The fundamentals of Commoning, Part 1: Introduction

I’m interviewing Dil Green about the fundamentals of commoning. Dil is part of Mutual Credit Services (MCS) – designing models for the commons economy, that groups in Stroud and Liverpool in the UK are using in several sectors of the economy, including housing and finance.

Dave: this is the first in a series of interviews. About half an hour each. So, why are we doing this series of interviews?

Dil: to get out there in straightforward terms some of the new principles of commoning that we’re experimenting with and developing, so that more people can have an idea of what we’re doing in Stroud and other places

Dave: I don’t know how many yet. We’ll see how it goes. Roughly, the series might be something like:

1. What is commoning and why do we need to be doing it? What’s the problem it solves?
2. Why commons – why not co-ops / community shares? Why re-invent the wheel?
3. What’s a common pool resource? (what are we commoning?)
4. Who are the stakeholders? (all commoners)
5. How do we build material interdependence?
6. What will ‘ownership’ look like in the commons?
7. What are the financial models?
8. What are the governance models we might use?
9. We can talk about organisations, and how commons models can evolve.
10. Connecting everything together. Can we really challenge corporate capitalism?

But today, let’s start at the very beginning. Commons – why do we need to be thinking about it at all? What’s the problem we’re looking to solve?

Dil: I guess for quite a long time, and then intensely over the last 7-8 years, I’ve been working with others on various types of monetary and financial innovation, with the aim of empowering communities. It’s been quite nerdy – all about monetary instruments etc. It’s all useful work, but it doesn’t do anything on its own. What does things is people, together. And people together are not that interested in the finer details of what’s used to keep score as to who’s contributed what. They just want it to work and be wholesome. The money we’ve got doesn’t work well for most people, and isn’t wholesome, but most people don’t want to argue about that – they want to get on and do good stuff.

So when we started thinking about how we could put that work to the service of the commons, we realised we had a way to connect these positive ideas about money to projects that would engage people, because they connect to a real need, rather than ‘the economy’, which is too big for most people to think about. But if we have tools to help solve people’s real problems, without them having to buy crypto, or become a money nerd themselves, we realised that this could energise social momentum. Then when we started thinking about commons, we realised that that was really the thing that all humanity needs – one way or another, but not necessarily branded in a particular way – to build resilience in the omnicrisis that’s coming down on all our heads.

At that point we realised that all our money tools were just a part of much deeper and much less defined project of helping people and groups everywhere to become more resiliently collaborative.

Dave: for people new to all this, what does commons mean? What is commoning?

Dil: there’s a reason we use commoning or commoner rather than just commons, because commons is a term that’s used in all sorts of environments, sometimes with negative connotations. Giving presentations, I sometimes ask the audience about the first thing they think of when they hear the word commons. A lot of people say the ‘Tragedy of the Commons‘, some say open source, creative commons, wikpedia etc. And some talk about the past / old commons – grazing land and village greens that have been largely enclosed. And another was the oceans, atmosphere etc. – global shared resources.

So commons means different things to different people, which is great. Generally it makes people feel good (apart from people infected by the ‘tragedy’ meme).

Dave: you’re talking about a famous essay by Garrett Hardin, aren’t you? We don’t like him, do we?

Dil: I try not to be personal, but I talk about ‘our hero’ Elinor Ostrom, who debunked him. Hardin tried in his article (just an essay, not an academic piece backed up by anything) to make it seem as if the difficulties of managing a global public good like the sea or the atmosphere are the same as the problems of managing a local, closed resource of the kind that Ostrom defined as a common pool resource – something like a fishing ground or a grazing meadow, where it’s pretty obvious who the people who engage with it are. If they can collaborate, whatever the common pool resource is, will do better for all of them. But Hardin made it seem that it was impossible to co-ordinate around even a grazing meadow, because everyone would cheat. Ostrom and many students all over the world, studied commons of all kinds, from grazing meadows in Switzerland that had been commoned for centuries, to highly-contested water rights in southern California, that had been viciously contested (remember ‘Chinatown’ with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway?).

Not only was governance possible, it was real and happening, and did work. If you look up Hardin, it seems he was a bit of a scumbag in other ways (so much for not getting personal – Dave). He was a bit of a eugenicist, and I think the article was written in bad faith. He wasn’t stupid enough to think that a local place where people talk with each other has the same conditions as the atmosphere. Technically, what he and others who followed him did was to use game theory to ‘prove’ that the tragedy of the commons was inevitable. But Ostrom used game theory to show that he didn’t examine the possible games there are for co-ordinating, and didn’t investigate the games used to co-ordinate real commons. She showed games that could be and are being used, and then never mentioned game theory again (because it’s an inadequate tool – but showed that even using his tools, he was wrong).

Dave: he didn’t mention any kinds of governance models at all, did he. It was just a free for all in his mind.

Dil: exactly. He was a shill.

Dave: so, back to real commons.

Dil: I’m nervous of saying what is and isn’t real commons, because any group of people coming together to collaboratively manage and plan around some shared resource – I think they’re commoning – whether they call it that or not. I don’t want to draw any hard lines around anything. No-one has it right or wrong. What matters, in the face of the polycrisis, is – can we safely and reliably rebuild the social practice of commoning, and make it resistant to co-option by capitalism or destruction by the state, which has historically been the enabler of enclosure of the commons.

So It’s not about figuring out what ‘real’ commoning is, but about finding good ways to do it, that might well be adoptable by groups that don’t have a history of collaboration, so it gives them more of a framework to use, and we’ve done work on legal, financial and governance models. For example, if you think of community land trusts, someone invented them and published the model, so that people could use it and do things they wouldn’t previously have been able to do. CLTs are just one way of doing things. So there isn’t ‘proper’ commoning – we’re just trying to offer tools for effective commons for people to have a look at, and that will hopefully enable more commoning to happen.

Dave: so would you say that co-ops are also commoning? Or are they ‘commons-adjacent’?

Dil: I’d say they’re doing commoning of a sort, yes. But there are all sorts of commoning, and none of them is the ‘right’ way. Horses for courses. There are places that co-ops find it hard to operate, and other models work well. I’m not interested in drawing hard lines, I’m interested in doing the most effective thing for each context. That’s not always a co-op.

Dave: there’s already a huge co-operative sector (including Lowimpact.org) – so why do we need a commons movement as well? Could you see them merging and becoming the same thing?

Dil: co-ops, if successful, tend to be about one thing – making or selling or getting together to access a certain thing, for example. That’s a nice, clearly-defined setup. Those can be quite effective, and have a lot of history. What co-ops don’t seem to be good at is dealing with more complex contexts. There are multistakeholder co-ops, but not many of them. There’s a famous wholefoods wholesaling co-op in the UK called SUMA, supplying health food shops and community groups who make big orders. They were founded in the 1970s, and at a certain point they began to have a lot of trouble. A wholesaler needs 3 kinds of worker – first, people who understand the market, and buy in bulk, making high-risk decisions about what and how much to buy. Second, there are drivers working alone, and third, people in the warehouse. They’re all part of the same business – quite a simple business. But it began to fall apart. Someone from the VSM (viable system model) community went in to help them rearrange their governance so these different sets of people could co-ordinate better.

But if you think about something more complex, with a lot of different people – for example if you want to bring investors inside the organisation, you’re not allowed to do that in a co-op; or if you want to bring together workers and consumers into the same co-op, that’s difficult to set up. So we have more flexible commons models, more easily able to cope with complexity. That allows for richer ambitions.

Dave: there’s also community-supported agriculture, which looks very commons to me – using a model very similar to one of the tools you’re developing.

Dil: absolutely. I’d describe CSA as a strong effort to make a planned commons around food that includes growers and consumers, designed to make a win-win situation for both, but also a mutual insurance situation. They’re all in it together, and if there’s a bad season, the growers don’t go bust – everyone has to tighten their belts a bit. And in a good season, everyone does well together. If they know the weather’s changing they could come together to plan the growing of different crops. That’s definitely the sort of commoning that we want to support and build better models for.

Dave: then there’s the whole world of free and open source software, and wikis. That’s harder for me to get my head round, because they’re not human scale – they’re huge. It’s difficult to see where the boundaries around a resource are.

Dil: yes. I think the people around Wikipedia, media commons, creative commons and open source – thoughtful people in those communities are concerned about the way things have gone over the last 20 years. Essentially, those commons are being mined ruthlessly by organisations that don’t contribute and are not good commoners, so that the commons is being used to accelerate capitalism and undermine the commons. I don’t want to do more of an off-the-cuff analysis here, because that’s unfair on all the serious people who work in those spaces. But it’s more like a public good condition. I believe Elinor Ostrom in later work addressed things like digital commons, and I admit that I haven’t read it.

Dave: so you’re talking about corporate takeover of open source software, for example?

Dil: yes. It’s well known in open-source circles that the best coders can sometimes be hard to work with. So often, corporations allow coders to go and do whatever they want in the open-source world, on the proviso that if they produce anything commercially-viable, Microsoft can have it. The supposed defence, that Microsoft can improve on it, they have to offer that improvement back to the software community that built it – that turns out to not really matter. There’s a lot of critique of a Linux-based company called Red Hat, that set out early on to be the Linux distribution for large corporates, and got bought by IBM. There’s a lot of critiques of them – using open source software but making huge profits, and not playing by the spirit of the rules (even if they play by the letter). It seems that the rules may be inadequate to cope with the different actors in the software space, and that there isn’t a real commons there (no boundaries) – just a mechanical licensing arrangement. So there’s a problem there.

Dave: it’s not an unsolvable problem though, is it? There are lots of different aspects to the commons, and lots of ideas and models. Couldn’t the new models being developed be used to keep collaborators safe from predatory corporations?

Dil: at MCS, we’re developing software, and we’re thinking hard about how to develop software as a commons. I don’t think it will be too hard actually, because our approach is typically to use the most ‘vanilla’ instruments possible, and arrange the structures so that agreements between commoners, on top of those base vanilla legal structures, are what governs what can happen. The reasoning for that is that if you use the most vanilla structures for straightforward ownership or licensing or company forms, then you can’t be deleted very easily, because they’d have to delete everything else.

Dave: ‘they’?

Dil: whoever is in charge – the state and people who manage it, who might decide that they don’t want people to do things independently from the system.

Dave: they might decide that they don’t want anything to compete with the corporate sector.

Dil: yes. The legal forms of co-ops were pushed onto the co-op sector. All over the world, different countries have restrictive conditions under which co-ops can operate, and it seems to have been a bit of a pact with the devil. Co-ops on the one hand wanted to be special, so they wanted a different legal form, and the powers that be said OK, but your legal form has to be a bit of a straitjacket as well. It seems that the co-op movement in some countries have something similar to Stockholm syndrome – they’re in love with their straitjackets. They think their straitjackets make them special, but in fact they constrain them.

Dave: anything else you want to say in this introductory interview about the commons and commoning generally?

Dil: I think I want to surface that term you mentioned at the beginning – mutual interdependence. That I think is the key outcome and feature of a commons – where you’re not just building a community (which humans do all the time – we’re a social species), but community is basically something which introduces friction into the economy. People don’t do things that would be good for the economy, because their community doesn’t like it. The system has undermined community, unless it’s totally powerless. That means that community is everywhere very fragile – especially in the West. Not by mean people, but because communities undermine the free flow of capital.

Dave: especially communities that try to keep wealth inside them, rather than allow it to be extracted.

Dil: exactly. David Bollier says that you can have all the Ostrom principles you like, but if you haven’t got a strong social engagement and agreement, you don’t have a commons. Bringing people together is the heart of commons – around a resource, but if that commons doesn’t provide mutual interdependence – i.e. a situation where if I want to gain, other people have to gain. So if I try to disrupt things, it’s going to stop working for me as well. On that basis, the hope is that you get stronger social bonds if they’re mixed up with material well-being at some level. In the West there is no material interdependence in communities – everyone is atomised. Outside the family (or even inside), people are increasingly just isolated economic units.

Dave: which is what the discipline of economics always said we were, although we never were.

Dil: yes. The counterbalance to mutual interdependence is the political cost of managing the commons. Isolated individuals don’t need to manage anything – just earn and spend money. Management is done theoretically by the invisible hand of the market, but in practice more by bureaucracy. But if we want material interdependence, we’re going to have to talk to each other. So the win from material interdependence has to be worth the effort of talking with each other about material things. We’ve lost that ability in the West / global North, but in the global South, thy’re commoning all the time, without calling it commoning – they just have no other options. They still have their cultural traditions, that work, even though everywhere they’re under attack from money.

So again, commoning won’t be the same everywhere. It will be effective if it pays strong attention to context.

Dave: that’ll do for an introduction. We’ll build a series of around 10 interviews/articles I guess, about the fundamentals of commoning.

Dil: when you publish this, see if anyone is keen to add anything to the list.

Highlights

1. Commons is the thing that all humanity needs – one way or another, but not necessarily branded in a particular way – to build resilience in the omnicrisis that’s coming down on all our heads.
2. The famous essay ‘the Tragedy of the Commons’ is nonsense. He wasn’t talking about a commons, and it was written in bad faith.
3. Any group of people coming together to collaboratively manage and plan around some shared resource are commoning – whether they call it that or not.
4. We now have more flexible commons models, more easily able to cope with complexity, which allows for much bigger ambitions.
5. You get stronger social bonds if they’re mixed up with mutual material well-being – material interdependence.