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essay by Janet Hively To create a commons-based society, people need more than exposure to new ideas. They need tangible ways of practicing and living out these bright possibilities. Old habits about how we organize and pay for work maintain the sharp divisions between rich and poor and tie us to the consumer values of the market-based society. At this time when unemployment due to layoffs is growing, we should try out some new ways to share the work and spread the wealth.

All the talk about rights-based fishing and IFQs is a red herring that throws all of us off the track of what is important. IFQs do not work because they are rights, or because they are property rights…. IFQs work because they involve an assigned catch, as opposed to having catch be determined competitively. (Vermont Law Review, Spring 2004, p. 659) It is apparently irresistible for people, even trained scientists, to misunderstand ITQs as a triumph of the market and privatization. ITQs play into the grand narrative that private property rights promote good stewardship of a resource. Remember the so-called "tragedy of the commons" story? That parable holds that if you give people private property rights in the commons - if only your privatize the collective resource! - people won't over-exploit it. "Tragedy" can be averted. The mythology insists that the commons can be responsibly managed only if it is duly privatized.

Peer production thus abandons "credentialism" - a system of control used in modernity to protect information within a group, said Bauwens. Guilds, churches and universities are examples. In a p2p network, however, instead of making selections about work at the beginning, based on credentials, selection comes at the end, based on collective judgments.

Ah, all of this, and you get paid $1200-$1500 / semester, IF your class doesn't get cancelled, and I would know about the salary. I was about to become one of those adjuncts, teaching introductory probability and statistics, when I found that only three students at that college were willing to sign up for that class, listed in the schedule as being taught by the well known Prof.Staff. (He gets around a lot). I still remember walking down the street, wondering what happened, when passing a line of people hoping to get into a class that did seem to be of interest to students - "finding your animal spirit guide". No, I'm not making that up. A little about the "privileged" life that the backbreaking work they did in graduate school made possible, for so many, while the former frat boy executives who drank and cheated their way through school have so often ended up having to struggle by on six figure incomes, as they stare forlornly out their corner office windows. I'm not guessing about the frat boys. I've tutored and graded the papers of a number of these "achievers". A little more truth about life in the so-called land of opportunity, in the Postmodern Era.