Value in the Commons Economy

* Report: Value in the Commons Economy: Developments in Open and Contributory Value Accounting. By Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Niaros. Heinrich Boll Foundation, 2016.

URL = http://www.p2plab.gr/en/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Value-in-the-Commons-Economy-2017.pdf

Description

"This is a report about what we believe is a ‘value crisis’ affecting the current world system, and which is in our opinion indicative of an underlying transformation of the ‘value system’. Our main thesis is that we are moving from a system based on the creation of value through labor and capital in a market system, to a system which recognizes broader value streams, which are experienced as ‘contributions’ to systems that are based on the co-construction of shared resources, i.e. commons. While this emerging new system of value creation and distribution operates at present mostly within the confines of the mainstream value system, we show how a number of pioneering communities are also working on expanding the new system within those confines, with the potential to eventually escape those confines.

Throughout the document, we attempt to answer three fundamental questions:

• What is value, generally in the context of the allocation of resources in human societies, but more specifically in our ‘digitalized’, ‘networked’ societies where emerging knowledge commons are playing an increasingly vital role?

• What ‘should’ value be in a world marked by ecological and resource constraints presently operating at a global scale? Can we imagine a value system that rewards generative instead of extractive activities and exchanges?

• In a world of social, cultural and institutional diversity, can a new ‘value system’ incorporate the multiple values that are not recognized by capitalism, such as the care economy and domestic work?

This report looks at the issue of potential rent extraction from contributory communities, and attempts to solve or mitigate it through open and contributory accounting practices. It focuses on the internal value practices within productive communities and their entrepreneurial coalitions.

The first section frames our research topic with reference to approaches about value shifts in earlier historical development drawing on the works of Kojin Karatani, David Ronfeldt, Alan Page Fiske, as well as the P2P-theoretical approaches of the P2P Foundation network.

The second section focuses on the open and contributory value practices of pioneering peer production communities, namely Enspiral, Sensorica and Backfeed, looking at their value practices, i.e. how to maintain autonomy, how to create value sovereignty beyond the pressures of the capitalist market, how to generate value flows from the old economy to the new, advances and changes in their accounting practices, etc.

The third section explores the potential policy recommendations of their pragmatic approaches, and how it can affect society as a whole, and the furtherance of commons-based peer production models through policy frameworks such as the Commons Transition Plan, and others.

Contents

1. Theoretical Framework 3

1.1 Background 3

1.2. Analysing the value crisis 6

1.3. A historical approach to shifts in modes of exchange 10

2. Case Studies 13

2.1. The Enspiral Network 13

2.2. Sensorica 18

2.3. Backfeed 23

3. Policy Recommendations 30

3.1. Economic Infrastructure 31

3.2. The Political Infrastructure