refers to the accumulated collective resources of the cooperative: knowledge, productive capacities, relationships, reputation, material assets, reserves and organisational experience.

The cooperative therefore does not exist simply to distribute current income among its members. It exists to increase the communal over time.

The cooperative statutes are unusually explicit on this point. They state that the statutes are intended to describe a model that has already been lived and tested rather than an abstract utopian programme. They describe the cooperative as a worker cooperative whose principles govern everyday work, productive and commercial decisions, social action and relations between members.

The communal can consequently be understood as the bridge between the economic and social dimensions of maximalism.

A successful project produces:

work → income → knowledge and reserves → communal → greater productive and social capacity

The objective is not simply accumulation of financial capital but the accumulation of collective capability.

The seven maximalist principles

The current maximalist model is organised around seven principles.

1. Abundance

Abundance is treated not merely as an ethical aspiration but as a material possibility.

The cooperative therefore rejects artificial restrictions on knowledge and seeks to orient productive activity towards increasing the amount and accessibility of useful knowledge and capabilities.

In its recent educational material, the CEM explicitly presents abundance as a practical principle for everyday cooperative organisation, including the development and management of knowledge commons.

2. Centrality of work

Work is treated as the fundamental social contribution of members.

This is a significant distinction from approaches that define cooperatives primarily through ownership or legal form. The maximalist cooperative is fundamentally a community of people who work together.

The CEM consequently presents worker cooperativism as qualitatively different from a generic "social economy" understood simply as a category of enterprises with particular legal or ethical characteristics.

3. Development of the communal

The purpose of cooperative work is to build a growing collective resource.

Knowledge, technological infrastructure, reserves, relationships and productive capabilities are accumulated for collective use rather than distributed entirely as individual returns.

4. Equality and sufficient remuneration

The maximalist model rejects the accumulation of large individual income differences inside the cooperative.

Remuneration should be sufficient for members while the cooperative's surplus is retained for collective development and social purposes.

The result is a deliberate distinction between remuneration for work and ownership of accumulated productive wealth.

5. Consensus

The cooperative is intended to function through consensus rather than permanent majority/minority politics.

This links maximalism directly to the governance practices observed by its authors in free-software communities, where continuing contribution and deliberation can substitute for conventional hierarchical control.

6. Maximum community impact

The cooperative is not regarded as an isolated economic unit.

Its success is measured partly by its contribution to the surrounding community: creating productive opportunities, strengthening local capabilities, increasing knowledge and improving material and cultural conditions.

7. Non-neutralism

The final principle rejects the idea that the cooperative should be neutral regarding the major problems of its historical moment.

The CEM currently identifies climate change, war, rural depopulation and the degradation of material and cultural conditions as examples of issues towards which maximalist organisations should take an explicit position.

This is important because it turns maximalism from a governance model into a historical project.

Against "artificial scarcity"

The position on intellectual property is one of the clearest connections between maximalism and the P2P/commons tradition.

The maximalist argument is that knowledge differs from scarce physical resources because copying it does not normally deprive the original holder of its use.

Patents, copyright restrictions and secrecy can therefore create forms of artificial scarcity.

Maximalist cooperatives seek to renounce these mechanisms as their principal means of generating income.

The alternative is to monetise the work around knowledge:

• research;

• implementation;

• customisation;

• consulting;

• training;

• integration;

• maintenance;

• development of new applications.

This is essentially the economic model that made many early free-software businesses possible, but placed inside a worker-owned and explicitly non-profit institutional framework.

From the network to the territory

The early maximalist story could easily be mistaken for a theory of digital communities.

The more recent trajectory is different.

The CEM's own history describes a movement from the free-software commons through the network economy towards a concern with the material conditions of communities, work and territory. It argues that the contemporary challenge is not merely to preserve digital commons but to use technology and cooperative organisation to strengthen places that are losing productive capacity.

This produces an unusual combination:

digital commons → worker cooperatives → local productive capacity → territorial regeneration

The rural world therefore becomes strategically important.

The maximalists argue that technological change can reduce the economically efficient scale of production, making small firms and small cooperative groups increasingly viable in areas that were previously disadvantaged by distance from major urban centres.

Their current strategy consequently emphasises small and medium-sized towns, rural territories, knowledge-intensive work and cooperative ownership.