Commons Boundaries and Postcapitalism

Discussion

Sam Dallyn, Fabian Frenzel:

"While there is now an expansive literature on the commons, there is a reoccurring ambiguity around the distinction between non-capitalist and anti-capitalist commons. Commons today have been positioned as a clear adversarial alternative to capitalism (De Angelis 2017b; Ruivenkamp and Hilton 2017:7); or, as essentially non-capitalist (Ostrom 1990). The term postcapitalist commons adds an important additional nuance to these conceptions since it denotes a commons which recognises its own hybridity, in being both against but simultaneously operating within capitalism, with all of the accompanying challenges this gives rise to. This postcapitalistic aspect of FairCoop was neatly reflected by Chris from Decentrale, Mont-Soleil, Jura, Switzerland. Decentrale is a space for diverse self-organised and cooperative projects in the region. Chris has been heavily involved in FairCoop since 2016 and he saw strong potential overlaps with FairCoop’s efforts to generate transitional alternatives: It offers an opportunity to create something that interacts with the capitalist system to some extent and interacts with a new reality that is postcapitalistic that can be created, and I see FairCoin as a bridge element between the two.

This “bridge element” in the transition from within capitalism to generate alternative futures after capitalism, is a strategic and practical one that can only be built through risk taking and experimentation (see Chatterton 2016) in postcapitalist commons. In Chatterton and Pusey’s (2020:40) helpful outline of different streams in the postcapitalist literature, the work related to autonomous postcapitalist commons is characterised by analysis of “novel forms of community-based doing and common ownership of the economy that has the potential to scale beyond self-governing micro-local experiments”.

Yet it should be noted that capital in the form of state backed fiat currency is often required in some form due to “the vast array of useful products that commons do not have any other ways of procuring but through engaging in monetary payments” (De Angelis 2017a:334). This gives rise to the central problematic of postcapitalist commons that we investigate here: How can commons filter in enough capital to be resilient and sustainable, but at the same time be sufficiently bounded from capital to prevent the ideals and practices of the commons becoming endangered through the predominance of money in the form of state backed fiat currency (see De Angelis 2017a:317)? The shape and form of the “filtering membrane” (De Angelis 2017b:228–229) through which capital enters into—and is extracted from—the commons must be decided and monitored by actors to ensure that capital does not endanger the commons, for example, through an unsustainable extraction of the dominant state sanctioned currency, in the case of FairCoop, Euros. There are a variety of different ways in which capital can be filtered into the commons in a manner that maintains some boundaries, including crowdfunding (although there are obvious limits to the extent to which this can be repeatedly used), membership contributions, the commons itself producing and selling particular goods and services for state backed fiat currency, or potentially through monthly instalments from participants who have a steady and sufficient income in state backed fiat currency (see Fairo 2019).

One interesting example of filtering capital into a postcapitalist commons is the case of the Low Impact Living Affordable Community (LILAC) housing cooperative in Leeds, UK (Chatterton 2016), in which all residents pay 35% of their net income in equity shares into a Mutual Home Ownership Society (MHOS) (Chatterton 2016:408). This presents an innovative way of filtering capital into the commons but keeping this bounded so that property speculation and private incentives around house price increases do not crowd out the shared values and practices of the commons. Since rather than contributing a certain amount of money in monthly instalments to paying off a private mortgage, residents are contributing a fixed proportion of their income to the shared commons resources of the MHOS. While LILAC presents an interesting, important and innovative case of a bounded postcapitalist commons, it is also a “single-place based experiment” (Chatterton 2016:410), and there are thus limits to its scalability (see Chatterton 2016:409; Gerhardt 2020).

The filtering membrane (De Angelis 2017b:228) through which capital is brought into the commons must be monitored to ensure that sufficient capital is entering for the commons to be sustainable. Furthermore, if there is a significant reduction of capital inflow, the scale and size of the postcapitalist commons will require adjustment and/or scaling back. Ostrom’s (1990) famous account of common pool resources (CPRs) provides further clarification. CPRs are natural resources that are self-governed by communities, in which the exclusion of beneficiaries is costly and in which the exploitation by one user reduces resource availability for others (Ostrom et al. 1999). By thinking through the experience of individuals in field settings, Ostrom is able to identify some design principles for CPRs to be self-governed in a manner which is viable and sustainable. It is the first of these principles that is most relevant to our investigation of postcapitalism and commons boundaries: “Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resources units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself” (Ostrom 1990:90).

There is an emphasis in Ostrom’s account on limiting extraction to ensure the sustainability of resources within the commons. The two key principles of CPR boundaries can be summarised as exclusion, in which some actors are unable to extract the shared resources from the CPR system; and subtraction in which the limited nature of the resource means excessive extraction by some will limit the availability of the resource for others (O’Mahony 2003). The crucial and scarce commons resource within FairCoop—as it sought to build and spread FairCoin as an alternative currency to help generate a transition to postcapitalism—was money in the form of state backed fiat currency, predominantly Euros, as this was the dominant currency in the regions where FairCoin was most widely used, including Spain, Greece and Italy.

Alternative currencies like FairCoin are non-exclusive since it is difficult to prevent someone acquiring an alternative currency; and they can also be non-subtractive since the rate of release and issuance of the currency can be determined by the commons itself. However, if the commons promises to exchange the alternative currency for state backed fiat currency (in this case Euros)—as FairCoop did—a subtraction of limited capital resources is enabled through the commons. This highlights how money in the form of state backed fiat currency presents a significant challenge in regard to commons boundaries. Postcapitalist commons must find a way to filter state backed fiat currency money into the commons, and limit its extraction, so that it sustains and does not weaken the cooperative and convivial aspects of the commons.

Ostrom focuses on non-capitalist CPRs and her work has little critical engagement with the role of money (Vercellone et al. 2015:22). Her approach has also been characterised as overly rationalist and methodologically individualist (O’Dwyer 2015; Ruivenkamp and Hilton 2017:3; Vercellone et al. 2015). Yet we argue here that these critiques do not invalidate the relevance of her work for thinking through the basis for more radical and sustainable postcapitalist commons. Ostrom’s framework does not require individuals to be rationalist in any purely individualist sense but allows for more collectivist and convivial values such as mutual aid, shared love and solidarity to sustain commons (see De Angelis 2017a:158). The crucial element of Ostrom’s account is identifying appropriate design principles. Postcapitalist commons which to some extent rely on capital (a subtractable resource) must have boundaries and design principles in place to guard against the self-interested extraction of capital by (a) given actor(s) who may conceivably enter and seek to extract capital from the commons at some future point. The search for additional design principles to better secure the sustainability of scalable postcapitalist commons will be at the core of the following analysis of FairCoop."

(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/anti.12705)

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