Transition Proposals Towards a Commons-Oriented Economy and Society

* this is an expanded page for transition proposals; the companion page is: Three Competing Societal and Economic Models in the Age of Peer Production

Proposals

The State

• The State becomes a Partner State, which aims to enable and empower autonomous social production, which it also regulates in the context of common good concerns
• The State strives to maximal openness and transparency
• The State systematizes participation, deliberation, and real-time consultation with the citizens
• The social logic moves from ownership-centric to citizen-centric
• The state de-bureaucratizes through the commonification of public services and public-commons partnerships
• Public service jobs are considered as a common pool resource and participation is extented to the whole population
• Representative democracy is extented through participatory mechanisms (participatory legislation, participatory budgetting, etc..)
• Representative democracy is extented through online and offline deliberation mechanisms
• Representative democracy is extended through liquid voting (real-time democratic consultations and procedures, coupled to proxy voting mechanisms)
• Taxation of productive labour, enterpreneurship and ethical investing is minimized; taxation of the production of social and environmental goods is minimized ; taxation of speculative unproductive investments is augmented; taxation on unproductive rental income is augmented; taxation of negative social and environmental externalities is augmented
• The State sustains civic commons-oriented infrastructures and ethical commons-oriented market players
• The State reforms the traditional corporate sector to minimize social and environmental externalities
• The state engages in debt-free public monetary creation and supports a structure of specialized complementary currencies

The Ethical Economy

• Creation of a commons and common good oriented social / ethical / civic / solidarity economy
• Ethical market players coalesce around commons of productive knowledge, eventually using peer production and commons-oriented licenses to support the social-economic sector
• Ethical market players integrate common good concerns and user-driven and worker-driven multistakeholder in their governance models
• Ethical market players move from extractive to generative forms of ownership; open, commons-oriented ethical company formats are privileged
• Ethical market players practice open book accounting and open supply chains to augment non-market coordination of production
• Ethical market players create a territorial and sectoral network of Chamber of Commons associations to definte their common needs and goals and interface with civil society, commoners and the partner state
• With the help from the Partner-State, ethical market players create support structures for open commercialization, which maintain and sustain the commons
• Ethical market players interconnect with global productive commons communities (open design communities)and with global productive associations (phyles) which project ethical market power on a global scale
• The ethical market players adopt a 1 to 8 wage differential and minimum and maximum wage levels are set
• The mainstream commercial sector is reformed to minimize negative social and environmental externalities; incentives are provided that aim for a convergence between the corporate and solidarity economy
• Hybrid economic forms, like fair trade, social enterpreneurship, B-Corporations are encouraged to obtain such convergence
• Distributed microfactories for (g)localized manufacturing on demand are created and supported, in order to satisfy local needs for basic goods and machinery
• Institutes for the support of productive knowledge are created on a territorial and sectoral basis
• Education is aligned to the co-creation of productive knowledge in support of the social economy and the open commons of productive knowledge

The Commons Sector

• Creation of commons infrastructures for both immaterial and material goods; society is seen as a series of interlocking commons, that are supported by an ethical market economy and a Partner State that protects the common good and creates supportive civic infrastructures
• Local and sectoral commons create civil alliances of the commons to interface with the Chamber of the Commons and the Partner State
• Interlocking for-benefit associations (Knowledge Commons Foundations) enable and protect the various commons
• Solidarity Coops form public-commons partnerships in alliance with the Partner State and the Ethical Economy sector represented by the Chamber of Commons
• Natural commons are managed by public-commons partnership and based on civic membership in Commons Trusts

More Information

• FLOK Society Project