Stefan Meretz on the Planning Dimensions in Commonism

Video via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLvggB6z2_k

Description

Excerpt from the transcript:

“At its core, commonism is a generalization of the commons—the idea that any resource can be made common. But for a resource to truly function as a common, it must meet two key conditions:

• It must be commonly available (accessible to the community).

• It must be collectively managed by that community.

Yet a common is not just a resource—it’s also the entire social process surrounding it. The same logic applies to commodities under capitalism: a commodity isn’t merely an object but a social relationship between people.

Zooming out to the systems level, we see two dominant frameworks:

• Capitalism, mediated by the market.

• Commonism, mediated by commoning—the self-organizing, collaborative process that creates and sustains the commons.

At the interpersonal level (where everyone knows each other), coordination happens through direct agreements. But at the transpersonal level (where participants are strangers), this becomes far more complex. Here, we need mediated agreements—structures that enable large-scale, anonymous cooperation.

The critical question then arises:

How can we design transpersonal mediation that maintains coherence across society as a whole?”