Placing the Commons in a Temporal Framework

* Article: PLACING THE COMMONS IN A TEMPORAL FRAMEWORK: THE COMMONS AS A PLANETARY REGENERATION MECHANISM. By Michel Bauwens and Jose Ramos. In: Money, Money, Money: Dialogues entre citoyens, artistes et chercheurs. Ed. by Emmannuelle Grangier. Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2025.

URL = https://www.puv-editions.fr/ouvrage/money-money-money/

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Michel Bauwens and Jose Ramos:

The Commons As A Perennial Mode Of Exchange

This text centers around the importance of a perennial human institution, that of the commons, which is one of the four basic modes of exchange identified by anthropologists.

Alan Page Fiske, in his landmark book Structures of Social Life (1991), offers a fourfold typology of modes of exchange. A mode of exchange focuses not on how things are made and what the relations are of productive communities, as Marx did when he talked about a ‘mode of production’, but looks at what the criteria are for the exchange of value, i.e. the allocation methods for who gets what in a given society. Fiske called them: Communal Shareholding, Equality Matching, Authority Ranking and Market Pricing.

Commoning occurs whenever human groups exchange with a ‘whole’ following the logic ‘give a brick, get a house’. Commoning, doing something for the tribe, clan and family rather than for one’s own, is the primary way in which value was exchanged at the dawn of humanity. A hunter or gatherer would bring back the proceeds of their search for food, but this was often done on behalf of the kin group, and there was a pre-established way in which these proceeds would be shared. Later on, human communities would collectively manage natural resources on which they were co-dependent, such as forests, estuaries, fishing rights, mountain slopes, grazing rights, etc… In the European Middle Ages, farmers would have access to a family plot, would have to work for their lord, but would also have access to common fields, managed by the village as a whole. Such commons are still widespread in the Global South, while they have been massively privatized in the Western world. In this fashion, the commons have always been a part of the overall mix of value exchange, though the relative weight of the commons in the overall mix has ebbed and flowed. The ‘market exchange’ system in its capitalist form, has been the system most intent on diminishing the place of the commons in social life, as its advocates generally believe that private property is a more productive arrangement than commoning. In her seminal book Governing the Commons, Elinor Ostrom (1992), the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences winner in 2009, has been the author that most cogently studied the logic of commoning.

Essentially, the market is based on the underlying assumption of scarcity, with the belief that the pricing mechanism will direct the resources needed for production more efficiently. Psychologically, it assumes competition for rival goods which cannot simultaneously belong to different people, hence it promotes fear of scarcity. Commons on the other hand, promote an idea of sufficiency and even abundance, since it can be assumed that private failure can be compensated by the availability of commons-based resources. Physical commons, who need regeneration for stability, were therefore regulated to avoid overuse through common accords by the user communities. While digital commons have the advantage of becoming more valuable through usage, hence they are called ‘non-rival’, or even anti-rival.

Gradually, after the core role of commoning in the early human arrangements had been established, tribal arrangements became more complex and grew in scale, and at this stage, the gift economy became more important, over-shadowing commoning. In this allocation method, an individual, family, or clan would make a gift, which would create gratitude and a sense of obligation in the recipient, who would at a later time, want to give another gift and return, so as to re-establish the ‘equality’ which had been disturbed by the gift. Hence the concept of Equality Matching to denote this type of exchange. One of the primary authors on the gift economy has been Marcel Mauss in his essay The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (Mauss, 1954).

However, once we see stratified class societies emerging, and a division in ‘classes’ under the ‘civilizational’ model, the primary determinant of allocation becomes distribution according to rank, under the adage “rule, protect and distribute”, hence ‘Authority Ranking’. These were the tributary or feudal modes. These systems still contain the logic of commoning and of the gift, but the primary means of exchange becomes the distribution according to rank, with priesthoods and nobility (the latter as the warrior class) the primary recipients of the ‘surplus’ value.

Since the 1600s, the primary mode of allocation has been “Market Pricing”, i.e., the capitalist form of the market, in different forms of its evolution. Here goods are exchanged according to a common standard of value, i.e., the ‘price’.

While these modalities have co-existed across regions, cultures and epochs, their relative importance has evolved over time, as we already indicated. One modality dominates and the other modalities adapt to its dominance and find new niches where persistence makes sense. We have already indicated the overlap in which these different modes of exchange became the dominant modality, but Alan Page Fiske’s work is actually a synchronous comparison of these modes of exchange. It is Kojin Karatani, a Japanese philosopher, who has provided an account of the same changes in a relative hegemony of the different modes of allocation, in a remarkable book called The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange (2014). Karatani posits a succession of modes of exchange in terms of relative dominance, in other words, he attempts to historicize more precisely how the different modalities posited by Alan Page Fiske, evolve over time.

To briefly summarise:

- Mode A is association, or rather the reciprocity of the gift. - Mode B is brute force, or rule and protection. - Mode C is commodity exchange. - There’s also a Mode D, which transcends the others.

Mode A consists of 2 phases, which correspond to the distinctions made by Fiske: the first modality of intra-tribal exchange is ‘non-reciprocal exchange’, in other words ‘commoning’, exchanging with a whole. The second phase, used for inter-tribal trading when these societies become more complex, is the reciprocal gift, used to create mutual social obligations and therefore also ‘peace’. When sedentarization occurs, and conflict can no longer be avoided through nomadic strategies, the gift logic becomes necessary for inter-tribal peace-keeping. Mode D, emerging today, then combines the historical modalities A, B, C but under the coordination of a ‘new associationism’, a concept that is very close to commoning as we could confirm in a private email exchange with Kojin Karatani.

Of special interest in this specific context is Karatani’s treatment of mode C, commodity exchange, where he introduces the idea of the simultaneous emergence of a triarchical system of institutions, i.e. the State, the Nation, and the Market, with each of them supporting each other.

The triarchical system also introduces a cyclic pattern within capitalist evolution. In this vision, which comes close to the ideas of Karl Polanyi which we will introduce shortly, the Nation is what remains of community under a capitalist political economy, and the State continues to exist with an arbitrage function between the People and the Market forces.

History of the Commons

As we agree with this interpretation of human history, we can apply these insights for a stylized summary of the history of the commons:

- In early tribal societal forms, commoning is the central mode of allocation and is used for all resources pertaining to the survival of the kinship group; it remains important in gift economy systems.

- In feudal and state forms (Authority Ranking), the commons and the gift lose their dominance, but the commons retain an important function for guaranteeing the collective management of vital natural resources; commons-based communities compose with the feudal order but also defend themselves. For example, in European medieval history, the most important communal ritual was the Rogantide Procession, or the ‘Gang Days’, in which the community, under the leadership of the parish priest, did a walk around the village and their commons, to reconfirm their borders and importance for the community. This ceremonial pilgrimage was also called ‘Beating the Bounds’. It was only abandoned after the Reformation, i.e. after the emergence of the capitalist social order.

- Under capitalism, a massive amount of common lands and other common resources have been privatized, the so-called ‘Enclosures of the Commons’, a process that started in the UK.

- But the exodus of the farmers from the countryside in order to become workers in the cities, coincided with the emergence of a new form of commons: barring control and access to common natural resources, workers commodified their life risk through a massive mutualization of income and health resources, which became the basis of the welfare state. Thus we could claim that capitalism privatized the natural resource commons, but “state-ified” the social commons.

- With the emergence of digital networks, the commons are again emerging as a substantive practice, starting with the emergence of knowledge and open source commons after 1993, with the invention of the web and the browser, which democratized access to the Internet. As mentioned above, digital resources are not depleted through sharing, as the cost of an extra copy is marginal. Hence digital commons promote the widest possible usage of the resource, and in this context, they can be considered abundant. However, they do require energy and resources for their infrastructure, production, and maintenance. But digital commons introduce the capacity for non-territorial cooperation and for the rapid diffusion of innovations. Rather than based on economies of scale, such as material production in a market context, i.e. producing more by goodwill brings down the value of an individual item, digital commons are based on ‘economies of scope’: any innovation anywhere in the network is available instantly throughout that network.

- At the current moment in history, after a period of eclipse under the capitalist mode of production and allocation, the commons seem to be re-merging, particularly using the mechanism of what we call ‘peer production’, using “peer to peer” modalities. Peer to peer is any social and technical system, in which peers can connect with each other, in order to communicate, exchange, but also self-organize and even create new ‘value circuits’. Decentralized and ‘distributed’ computing systems, such as the internet, have enabled many people in the world to self-organize in open collaborative systems, which are able to create shared resources, i.e. commons. Open source communities consist of communities of developers who freely associate themselves to create ‘free’ software, free in the sense that everyone is able to use, share and transform/improve them; but they are also creating joint open designs, shared knowledge, and more. The latest iteration of open source production has been the development of decentralized blockchain or ‘Web3.0’ technologies. These are based on open source code, collaborative production, and open ecosystems that agents can freely join or leave, using common incentive schemes to align the different stakeholders. It is accompanied by technical attempts to create real data commons, in which the data are owned by the producers of those data, with stronger protections for decentralization. Tokens are used to recognize contributions to the network, which can be used to partake in the growth of value of the network, but also for democratic participation in decision-making.

- Since the crisis of 2008, we also see the emergence and growth of urban commons, which have grown tenfold in a decade. Urban commons do not necessarily entail autonomous production but are a form of mutualizing consumption and the use of common services. A study in the city of Ghent, Belgium, for example showed a tenfold increase in the number of initiatives in just ten years. Urban commons entail the mutualization of provisioning systems such as shared access to organic food, shared urban gards, cooperative housing, cooperative and associative carsharing, etc …

- Finally, we see the emergence of eco-systems of material production, which are also inspired by commons-based logic. For example, the multi factory-model, used by a network of 120 craft-based ‘maker spaces’ across Europe, works around a common ecosystem for shared knowledge, their Invisible Factory. We could say that if the internet of communications stimulated the ‘peer production’ of so-called immaterial goods, i.e. knowledge, software and design, then the ‘internet of transactions’, which came into being with the blockchain, represents, through its shared and distributed ledgers which can be used for coordinating production flows, the possibility of material peer production.

New era of the commons

The new technological affordances are only part of the explanation. We want to show and argue, in this paper, that there is a historical pattern in the ebb and flow of commoning in human history. Why are commons sometimes weakening to the point of disappearance, while they make strong comebacks at other times? We believe, and posit with some confidence, that we are now entering a ‘new era of the commons’ in which we expect them to take center stage.

The basic idea of the ‘pulsation of the commons’ is the following: Throughout history, even as the arrow of time proceeds and societies become more complex and evolve, there is also a cyclic pattern.

The full pattern has two different moments:

1) in the expansive/degradative phase, competing entities in a peer polity system (which can be a system of tribes, kingdoms, empires or nation-states), enter into an expansive but also degradative phase of consumptive expansion. They do this by over-using both their core territories and frontier areas, leading to inevitable overshoot and then decline and collapse.

2) as a reaction to this degradative phase, local productive communities, rooted in their territory which is degrading, seek to resist and eventually to redress, linked to religious and spiritual movements which express this discontent and desire for social harmony. If this movement overtakes the degradative forces, the commons, the mutualizing of resources to create abundance within a context of sufficiency, recreate old and new commons which had been degraded and weakened in the expansive phase. At some point, the health of the system is restored to such a degree that the desire for expansion grows again. This dynamic is what we like to call: the pulsation of the commons

Perhaps a word here for the visually oriented readers: what do you get when you combine a successive evolution of systems, each more complex than the other (which doesn’t mean superior in any moral sense, nor progress, but only: a tendential complexification of the social systems over time), which are also determined by ‘polarity switches’? The answer is: a spiral. In a spiral we can visualize each phase of complexity but at the same time, the line moves between polarities and the downward direction of the crisis moment becomes visible. However, it would seem that for most of the transitions, the downward arc never reaches below a certain threshold, so that there is an accumulation of knowledge and technology remaining from previous phases. This can serve as the new starting point for a new positive growth cycle While Oswald Spengler argues in his masterpiece, The Decline of the West (2020), that all civilizations have a life cycle, they are born, mature, and decline, and do not learn from each other; other macro historians, like Arnold Toynbee in The Study of History (1961), sees at least three generations of civilizations, each with higher knowledge and technical level than the civilizations typical for an earlier phase. In this context, as civilizations are seen as a particular arrangement between the agricultural countryside and the city, the digitalization of technology would suggest a fundamental re-arrangement of time and space, and therefore, up-ending the civilizational model that we have known for 5,000 years. Hypothetically, this would allow us to speculate about ‘fourth-generation civilizations’.

The Temporal Ebb And Flow Of Commoning

Introducing Pogany: The Time for The Chaotic Transition Has Begun

The initial temporal framework we present is that of Peter Pogany. Pogany is a very original but rather unknown Hungarian-American thinker who published two books (Pogany 2006, 2015). Rethinking the World (2006) is an arduous but rewarding new view of the world system and its structures. Pogany is one of the very few thinkers who links the thermodynamic basis of our world to the socio-economic system. More importantly, he links both these levels to a third system, the ‘mode of apprehension’: how human cultures see the world, what they can ‘see’, and most importantly, what they cannot ‘see’. This can be equated with a ‘mode of consciousness’ and Pogany uses the schemes developed by Jean Gebser in the book, The Ever-Present Origin (2020). This is important since typical left-of-center analyses usually focus on material structures, but often ignore a systematic vision of human agency; right-of-center analyses usually focus on human agency and responsibility, but often ignore the structural constraints on human and natural systems. Pogany offers a sound integral theory that holds three levels of reality, material, economic and cultural, in an organic and holistic embrace.

Based on findings of biophysical economics and complexity theory, Pogany concludes that our world, i.e. human society embedded in nature, is a ‘complex adaptive system’ and reminds us that such systems change through ‘punctuated equilibrium’, ‘chaotic transitions’, and ‘bifurcations’. This is a huge statement as it means that humanity would not adapt to radically new situations through reasoned debate, but through shocks in the system. First, the old system disintegrates and old institutions lose legitimacy. Then, a Cambrian explosion of alternatives emerges, carrying the seed forms of the next system. But these alternatives need to fight themselves out before a new stable system emerges.

This also means that societal transitions are about the installment of new logic rather than a re-arrangement of the old system. For example, the Christian feudal society that replaced the imploded Roman Empire believed that work was positive and sacred, rather than exclusive to slaves. Christians and monks believe in the adage, ora et labora, pray and work. This view was fundamentally opposed to the Greco-Roman vision of work as a degrading activity. The Greeks believed that people who depended on work to survive, could not become autonomous beings able to think for themselves.

So, a new mode of organizing productive life in more harmony with the limitations of the material planet and its living beings will require more than a ‘business as usual’ adaptation. The new system must either disintegrate to a lower level of complexity or ‘transcend and include’ some of the achievements of the previous system while addressing its problems at a higher level of complexity and integration. The two may of course coincide, i.e. an initial regression is needed for the new system to be able to reorganize itself at a higher level.

Pogany explores our current context based on his analysis of three succeeding ‘global’ stable systems. Global System 0 (GS0), or a proto-global society, was the mercantile system that dominated Europe under the absolute kings of the 17th-18th centuries. This stable system ended with a period of ‘chaotic transition’: the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (1789-1815).

The second stable system, which emerged after the chaotic transition period, was the first truly global system. Global System 1 (GS1), also called the ‘Smithian’ capitalist system. It was based on the full domination of Capital over Labour. GS1 and its institutions have been in turn interrupted by the period of chaotic transition between WW1 and WW2. During this transition, 3 different systems fought for dominance: democratic capitalism, fascism, and (Soviet) communism.

The third stable system, Global System 2 (GS2), emerged after 1945. This system of ‘weak multilateralism’ (GS0 had no multilateral institutions) was based, at least in the Western countries, on a contract between capital (Fordist capitalism) and labour (the welfare system). GS2 was based on a hyper-exploitation of natural resources and neo-colonialism. While the Global South had largely obtained its political independence, new countries had been locked in unfavorable terms of trade and had little or no power in new international institutions dominated by the winners of WW2.

Here is what Pogany wrote after the onset of the global systemic crisis of 2008:

- It is hardly a mere coincidence that the collapse of the global financial casino coincided with the divorce between cheap oil and the full utilization of the rest of productive resources. We will never see the two of them together again — a situation loaded with the awesome implication that the world will be knocked back and forth between recession and aborted recovery as the oil price roller coaster alternatively encourages and discourages profligacy with our body economic vis vitalis (vital force). This emergent cyclicality reveals that the collision between humanity’s material ambitions and the planet’s physical constraints is not a single dramatic event as symbolized by the more than three-decades-old ‘overshoot and collapse’ meme. Rather, it is an extended, micro-historically recognizable temporal process. (Pogany, 2009)

Note the important historical shift that follows from Pogany’s conclusion: whereas the earlier cyclic patterns were always local and regional, leaving room for growth in new frontiers or regions, this crisis is planetary: there are no frontiers left. Humanity is facing a closed earth system, which receives energy from the universe, but no matter, and that matter is subject to the degradative effects of the second law of thermodynamics. This time, there is no escape, no ‘elsewhere’. This means that any further growth must be compatible with the regenerative capacity of the resource base as well as with other planetary boundaries. It is fair to say that the GS2 started to dissipate in 2008, when a deep crisis of the financial system has been followed by the weakening of the multilateral system based on US dominance; social unrest eventually resulting in right-populist victories; and rapid realization of the physical unsustainability of our current systems of production. Thus, the world has entered the beginning stages of a new period of chaotic transition. After the 1980s, the social contract between capital and labour slowly dissipated due to neoliberalism. The social contract is still not entirely destroyed but has been weakened, together with the multilateral system.

Covid-19 has since reinforced the crisis, showing that the weakened public systems under neoliberal austerity regimes, left the public sector in the West very ill-equipped to deal with the crisis.

Renewed contract with nature; and social equity

Pogany is quite clear that the next system, Global System 3 (GS3), must be based on a renewed contract with nature – we must learn how to produce for human needs within planetary boundaries. To retain social stability, this process needs to be accompanied by a degree of social equity – the social contract cannot be abandoned because it is the precondition for a successful ecological contract. This requires a strong two-level multilateralism. A form of global governance needs to embed human production into relatively coercive planning frameworks reflecting the availability of resources for the long-term survival of humanity. This view is expressed for example in the r3.0 (2021) proposal of a Global Thresholds and Allocations Council aimed at establishing ‘an authoritative approach to reporting economic, environmental and social performance in relation to generally accepted boundaries and limits. In this ‘multicapitalist’ approach, the market and public entities must all learn to become accountable, not just for financial capital, but also for human and natural capital. For each stock of capital, of which the flows of use and value to humanity are dependent, there are real physical thresholds, after which a stock starts degrading, and this must be prevented. Therefore, each threshold is accompanied by ‘allocations’, that determine the fair share of each entity of what is essentially a set of scarce resources. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut, Doughnut Economics (2017), shows a system in which humanity must produce below an ecological ceiling, i.e. objective limitations of vital cycles and resources – the so-called planetary boundaries – and a ‘social floor’, the minimal needs of humans as well as the conditions for a stable society. Within those two boundaries lies the ‘safe operating zone for humanity’.

For Pogany, it is uncertain whether humanity will succeed in this coming transition. We may be headed towards regressions to lower levels of complexity that are no longer able to sustain today’s population. A much deeper collapse is also within the realm of possibility. Nevertheless, Pogany’s view of world history as a ‘pulsation’ between stable systems and chaotic transitions is very much in line with other understandings of long-term human and natural history, and offers a clear meta-historic vision of the priorities we need to pursue in our current chaotic transition.

Hypothesis: re-emergence and centrality of the commons

It is our hypothesis that our current period of chaotic transition pushes towards a re-emergence and eventual centrality of the commons. This hypothesis can also be supported by a ‘cyclical’ argument.

In summary:

Alan Page Fiske (1991) has established a relational grammar for the allocation of resources in society. In The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, Kojin Karatani (2014) has examined the evolution of modes of exchange (unlike Marx, who examined the modes of production), and historicized their development.

● The original modality of humankind is commoning, which is when everyone contributes and partakes in a common pool; it is a prime mode in hunter-gathering bands. ● The gift economy, in which the gift creates social obligations for a counter-gift becomes the dominant modality in more complex tribal societies. ● Authority ranking, when in a class-based polity, the rulers must legitimize their domination through the redistribution of resources. ● Market pricing, where prices allow for the exchange of resources deemed of equal value.

These four modes have co-existed for a long time, but their relations have evolved. Nomadic and horticultural societies predominantly practiced commoning and gift economy. State-based societies practice redistribution through taxation (Turchin 2018). Today’s redistribution is dominated by the capitalist market and the state is largely at market’s service – See also Philip Bobbit’s The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (Bobbitt 2002).

The HANDY Project and Mark Whitaker’s Ecological Revolution

The commons always had an important role in class societies, until its recent marginalization by capitalism. But there is strong historical evidence of a pulsation of the role of the commons vis-à-vis extractive economic systems. The HANDY report on human and nature dynamics (Motesharrei, Rivas, and Kalnay 2014) examines human societies since the Neolithic, through a predator-prey hypothesis. This refers to the biological reality that a predator species will over-eat prey, until the population of the prey starts declining, depriving the predators of food, which then starts a new and opposite phase of the cycle. The report concludes that all class-based peer polities, which are locked in a competition with each other, routinely (in fact: always) end up over-using their resource base. At this point, the extractive logic stutters and a strong pressure to provide the commons with a more important role in the overall mix emerges. At such moments of crisis, reducing carrying capacity through mutualization is one of the most efficient ways to avoid, soften, or recover from societal collapse. Pooling of resources is a key way of reducing matter-energy footprints (Motesharrei, Rivas, and Kalnay 2014). The report stresses that equality is a key predictor of crises’ depth and severity. Egalitarian societies are more sensitive to the signs of a coming collapse, so their transitions are reasonably smooth and their recovery periods are shorter. By contrast, authoritarian and extractive societies insulate the ruling class from growing environmental problems, which means they fail to capture the signals in time, and so the fall of such societies is deeper and their recovery time is longer.

These observations correspond to Turchin et al.’s (2009) research of ‘secular cycles’ which combines two factors: the evolution of demographics i.e. the increase and decrease of the raw numbers of the population, and the evolution of state and elite extractive mechanisms, i.e. how much more is consumed by individuals in the elite. Peter Turchin and the cliodynamics school of historical research, study the temporal dynamics of large societies using a vast set of databases containing historical records (wars, conflicts, famines, political and social revolutions, etc.). They conclude that there are long-term oscillations that are related to how population numbers tend to exceed the local carrying capacity of the societies in question, and how ruling-class extraction aggravates those conditions. So far, the authors of this article feel confident to assert that these secular cycles do occur systematically in agrarian societies. See for example Thomas Abel Pulsing and Cultural Evolution in China (Abel 2007). Although we are unaware of similar studies related to capitalism, we posit that within those oscillations, at times of crises, mutualization contributes to remaining within local carrying capacity boundaries. This hypothesis is confirmed in the historical record as analyzed by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation, which sees an eb and flow, contrasting periods when the market is ‘freed’ from society, creating first growth but followed by dislocation (the ‘lib’ periods), and periods in which popular revolts force a re-embedding of the market under more societal regulations (the so-called ‘lab’ periods).

Mark Whitaker’s (2009) work seems well suited to testing this generic hypothesis. In his 3,000-year review of ecological crises in Europe, Japan and China, the commons have repeatedly played a crucial role in their overcoming. This is expressed in political, social, and religious movements of the past, where the productive classes would follow the lead of religious reformers and/or revolutionaries, who insisted on a new balance between people and nature. Whitaker posits a ‘slow ecological devolution’, referring to the slow but constant ecological degradation under elite leadership, and ‘fast ecological revolutions’, the result of popular mobilizations, which in the past, took the form of spiritual-political movements. He writes:

Most argue environmental movements are a novel feature of world politics. I argue that they are a durable feature of a degradative political economy. Past or present, environmental politics became expressed in religious change movements as oppositions to state environmental degradation using discourses available. Ecological Revolution describes characteristics why our historical states collapse and, because of these characteristics, are opposed predictably by religion-ecological movements. As a result, origins of our large scale humanocentric axial religions are connected to anti-systemic environmental movements. Many major religious movements of the past were environmentalist by being health, ecological, and economic movements, rolled into one. Since ecological revolutions are endemic to a degradation-based political economy, they continue today. (Whitaker 2019)

A paradigmatic case study in Whitaker’s work is the mutualization of knowledge by the Catholic monastic communities during the crisis of the Western Roman Empire. According to Jean Gimpel (1977), Catholic monks were responsible for nearly all technical innovations of their era. Catholic monasteries functioned as commons at three important levels. One, they acted as knowledge commons. Two, they mutualized shelter and common productive units, thus providing shelter, culture, and spirituality at a dramatically lower footprint than the Roman elite. Three, they re-localized production through the feudal ‘manor’.

Another example he summarizes in his book concerns China: The Zhou kingdom is the first state to emerge in the rice basins of the Yellow River, and they use ritualistic forms to be performed by the ruling royal family. But as the royal system expands and degradation ensues, there is a first reaction, that of the first Confucian movement, which according to the authors cited by Whitaker, represents the urban middle classes, the ‘shi’, that want to be part of the system by being recognized by merit and not by blood. A new degradative phase, at the time of the consolidation of the first Qin Empire, created the counter-movement of the Mohists. This movement of urban craftsmen, allied with the dissatisfied farmers, is based on a doctrine of universal love, calls for welfare systems, and specialized military technology to defend independent cities against imperial and royal expansion. The movement is repressed but the next imperial system will integrate the welfare demands. Whitaker shows how each revolt first shakes up the system but is then ‘de-fanged’ and integrated into the next phase of civilizational development. The resemblance with today’s conjuncture is uncanny. One, faced with ecological and social challenges, we see an exponential rise in knowledge commons in the form of free software and open design communities. Two, we see a strong drive towards mutualization of productive infrastructure, for example, the emergence of fablabs, makerspaces and coworking spaces, and the emerging multifactory model (Salati and Focardi, 2018). Rapid developments in the capitalist ‘sharing economy’, which is focused on creating platforms for underutilized resources, partake in this trend. Three, new technologies around distributed manufacturing, prototyped in makerspaces and fablabs, point to a re-organization of production under a ‘cosmo-local’ model (Kostakis et al. 2015; Ramos 2017b). The cosmo-local model combines relocalization of production, with global technical and scientific cooperation through shared designs and technical knowledge. The study on urban commons in the Flemish city of Ghent, (Bauwens and Onzia 2017) shows the emergence of nearly 500 urban commons active in all areas of human provisioning – as compared to 50 urban commons existing only ten years earlier. However, a difference with earlier cyclical re-emergences of commons in times of crisis is that the current exhaustion of resources and dangers to our ecosystem are global in nature, requiring transnational and globally coordinated responses which are at the same time local – hence cosmo-local.

There is some historical evidence that the ‘commonification’ response to over-extraction of resources was not just restorative; it also created the conditions for new prosperity. Adam Arvidsson (2019) evokes the remarkable integration of commons and markets from the 11th century onwards. The First European Revolution (Moore 2000) which emerged in the middle ages (late 10th century) with the so-called Peace of God (Pax Dei) movement, was a social revolution that united monks and peasants in France and neighbouring countries. It established a social contract (the Peace of God charters were signed in several hundred cities and regions) that pacified both inter-elite and class conflicts and so allowed for a productivity rise in the countryside, creating an exodus to re-emerging cities that had shrunk in the preceding period between the 5 to 10th century. City workers created productive commons in the form of guilds, and free farmers created agricultural commons through land contracts (de Moor 2008). This contributed to the development of a new ethical economy that had strong elements of redistribution and solidarity. During the next 3 centuries, the European population doubled, and in Western Europe, it tripled.

Another example of the re-emergence of the commons is the Tokugawa period (Lane 2014) in Japan (between 1600 and 1868). It started after the emperor (shogun) retook control of a largely deforested Japan and protected the land as imperial commons. This period was known not only for its prosperity but also because it succeeded in creating a long-term stable ecological society, with a constant population level. It’s worth digesting this: a relatively prosperous society, for its time, living for more than 2 centuries within its planetary boundaries and with a stable population: it can be done!

Other authors have made similar observations. William Irwin Thompson (1985) identified the tendency to overshoot natural limits across Babylonian, Greek, Roman and European civilizations. When a civilization’s core growth comes at the expense of its peripheries, it begins to undermine the viability of the core civilization itself. Thompson pointed toward a commons framework as a solution, an arrangement he termed “enantiomorphic” - which implies transcendence of binaries, in particular the way in which civilizations generate dualisms and disownments that need to be reintegrated. Thomas Homer-Dixon’s (2010) detailed analysis of energy use within the Roman civilization arrived at a convergent view: growth dynamics were early on based on large energy returns on investment, but diminished over time as social and ecological externalities mounted up.

Civilizational crises are linked to a number of related dynamics.

The Image of the Future by Fred Polak (1973) helped to animate that the extant civilization may begin to lose power. Images of the future may become dystopian, and narratives that are civilization-contradicting emerge and serve to unravel the core belief and logic that have wedded people to the old system. A creative minority from a variety of perspectives produces new seed visions that attempt to offer solutions amidst crises. Some of these may be ‘fantasy’ visions and solutions that reiterate the core logic of the empire without addressing its contradictions, giving people a false sense of hope. Some visions and solutions, however, are based on a square reading of the limits of their civilization’s contradictions (in our contemporary context, growth), and invite new pathways that are outside of the epistemological orbit of the empire.

This comparative review provides an understanding of the non-exceptionality, or even regularity, of civilizational overshoot. For example, Whitaker (2009) argues that every class-based system based on competition between elites creates a ‘degradative political economy’ and an overuse of internal and external resources. Against this, in predictable fashion, eco-religious movements arise that stress the balance between humans, the human and the divine, and the humans and the environment. These ideas lead to temporary re-organizations of society. It are these commons-based transformations that allow overshooting systems to find new ways to work within the biocapacity of their own regions. By now, this dynamic has played out locally and regionally. In our age of the Anthropocene, it moved to a planetary scale. Much can be learned from general world history, yet these cycles and rhythms also need to be carefully examined within the framework of capitalism. The two authors that can help us here are Karl Polanyi and Carlota Perez.

Karl Polanyi’s Double Movement vs Carlota Perez’s Adaptation of The Kondratieff Cycles

Kondratieff cycles, cycles that are related to 50-year patterns in commodity prices, were first remarked upon by the Russian agricultural economist Kondratieff. Although they remain controversial amongst economists, they remain constantly discussed (i.e. controversial!) as a cyclic pattern in capitalism. The theme was taken up by the economist Schumpeter as well as by the neo-Schumpeterian economist Carlota Perez. These analytical schools link these waves to technological innovations that create new techno-social systems. Karl Polanyi’s classic work on the history of capitalism since the end of the 18th cy., The Great Transformation (1944), sees these cycles at work in the social and political history of the system as well, and he coined the term ‘the double movement’. While Polanyi stresses the social and political impacts, Perez focuses on technological and financial infrastructures.

The first framing from Polanyi sees a ‘double movement’, the ‘lib-lab’ pulsation: The first period, of high growth and ascendance, is positive for labour (lab) as more work is created and needed. The second, descending and low-growth period which veers to the financialization of the economy, is favourable to capital (lib) but ends in a crisis. At the end of each such crisis, there is a periodic challenge in the balance between the market and the state. This pulsation is accompanied by the ebb and flow of the commons, which in industrial society, takes the form of the creation of cooperative entities.

In Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, Carlota Perez (2002) similarly notices that capitalism is marked by waves of economic progress and stagnation, ending in crises, which last 50-60 years on average. She paints, in detail, the picture described by Polanyi, by adding the logic of experience of capitalist forces during those periods.

Indeed, at some point in the economic arc, a high-growth phase in motion is set by a particular combination of energy use, geopolitical domination, land use, and managerial practice, accompanied by specific forms of technological infrastructures. In this phase, capital needs a lot of labour, which strengthens the power of workers, and is therefore accompanied by pro-labour reforms. As a result, the market becomes strongly embedded in societal needs and demands. The welfare advancements typically made in such a period are not top-down inventions and innovations, but generalizations of mutualized seed forms that had been created during the previous crisis. Thus, both the Attlee and Roosevelt New Deal reforms were inspired by the forms developed as commons but were then bureaucratized by the state. During the previous era of destruction of the commons, the ‘Enclosure movement’ fenced in common pastures, woods, and fields. The dispossessed farmers had to flee to the cities, where their only option was to become the ‘proletariat’, i.e. they had to sell their labour power to the factory owners. Within a context of total lack of social protection, and without access to natural resource commons, the workers, mostly under the leadership of the craft workers which had retained a memory of their guild-based solidarities, started mutualizing their life’s risks, creating all types of social insurance systems. It were these civil-society-based structures that were ‘statified’ and generalized as social rights, during eras of welfare reform. So, to recap the story as it pertains to the fate of the commons and the cooperative endeavours of the working class: the Enclosures that started in the 16th century had started a process of privatizing the physical commons; but the struggles of the working class ended in a nationalization of their common-based solidarity mechanisms, i.e. state-based welfare provisions.

While this suggests a stratification of social welfare, we should also be aware of the other direction. This is pointed out by Arnold Toynbee in his earlier mentioned landmark ten-volume review of human history, i.e. The Study of History, (1961). Toynbee points out that when universal states (the last stage of a thriving civilization) start declining, the “internal” proletariat forms ‘universal churches’, which re-invent new ways of social solidarity. While new nomadic overlords tend to take over the dying civilizations, as the Germanic tribes did at the end of the Roman Empire. But back to Polanyi’s more short-term lib-lab cycles within capitalism: when the first ‘ascending’ part of the Kondratieff cycle peaks, it is because there is a supply crisis, as capital makes less profit at the end of such an era of social redistribution. The political form of this cycle is a conservative revolution in favour of capital. This is quite obviously what happened during the Reagan-Thatcher counter-revolutions, which followed the crisis of the Keynesian system in 1970-1973. The conservative revolution ‘frees’ the market from societal constraints and sets in motion a period of lower growth accompanied by financialization, which creates higher profits. This eventually results in a crisis of demand, which will bring to an end the second phase of the cycle, as citizens/workers/consumers are suffering from stagnant incomes and high levels of debt.

The crisis of demand causes social unrest and pressures to re-embed the market into society. As the conditions of the working and middle classes deteriorate, it also sets in motion a renewal of commoning. As we indicated before, this double movement is also called the lib-lab pendulum (Polanyi 1944/2001). Lib meaning the phases of deregulation / privatisation / marketisation, and lab referring to re-regulation. In our own interpretation, we can therefore conclude that the oscillations in capitalism are closely connected to oscillations of the commons, though they take the form of labor mutualism, and then of state-based welfare institutions.

So where are we now? Capitalism’s long-term trend towards exaggerated extraction, which has created the conditions for the Anthropocene, merges with the short-term ending of a capitalist Kondratieff cycle. A radical transformation of capitalism is very unlikely in the cards in the short run. So, it is to be suspected that capitalism itself will make various attempts to integrate the commons into the next Kondratieff cycle. While there is no guarantee that these attempts will succeed, elements of social commons (such as P2P, climate change and energy scarcity reforms) are on the agenda of capitalist fora. Today’s world simultaneously experiences a global loss of balance with nature as well as a change within the cycles of capitalism. These trends converge in a single global process, which leads to a re-strengthening of the commons. Note that in our view, the commons risk becoming an instrument of both the productive classes and the elite. To use the language of Toynbee: the ‘universal church’ is first an expression of discontent and needs of the ‘internal’ proletariat, but ends up being adapted through compromise as the vehicle for a new phase of expansion.

Revolutions, Phase Transition, and Seed Forms

Following the iconic examples of the French and Russian revolutions, some of the radical left traditions, in particular Marxist-Leninism, have focused on how to strategize the final assault on the bourgeois state. Other left traditions, (e.g., anarchism and autonomism) emphasize an exodus from the state as well. And still, other left traditions such as the social-democratic and Christian-democratic traditions, take a more gradualist approach. However, a closer examination of phase transitions countering industrial capitalism shows a greater variety in the radical processes of change, with many different kinds of actors. This more complex narrative shows the French and Russian revolutions not to be universal norms for a political and social revolution. Examples include Bismarck’s introduction of a welfare state in Prussia/Germany, the liberation of serfs by the Tsar in Russia, and the constitutional civil wars in England and the US.

Earlier phase transitions, such as the transition from the Roman system to the feudal system, took many centuries. These transitions were originally based on seed forms that slowly emerge, then start interacting with each other, and only then do they finally create the conditions for a phase change that can take on multiple forms. For example, the seed forms of the capitalist system such as mercantilism emerged as early as the 11th century in Italian city-states, where a relatively autonomous merchant class started to adapt the social and political systems to their own needs. There would be no capitalism without the prior existence of capitalists and their practices, and there would be no commons-centric society without the existence of commoners and their practices, and their efforts to adapt the societal context to their own needs. Seed forms for a post-capitalist commons-based political economy are much more recent. They appeared in the 20th century, in the distributed experiments (involving commons and commoning) that bring forth a new organizational logic. It is impossible to say whether humankind will experience more revolutions, yet if they appear, they will result from these long-term changes in the productive systems and structures, and the social forces they create. So, what is the nature of seed forms for a post-capitalist commons transition? For an initial insight into this nature of the transition process, we turn again to Peter Pogany.

Pogany (2006, 2015) shows that societies change through chaotic phase transitions, where old binding elements disintegrate, and new seed forms, preconfiguring potential futures, compete in a Cambrian explosion. Therefore, it is impossible to predict with certainty which seed forms will succeed in building the successor system. However, given the crucial role of planetary limits to growth, and the equally important role of mutualization in lowering human footprint, we expect that currently emerging P2P and commons-oriented seed forms will play a crucial role in creating the society of the future.

The Commons as Mutualization for the Anthropocene

Much is written about the Anthropocene – a new epoch that signifies an active relationship between human beings and the planet. For the purpose of the following discussion, we can distinguish three main understandings of the Anthropocene.

The first understanding is the significance of humans as a species with planetary impacts. This is the popular definition of the Anthropocene — humanity has become such a powerful aggregate force that we can assign a geological era to ourselves! If this were the only dimension of the Anthropocene, however, then human beings would be no different from anaerobic cyanobacteria. Approximately 2.5 billion years ago, anaerobic cyanobacteria caused the so-called Great Oxygenation Event by rapidly increasing its population. Rising amounts of its waste product, oxygen, have significantly changed Earth’s atmosphere, causing the extinction of many species.

However, the Anthropocene also signifies an awareness of ourselves as a planetary species with planetary impacts. We have the power to reflect on who we are and what we do. While the first understanding of the Anthropocene — human instrumental power — is far more mainstream than the second understanding — reflective planetary awareness — this second understanding rapidly catches up.

The third understanding, reflexive planetary response, signifies humanity’s capacity to leverage reflective planetary awareness towards coordinated, intelligent responses matching Anthropogenic challenges. Reflexive planetary response is the most embryonic of the three understandings, yet it has the capacity to ensure long-term viability of human survival.

At a planetary scale, these three understandings play out a classic action learning cycle – act — reflect — change. Theory of the commons is a critical part of the second understanding of the Anthropocene – the human capacity to interpret and understand ourselves in the current era. Praxis of the commons, or commoning, is critical to the third understanding of the Anthropocene – human reflexive planetary responses. The Anthropocene is a crucial era for humanity. Our very survival is at stake, and the commons have an important role in human collective responses.

This hypothesis on the crucial role of the commons was one of the key reasons for the creation of the P2P Foundation.

It is based on the following premises:

• Our current political economy proceeds from the point of view permanent and unlimited growth, which is both logically and physically impossible on a finite planet. We call this the ‘pseudo-abundance’ of the material world.

• Our current political economy proceeds from the point of view that marketization and commodification are the best way to manage and allocate immaterial resources via intellectual property. This creates a scarcity of objectively abundant digital resources. We called this ‘artificial scarcity in the world of immaterial resources’.

• Pseudo-abundance and artificial scarcity are compounded by the fact that our economic organization produces more and more inequality.

Commoning as the Third Movement of the Anthropocene

Our capacity to see ourselves as interdependent with other people and species for our wellbeing and common futures brings forth a reflexive planetary response. In this movement of ‘implication’, a person is ‘plied into’ a shared concern through emerging relational awareness. In the Anthropocene, the commons has shifted from an implicit, real but unidentified concept and has acquired its explicit, relational formulation, as the domain of humanity’s shared concern.

Commons arrive in many forms. Elinor Ostrom gained fame for her analyses of natural entities (woods, river, pasture, etc.) which become a commons because they are valued by local inhabitants who want to protect these for their own use. Then there are public and social commons, created by political entities such as municipalities, states, and federal systems, which are meant to extend a common good to a whole political community. One example of such commons is universal healthcare. Seeing these resources as commons in a more narrow definition does require that these resources are managed to some degree with community involvement or multi-stakeholder governance models. We also have peer-produced commons created by networks of participants, such as open source software and sharing networks. The latter are new since they are made possible only through digital networking. A very short evolutionary history of the commons would see them emerging from natural resource commons, moving to the life-risk commons organized by the working class when the ‘enclosed farmers’ lost access to productive resources under capitalism; a revival of citizen-produced digital commons after the invention of the Web and the browser; a powerful re-emergence of urban commons after the crisis of 2008; and an emergent commons of material production, through the cosmo-local form of productive organization, which combines re-localized production with planetary cooperation. An example of the latter is the network of multi-factories in Europe, where craftspeople cooperatively unite locally, and share their designs more globally through their knowledge commons, the Invisible Factory. One of the next steps in the institutional evolution of the commons is the necessity for global governance of vital resources, which cannot be the subject of militarized competition by nation-states.

The value of planetary life support systems is implicit — they do not appear valuable as commons until their value is activated by a contextual shift. For instance, once the ozone layer was depleted by industrial pollutants, threatening human collective well-being, the ozone layer became a commons and an object of commoning. The climate as commons represents the awakening of the individual to the fact that each person shares an atmosphere with seven billion others (and countless other species). With this awakening, the planet’s atmosphere has shifted from an implicit commons to an explicit commons. This movement of self-awareness is mirrored by commoning as an act of governance, because those who share the Earth as commons need to make a shift toward becoming its protectors, shapers, and extenders. This is the movement from a commons-in-itself to a commons-for-itself. With respect to Earth’s atmosphere, everyone is a commoner – in the context of this collective publication: an ‘Earth trustee’ – and this implies a radical democratization of planetary governance.

The transformation of subjectivity in the 21st century, of the experience and the definition of self, is the re-awakening of our embodied relationality in respect to multiple categories of the commons, and their expression through our emergent practices of commoning. This can manifest from our connection to our local community or the resources that the local community manages for its well-being, but can also be in connection to what we experience in relation to the future of Earth’s atmosphere and its suitability for human life. This is the global dimension within which the community is a global entity wherein we, and our children and/or grandchildren, all are critical stakeholders.

The emergence of the Anthropocene changes something vital about our understanding of the ‘pulsation of the commons’, i.e. the cyclic patterns of degradative and regenerative movements in human history. Before the Anthropocene, the cyclical pattern applied to particular territories and regions. What this means is that when faced with degradative ecologies and overshoot, balance could be created within a territory, and that territory could be over-run by more powerful neighbours, or the core area of civilizational management could move to a different geographic focus. For example, this pattern, shown by ‘moving capitals’, can be seen both in China and Maya. But also at the end of the Western Roman Empire, under 400 years of capitalism, since its emergence in the 16th century. As a solution to the crisis of feudalism, frontiers were always available to keep international dynamics going. But today, these frontiers are gone. Those who invest in the endless march of technological innovation might believe that extensive growth might transform into more intensive growth. But studies like those of Carlota Perez on technological revolutions (Perez, 2002) would indicate that the dynamic periods of growth within the capitalist cycles are combinations of multiple factors and that technology alone cannot possibly be sufficient to solve the ongoing meta-crises that we are facing.

Abandoning the cycle?

From this follows an important conclusion: it is not enough to change from a degradative to a regenerative cycle, we must abandon the cycle altogether!

Why is this so? The key reason is the global character of our overshoot. Indeed, as long as overshoot crises are local, the locus of civilizational development can move to another place. See for example, how the capitals in the Chinese, Roman and Maya empires moved around, showing the evolution of dominance between different regions. This was often linked to the regional exhaustion of a particular area. If the locus of the Empire moved, that would give the exhausted territories time to heal and generate. Global capitalism has generalized this logic, by serially exhausting territories in succession, but at an unprecedented depth of ecological damage. When exhaustion reaches a global level, there is no more place to go, and the whole world needs to heal and regenerate at the same time.

This means that, in a context of global overshoot, there can be no continuation of the cycle, no return to degradation. The ‘pulsation of the commons’ becomes obsolete and dysfunctional.

The solution, therefore, is to aim first of all for ‘synchronic’ degrowth, i.e. the process of lowering the matter-energy cost of production for human needs. It has to be stressed here, that degrowth does not mean a lowering of living standards of the majority for the benefit of any elite. Degrowth is simply the objective necessity for humanity to learn to use less matter and energy, while maximally maintaining complex public and social services that maintain a quality of life. It is our contention that it is precisely through commons-based mutualization, that we can achieve this. For example, let us imagine that we do appreciate the point-to-point transport capacity of cars. In that case, in addition to good public transport, neighborhoods can create associative and cooperative pools of cars, whereby one single shared car can replace from 9 to 13 private cars. In this scenario, there is both a drastic diminution of the use of matter and energy, as well as a substantial decrease in cost, while at the same time protecting the capacity for point-to-point transport. Imagine using this method for all provisioning systems in a particular rural or urban region. What happens after degrowth has been achieved by such conscious efforts to reduce the collective human footprint, while maintaining a high quality of life?

The second new logic is that of achieving a steady state economy, a stable relationship between the needs of humanity, and the ecological planetary balance. For this, we suggest the creation of planetary computation, a global cyber-physical infrastructure that would allow for cosmo-local coordination of production for human needs, within planetary boundaries. We propose the creation of a global commission of experts and civic organizations charged with maintaining knowledge about the availability of resources, and the needs of the web of life, so that, through shared accounting, human collective entities can make distributed and on-the-ground decisions, in line with such planetary boundaries. In this way, we believe a steady state economy can be achieved, as was pioneered by Japan in the Tokugawa period, in which the country lived with a stable population without exhausting its regional physical base of resources.

However, we should not conclude that a steady-state economy is static. Growth in the past would move from a focus on material growth, to a focus on the whole of immaterial aspects of life, as was customary in pre-capitalist and traditional societies. At present, we will need to make much more extraordinary efforts to heal our planet. This means that the coming civilizational model will be geared towards regenerative approaches, systematic efforts to increase the life co-creating capacity of the planet and its beings, and restore the damage that was done to it in the preceding millennia, and in particular under the period of growth-oriented capitalist civilizational models.

Why Will the Transition Be Cosmo-Local?

Civilization, i.e. the way humanity started organizing after sedentarization and agriculturisation, was, amongst other things, a particular way of organizing the relationship between countryside and city, town and country. Tribal and nomadic societies did not yet have the recent strong contrasts between huge cities and the countryside.

At first, despite the large sizes of empires, local production was the primary locus of value creation, and trade was supplementary. Under global capitalism, especially under the neoliberal regime, that logic was altered. Global trade became primary, and local production was seen as complementary. For example, the Western world actively de-industrialized after the 1980s. Nevertheless, it was mostly a matter of organizing geography, i.e. space. But the advent of the digital age has changed this. We are now dealing with a new profound re-organizing of space and time, by adding digital self-organization and new types of human ‘de-territorialized’ coordination. The first phase of digitalization involved private telecommunication networks, which themselves were instruments for creating neoliberal globalization. But in the second, public or social phase, after the invention of the web and the browser in October 1993, the internet created new trans-local and trans-national dynamics in the civic world. One of the deep challenges of current humanity is therefore finding a new equilibrium between the local and the global.

There are currently two hegemonic models, which the authors believe are fighting it out within the perspective of the current Ukrainian crisis. On the one side is the neoliberal model of ‘rentier capitalism’, based on perpetual growth, and financial profit. It is led by the financial and ‘maritime’ power nexus of the Anglo-Saxon alliance, in cooperation with Europe and some leading East Asian powers, such as Japan. This alliance is groping for a new post-neoliberal order, after the global financial crisis of 2008. One of the most likely ideological candidates is the World Economic Forum (WEF) ideology. It aims for global private-public-NGO alliances, to manage global domains of activity. The stress is on the supremacy of capital, in alliance with weakened nation-states, and selected NGOs that would play a similar role as the big religious congregations in pre-capitalist Europe. The rival model is the state-centric, ‘sovereignist’ model, located at the heart of the Eurasian continent, where the state is in charge of the ‘common good’ and polices the market to serve the direct interests of an administratively oriented nation-state elite. Though they are different, both Russia and China share this orientation. Remarkably, both mentioned systems favor rivalry and competition and enter into conflict around scarce resources. Both now maintain their own ‘globalizing’ system, as Russia has been forced (or has chosen to move) into the Chinese orbit. In both these systems, the digital realm is entirely subordinated to the interest of a geographically-based system. Though we have passed ‘Peak Globalization’, both systems are very similar in how they promote trade, within their own territory and involving the outside world. There is now a huge danger for this competition between the two core systems supremacy of capital and state-centric, leading to war for global hegemony and access to scarce resources.

One of the effects of the necessity to avoid this danger is a change towards a new ‘geographic regime’. Premodern and pre-capitalist systems were regional in scope, not global, although they had relations with each other. Capitalism globalised our geographic regime, with huge transfers of people and resources all over the globe, and a transport system that costs us three times as much resources as those needed for production (i.e. we spend three times as much energy and matter on transporting products than on ‘making’ them). This type of ‘neoliberal’ globalisation is not sustainable. However, a pure retreat to the local area would also create huge problems. For example, retreating to local fisheries commons offers no solution to much-needed sustainable fishing, as industrial crawlers are emptying the ocean just outside of the national maritime zones anyhow. Many issues, such as climate change, nuclear accidents, the biodiversity crisis, and atmospheric pollution, cannot be solved on a purely local basis.

The challenge, therefore, is to find ways that combine:

1) subsidiarity of material production, with a preference for ‘smart and sensible localization’, since the local is the only dimension to accomplish anti-entropic work

2) strengthening of global knowledge commons.

The basic adage is: “Everything that is heavy is localised to the extent possible; everything that is light is shared globally”.

The transformation is from ‘economies of scale’ through globally distributed but centrally controlled mass production, to “economies of scope”, i.e. “doing more with less”, bringing the maximum amount of contextualised knowledge, the best insights and innovations from the whole world, at the local point of production.

This alternative regime is what we call cosmo-localization. It is nothing less than a potential alternative civilizational order. The historian Arnold Toynbee and others have distinguished ‘generations of civilizations’. The first generation was local, such as the Sumerian civilization. The second generation is when the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations merged into an interconnected Eur-Asian system. David Wilkinson (1987) called this “Central Civilization”. While the third generation is the Western-led global system that started in the 16th century and included the New World of the Americas. What we are suggesting is the birth of a fourth generation civilizational model, which is based on a new accommodation between time and space, i.e. a successful complementarity between the still vital geographical organization of the world, and the equally important non-territorial cooperation through digital networks, via a new type of human community, and, institutions. Currently, digital networks are dominated by private interests and the needs of states for surveillance and control, and the models of technology create ever-increasing estrangement and distance between humanity and the web of life. What we are proposing is an entirely new orientation towards technology, that is geared towards managing the planet responsibly, by extending human responsibility towards the entire web of life. Our human-to-human social contract will need to be extended to other living beings and resources, in recognition of our interdependency.

We believe that cosmo-localization both transcends and includes the best of the previous socio-economic systems, while negating its degenerative aspects. If the best of the capitalist global system was the social contract between capital and labor, leading to the welfare state; and the provision of rights to previous minority groups, i.e. identity-linked rights, as well as formal decolonization of the former colonies; then we can posit that the new regime must be based on a contract between humanity and the web of life, i.e. between humanity and nature. The form of this social order is to be both based on a revival of the local, and on a continuation of non-territorial, trans-local cooperation.

Cosmo-local production requires global and collaborative knowledge production, based on free association; it is a guarantee that ecological and social problems can be solved both locally and globally, without endangering local specificity, adaptations, and differences; it recognizes the true abundance of knowledge and cultural resources that should not be endangered by artificial scarcities.

Cosmo-local production is based on the subsidiarity principle in material production, i.e. intelligent localization, which dramatically reduces the footprint of material transport; local communities can choose wisely within their concrete resource boundaries.

The local production units are based, to a certain degree, on solidarity and mutualization, in order to radically diminish the ‘thermo-dynamic load’ of humanity’s production pressuring on natural systems. Indeed, it abolishes the previous civilizational logic, by

• Negating the artificial scarcity asserted by intellectual property on knowledge systems, which excludes those without means from using the best solutions for ecological and societal problem-solving.

• It fully recognises the material limitations of our planet and the need of other beings as well as our mutual interdependence, by radically reducing the human footprint.

• It fully recognises that a successful ecological shift cannot happen without sufficient social justice.

Cultural aspects of cosmo-localization

At the basic level, cosmo-localization revives local identity, which can express itself in bioregional, regional, national, ethnic and other identities, linked to a relationship with local nature and soil. Cosmo-localism does not abolish nation-state identifications but adds to it, though we foresee a new role of nation-states as ‘partner states’, i.e. enabling institutions that stimulate individual and social autonomy, and create ‘commons of capabilities’ for all citizens in an ‘equipotential’ manner. The latter refers to ensuring that every citizen has the capacity to contribute to common projects. But cosmo-localism also creates an added layer of identity, i.e. a contributory identity that is both linked to local contributions and to the contributions to the common open source core of cosmo-local collaborative projects.

However, we are now, to the contrary, undoubtedly faced with a broad identity crisis:

● because of globalisation, identification with national systems has weakened in important parts of the world

● as a reaction, more conservatively ‘rooted’ people, i.e. the ‘Somewheres’, have been identifying more with religious, ethnic, communitarian identities

● while the less ‘rooted’ the ‘Nowheres’, have been moving to identity politics based on biological markers

Cosmo-localism advocates, and we believe ‘leads to’, a more complementary vision of such identity formations. Take the example of a permaculture contributor: such a person is certainly rooted in the hyperlocal, having their ‘feet in the mud’; but the same person is linked to the local human community, not linked to the particular soil, i.e. they have their heart in the community; however, the learning and core common protocols of the trans-local permaculture movement are not located purely in the local, they are part of a global field of cooperation, the transnational ‘open design community’ of permaculturists. We believe that cosmo-localism will create a layer of people that are less to be considered rootless digital nomads (the Nowheres), but rather Everywheres, i.e. well-rooted humans that are both linked to the global open design communities (including using post-blockchain based ecosystems of cooperation), and in the same time play a crucial binding role with the local production communities. Thus we foresee the further emergence and growth of cosmo-local ecosystems of value creation and distribution. Case studies are described in The Cosmo-Local Reader.

Conclusions

Towards Magisteria (Support Coalitions) of the Commons

As we mentioned before, Peter Pogany explained how the post-World War II system, i.e. the welfare-state, followed by the neoliberal cycle, was marked by ‘weak multilateralism’ and a social contract between capital and labour. He indicates that the new ‘stable system’, Global System 3, would be characterised by ‘strong multilateralism’ and a ‘compact between humanity and nature’.

The emergence of new commons-centric seed forms may give us an indication of how this could be achieved. First of all, we have seen in recent times the emergence of global open design communities that co-construct common knowledge, free software and open designs. These communities are digitally self-organized towards producing knowledge commons through global common platforms. But with blockchain we have seen the emergence of open collaborative ecosystems that are based on open source code and community dynamics that operate at the global level, using incentive systems that attempt to align the multiple stakeholders. A number of these communities have been successful (so far) in creating socially sovereign crypto-currencies, a prerogative that used to be reserved to nation-states. They could be in effect considered to be ‘virtual nations’ that are constructing their own infrastructures.

This hints at the possibility of creating new layers of institutions, which we could call magisteria of the commons. Magisteria are interlocking sets of institutions that govern a particular domain at multiple levels. We have functioning magisteria for science, for politics, economics and culture. For example, during the Covid pandemic, it has been difficult not to notice that there has been an interlocking management that comprised both pharmaceutical companies, interstate organizations such as the WHO, and networks of national governments and public health authorities. It constituted in effect a multi-stakeholder consortium which determined the generic policy of how to combat Covid. Dissenting countries were put under pressure, showing a very relative sovereignty at the national level. As mentioned. it could be argued that the project behind the Great Reset, i.e. the plan proposed by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, precisely demonstrates a generalized form of global governance, based on private-public-NGO domain-specific consensus coalitions, while other forces, such as Russia and China, promote inter-state forms of global governance.

But notice that what we do not have are magisteria of the commons, i.e. interlocking sets of trans-local institutions that can protect human and “human-nature” institutions and that have major democratic input from the involved citizens themselves.

So, at present we have a combined regime of inter-national state formations, mixed with trans-national capital. What is conspicuously missing is the civic counter-force that existed at the nation-state level. As Karatani (2014) argues, capitalism is a convergence of capital, the expression of private property, the arbitrage function of the state, and the community form that manifests as the nation, and represents the citizens. Moreover, Polanyi could notice that whenever the market freed itself too much from common constraints, the citizenry would force the state to retake control of these market forces, hence the lib-lab pendulum we discussed before. However, no counterforce exists at the international level, which explains the obstruction exercised by the neoliberal ‘situation’: there is no global counterforce, and critical NGO’s are too weak. The private-public domain coalitions proposed by the Great Reset forces are entirely dominated by capital and sovereignist states, even if they would restore somewhat the power of national citizenries. Civil society is not enough of a match for trans-national capital. So how can we imagine effective transnational civic domain organizations?

An example of a possible seed form:

R30.org has proposed a Global Thresholds and Allocations Council, an institution of materials scientists that can keep track of the available stock of resources. It would be aware of the negative thresholds that would endanger the continued existence and possibility of the production of a continuous flow of services for the present and future generations. From this knowledge of thresholds follows the establishment of criteria for developing fair allocations of these resources. This would therefore require a ‘magisterium’, an institution that provides valuable enough services, so that competing entities wanting to avoid war and conflict over dwindling resources, would be motivated to join. Just as European nations found it useful to join the EU after a generation of intense warfare on the European continent.

The way we envisage Magisteria therefore, are not to be compared with the vision of the WEF, which focuses on the key role and power of financial entities, and which invites in nation-state agencies, and ‘accredited’ NGOs, but would be rather organically derived from trans-local civic and productive coalitions. Public agencies and formal civil society organizations would be brought in, as would potentially ‘ethical’ and ‘regenerative’ pools of capital. Such Magisteria do not exist, but we believe the seed forms are visible in the ‘global open design’ communities which have emerged in the last two decades. For this purpose, most open source communities develop ‘for benefit’ associations, which manage the ‘infrastructure of cooperation’ needed for the trans-local open source development process. These institutions, often Foundations, manage a particular domain of ethical and open source production, and are most often designed as multi-stakeholder entities, where the various players of the eco-system can negotiate common agreements.

This implies that the management of vital resources would no longer be solely determined by Westphalian state logics and corporate markets, but would at least be partially managed as commons for humanity and the living planet. The post-transition stable system can be a world that is no longer purely territorial and Westphalian, but has integrated accountability for the web of life, vital ecosystems and scarce non-renewable resources. It can be alike the world described by Kate Raworth in her Doughnut Economics, a safe space for human development, in alliance with extra-human nature, that respects both the social floor of human wellbeing and the ecological ceiling of natural well-being, managed through commons magisteria powerful enough to protect human and extra-human communities.

In a report on the mutualization of urban provisioning systems, and inspired by the experience of the city-commons regulations in Italy, we have proposed a fractal system (Bauwens, Ramos & Kranjc, 2020). The Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons, taken over by 250 Italian cities and enabling one million citizen commoners in Italy, uses a quintuple helix governance model. This means that the city coordinates a support coalition for the commons-oriented civic initiatives: the city, the commercial sector, the research sector and the official non-profit sector ally to help the fifth partner, the citizens, to take better care of the urban commons, to enable and empower them. What we propose are leagues of cities that collectively decide to create local enabling mechanisms to mutualize provisioning systems at the city level. In effect creating a multi-stakeholder mechanism to support and create autonomous commons. Depending on the domains of shared activity, these city systems also ally with a trans-local system, creating a support coalition for the global open design community that creates common protocols. Thus, on the trans-national level, a similar support coalition would connect inter-city cooperative agencies, impact driven capital, research universities, nonprofits in supporting these domain specific organizations.

But such ‘domain organizations’ could also be created by token-driven capital coalitions, with a distributed ownership for the tokens, that includes workers and contributory citizens. It is too early to say what the precise mechanisms and institutions will be, but trans-territorial capacities for collaboration, crowdfunding and collective governance experiences suggest that a commons-driven economic system is technically and socially possible.

In conclusion, in this essay we have argued that human history shows a recurring cycle of various growth-oriented extractive periods, led by state and market institutions, followed by periods of regional over-use of resources. This over-use in turn leads to a revival of local commons, used to regenerate and heal the broken lands, in turn and over time creating the conditions for a new growth cycle. We show that the commons is the institution for peoples that want to preserve resources for the long term. But we also show that with global overreach, we need to globally diminish our matter-energy use now, and we therefore need global common institutions. The relation between the local and the global necessitates a cosmo-global societal order that is based on a contract between humanity and nature. With institutions that are capable of defending these types of commonly needed domain accords. We believe this order will supersede both the neoliberal order of transnational capital and the Westphalian order of state competition, by adding a third layer of commons-based civic institutions. In the first phase, we need to create bottom-up civic seed forms to aid in the creation of urban commons that substantially mutualize urban provision systems. B ut we argue that knowledge and collaboration protocols need to exist at a trans-local level. In this commons-centric global order, geographical institutions such as states, and local and trans-local enterprises still exist, but they operate within the planetary boundaries, and under the guidance of protective civic institutions that protect human communities and the web of life.

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