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These crises are sharpening our awareness of the existence and importance of the commons. Natural commons are necessary for our survival, while social commons ensure social cohesion, and cultural commons enable us to evolve as individuals.

A reduction in the GDP does not necessarily signal a reduction in the real wealth of a society. Recognizing this fact widens our perspective and opens doors for new types of solutions.

The commons can help us overcome the crisis, but it requires systematic advocacy.

What are the commons and why are they are significant?

Commons

include knowledge and water, seeds and software, cultural works and the atmosphere. Commons are not just „things,” however. They are living, dynamic systems of life. They form the social fabric of a free society.

Commons do not belong to anyone individually nor do they belong to no one. Different communities, from the family to global society, always create, maintain, cultivate, and redefine commons

We have to constantly revitalize our commons, because everything we produce relies upon the knowledge we inherit, the natural resources that the Earth gives us, and cooperation with our fellow citizens. The activity known as „the economy” is embedded in our social fabric.

There‘s something new afoot – a movement to reclaim the commons!

Commons are being rediscovered and defended.

Commons are newly created and built upon. Countless people are creating new things for all and meaningful social and physical spaces for themselves.

Taken together, scientists and activists, citizens and politicians are developing a robust and innovative commons sphere – everywhere.

Commons are based on communities that set their own rules and cultivate their skills and values. Based on these always-evolving, conflict-ridden processes, communities integrate themselves into the bigger picture. In a culture of commons, inclusion is more important than exclusion, cooperation more important than competition, autonomy more important than control.

Neither no man‘s land nor boundless Property

The commons is not only about the legal forms of ownership. What matters most is whether and how community-based rights to the commons are enforced and secured.

The usage rights of fellow commoners are the stop signs for individual usage rights.

Absolute and exclusive private property rights in the commons therefore cannot be allowed.

Each use must ensure that the common pool resources are not destroyed or over-consumed.

No one may be excluded who is entitled to access and use the shared resource or who depends on it for basic needs.

What is public or publicly funded must remain publicly accessible.

The commons helps us re-conceptualize the prevailing concept of property rights.

Our shared quality of life is also limited by knowledge that is excessively commercialized and made artificially scarce. In this manner, our cultural heritage becomes an inventory of lifeless commodities and advertising dominates our public spaces.

We all need commons to survive and thrive. This is a key principle, and it establishes why commoners‘ usage rights should always be given a higher priority than corporations‘ property rights. Here the state has a duty to protect the commons, a duty which it cannot abandon. However, this does not mean that the state is necessarily the best steward for the commoners‘ interests. The challenge is for the commoners themselves to develop complementary institutions and organizational forms, as well as innovative access and usage rules, to protect the commons. The commoners must create their own commons sector, beyond the realm of market and state, to serve the public good in their own distinctive manner.

For a society in which the commons may thrive

The rules and ethics of each commons arise from the needs and processes of the commoners directly involved. Whoever is directly connected to a commons must participate in the debate and implementation of its rules.

Commons are driven by a specific ethos, as well as by the desire to acquire and transfer a myriad of skills. Our society therefore needs to honor the special skills and values that enable the commons to work well. A culture of the commons publicly recognizes any initiative or project that enhances the commons, and it provides active financial and institutional support to enhance the commons sector.

This challenge requires a lot of work, but it is also a great source of personal satisfaction and enrichment.

Our society needs a great debate and a worldwide movement for the commons.

the housing rights activist and feminist Ada Colau – took control of the Catalan capital

citizens started to wonder what would happen if the movement tried to occupy the institutions too

From the beginning, this was not a simple return to electoral politics but an experiment in transforming local institutions. It was to use municipal institutions not instead of movement organising but to support, expand and generalise the movement.

it’s about the blossoming of examples around the world where citizens are successfully winning their cities.

internationalist

the list of radical civic platforms standing up to entrenched political interests continues to grow.

there are a number of principles and practices that the new municipalist movements share

The political theorist Margaret Kohn once defined municipalism as ‘a politics of everyday life concerned with the issues that immediately affect citizens, including education, policing, jobs, culture and services. Municipalism is a political approach to community.’

The role of the municipality was to foster associations that challenge concentrations of power in the hands of a small elite. Capturing the city hall was never an end in itself but rather one method in expanding the scope of experiments in popular participation.

the continued erosion of basic living standards and increasing inequality driven by the myth that there is ‘no alternative’ has increased awareness that revolutionary change extends beyond ‘economics’ to every aspect of our lived experiences.

the new municipal citizens’ movements have arisen out of the failure of national political parties or street-based organising to deliver transformative change

This new municipalism may be picking-up where the alter-globalisation movement left off, retaining and reinvigorating the concepts of prefiguration, experimenting with ‘diagonal’ methods for dispersing power, and fuelling the expansion of non‑state, non-market ways of organising our societies.

This provides fertile ground for the development of a progressive post-capitalist politics that can win.

Women are at the forefront of many of these citizens’ movements

The feminisation of politics means encouraging a political style that openly expresses doubts and contradictions – backed by a values-based politics that emphasizes the role of community and ‘the commons’.

open spirit is at the centre of the new political culture

The commons is much broader than an economic strategy for resource management; it’s about building forms of autonomy and social solidarity as the substance of our day-to-day lives.

the Commons Lab

Department of the Commons

These are not occupied but liberated spaces.

social centres

‘citizen patrimony’, which would formalise and expand a network of spaces across the city where the municipality provides greater resources and public infrastructure for self-managed common use.

The collaboration between citizens’ groups, cooperatives and municipalities is also at the heart of many of the attempts to return public services to public ownership.

There are many reasons why cities and regions want to take services back under public ownership, but reducing cost (especially for poor people), improving the quality of services, and increasing financial transparency are recurrent themes. Efforts to create better conditions for workers are another key driver. In the energy sector, which accounts for around a third of the cases where services have been returned to public ownership, the shift is often driven by efforts to tackle climate change.

Taking control of the energy supply also means that the council can better coordinate efforts to reduce energy use.

A number of French municipalities have taken back control of school meals from corporations to protect local agriculture and improve the quality of meals.

Increasing citizens’ control is not just about taking over existing institutions, but building new democratic processes that involve citizens in the day-to-day decision making of their cities.

it involves changing how citizens interact with the city government.

participatory budgeting

These municipalist projects are beginning to define new ways for progressive movements to organise, challenging and moving beyond dichotomies that have traditionally haunted the left.

The objective is to use municipal institutions as part of a project of autonomy – to expand the commons, to build non-state institutions and to empower citizens (not their representatives) to control the collective conditions in which they live their lives.

The new municipalism isn’t about winning elections; it’s about building, transforming and distributing power.

We must do it ourselves. It’s time to win back our cities.

we aim for a fair synthesis

Our main counter-argument is this: under capitalist conditions, peer production is not capable of self-reproduction and therefore not a full mode of production or value creation. We make an important distinction between the self-reproduction capability of a peer production project as a whole, and the social reproduction at the individual level. The reason is that there is no real universal possiblity for the reproduction of the human life of peer producers under capitalist conditions.

We would characterize Yochai Benkler’s vision as a reformist or meliorist approach, seeking to improve and balance some of the negative aspects of capitalism through increased peer production dynamics.

2. Oekonux: free software as a germ form that is prefigurative of a peer production society

free software production is a full mode of production that is born within capitalism but destined to supersede it, based on a understanding of germ form theory.

The description of Meretz considers free software as a full mode of production, prefigurative of a wider transformation of the current capitalist mode of production.

We would characterize the main argument as stating that the deep lowering of transaction/coordination/communication costs, creates the possibility for a new mode of production next to the market and the firm, which produces value through ‘social allocation’.However, for Benkler, the new modality exists ‘in addition’ and in complementary with market dynamics.

On the collective level, we can see that peer production occurs when a pool of voluntary contributors can create commons-oriented value, under conditions of participatory governance, i.e. through the social, and not market or hierarchical, allocation of productive resources. This can occur on a collective level, but only if we abstract from the need for the social reproduction of the individuals who contribute.

there is no autonomous social reproduction within the commons itself

3. Dmytri Kleiner’s Venture Communism

For Kleiner, peer production can only occur if commoners also own the common stock of production.

Kleiner proposes that peer producers would create common stock cooperatives, and use a specific licence, the Peer Production or Copyfarleft license, to protect their shared innovation commons from private appropriation by capitalist forces.

Like with the P2P Foundation’s approach, Kleiner also recognizes the continuation of the politics of class, as long as we live in a class-based society.

Our contrasting peer production IS a proto-mode of production, which means that indeed value is created in a radically different way in peer production, but that it’s lack of self-reproduction capabilities makes it dependent on capitalism.

Kleiner’s strategy is exactly what can make it independent and capable of self-reproduction since its combination with common-stock physical production entities, would guarantee the self-reproduction capability of individuals and collectives contributing to the commons.

creating a real counter-economy

4. George Caffentzis and the Anti-capitalist commons

two kinds of commons, i.e. anti-capitalist commons which exist to produce value in a different way, and which function against capitalism, and commons which are used by capital for its own self-reproduction and act in favour of capitalism

Politically, pro-capitalist commons are represented by the neo-Hardinian school of Elinor Ostrom

while the basic premise of the existence of capitalism-compatible commons is correct, the making of a radical dichotomy, based on the necessity to struggle against capitalist commons, is absolutely counter-productive.

Our approach stresses that it is more productive to focus on the post-capitalist potentialities of peer production, and make them real and concrete, than to fight against commons that are compatible with capitalism.

it makes only sense to undertake efforts to make the commons more autonomous from profit-maximizing entities and the system as a whole. This can be done through strategies such as those proposed by Kleiner and the P2P Foundation.

In the interpretation of the P2P Foundation, social change occurs because proto-modes of production, which are initially embedded in a dominant economic system, and benefit that system, become gradually more efficient, and capable of self-reproduction, and therefore create the conditions for a phase transition to occur, in which the new emergent mode of production, achieves its independence over the formerly dominant model.

For the P2P Foundation, an integration needs to occur between the new prototype model, i.e. the field of peer production proper, as it emerges in multiple social fields and attempts to become more autonomous; the social mobilization of progressive social forces (i.e. politics and even ‘revolution’ are crucial remaining aspects of social evolution), and political/policy oriented movements that are capable of creating new institutions.

Politically, § we differ from the Benklerite approach because we believe peer production has the potential to succeed capitalism as the core value and organisational model of a post-capitalist society § we differ from Oekonux by stressing the lack of autonomy of peer production under current conditions § we differ from the Telekommunisten approach by stressing it a proto-mode of production § we differ from the Caffentzis approach by stressing a post-capitalist approach centered on the autonomy and self-reproduction needs of peer producers, rather than guided by a core hostility to capitalism

P2P Foundation also has an integrative and integral approach, this means that despite differences, we seek commonality around aspects of our friends and allies that we may differ from in other aspects.

§ we agree with Benkler and similar approaches that peer production improves on the current conditions of capitalism, i.e. we generally support the spread of commons and p2p-oriented practices § we agree with Oekonux that peer production carries within itself the seeds of a post-capitalist value system § we agree with Kleiner’s proposal for a peer-based counter-economy § we agree with Caffentzis that we need a preferential treatment towards autonomous commons approaches that create a counter-logic within the present system

As knowledge became a major factor of informational capitalism a draconian copyright regime grew dramatically (Lessig, 2005 ). The GPL/GNU pioneered a juridical-productive strategy for producing global commons of knowledge and protecting them against the invasion by capitalism. In this sense, Stallman’s initiative was a major milestone in the struggle of knowledge workers against informational capitalism

The production of Linux was truly a revolution in the organization of cooperation among a large number of producers. Marx argued that any scientific knowledge was a product of collective work (Marx, 1981: 199 ), as each scientist built upon the achievements of previous ones. But this collective aspect of science was not a result of conscious and simultaneous cooperation among scientists but of contingent transfer of knowledge along a time and space axis.

The combination of GPL license with the Linux mode of cooperation represents the gist of the P2P mode of production, which coincides with the general principles of advanced form of communism, described by Marx.

1) There will be no equivalence, between each individual’s contribution to social production and their share from the total social products. They will contribute according to their ability and will use products according to their needs. Money as the quantitative measure of value will disappear (Marx, 1978b). Money does not play any role in internal P2P system, though it still constitutes its external context and inserts pressure on it.

2) In Marx’s advanced communism the division of labor, and with it the state and market vanish (Marx, 1978 a, b). In P2P the division of labor is replaced by the distribution of labor (Weber, 2004) and the logics of state and market are questione

3) Advanced communism, Marx (1978a) envisaged, would transcend alienation not only by abolishing the logic of quantitative equivalence in the realm of exchange between individual and society, and among individuals, and the division of labor, but also by allowing and enabling individuals to use socially produced means of production to materialize their own creative powers. My ethnographic findings show that creativity and peer recognition are among the strongest motivations of P2P producer

At this point we can raise the following questions: 1-Is P2P really a new historical mode of production, or just an appendage to the capitalist mode of production? 2-What is its relation to the capitalist mode of production? 3-To what extent can P2P be applied to material production? 4-What are the possibilities that it will replace or displace the capitalist mode of production altogether

The P2P production productive forces correspond to what Manuel Castells (2010/1996:70-72) defines as the Information Technological Paradigm (ITP). The all-encompassing ITP emphasises informal networking, flexibility, and is characterised by the fact that technology acts on information, information acts on technology, as well as by the integration of various technologies such as micro-electronics, telecommunications, opto-electronics and computers in a larger system. It is important to emphasise that knowledge workers themselves are an important component, or the most important components, of ITP productive forces.

Yet capitalism prevents the free flow of knowledge in all directions in the net. It is true that the capitalist mode of production, adapting itself to ITP, has become global, and has increasingly adopted a network form. However, the sum of all potential links in the net exceeds dramatically the sum of links of the global networks of capital. Hence, the potential of the net, as a paradigmatic productive force of our time, exceeds the capitalist mode of production (Hardt and Negri, 2000)

I described briefly above major aspects of P2P that accord to Marx’s understanding of communism. All these aspects contradict the logic of capital. Here I will show how the logic of P2P profoundly contradicts the capitalist division of labour, because division of labour is the key component of any mode of production. Let me emphasize that in P2P we have a distribution of labour and not a division of labour

The scholars of post-Fordism argue that post-Fordism has transcended Taylorism by enhancing workers’ skills and involving them in decision making

Such claims are at best controversial (Castells, 2010/1996). Many argue that Taylorism is still the dominant form of the organization of the labor process

Post-Fordism has replaced the Taylorist impersonal and mechanized despotism with new forms of personal enslavement. Individual producers do not choose their tasks, or the pace, time and place of their work. In other words the work process is micro-territorialized both spatially and temporally. In this sense the contrast with P2P cooperation cannot be stronger. In P2P cooperation the work processes are globally de-territorialized, in terms of both time and space.

Brook (1975) showed that in a centralized organization the increase of the number of engineers who work on a particular software problem decreases the efficiency by creating unnecessary complexities at an exponential rate. Raymond (2001) demonstrated that this was not true of de-centered networked cooperation of P2P. Here, the increase in the number of workers increases efficiency and improves the product. This hypothesis can be true of all forms of cognitive production.

The commercial use of P2P’s products does not make them commodities because the user does not pay for them and therefore they do not enter the costs of his own commodity. From this follows that the total labor which is globally spent today on different forms of P2P is outside the capitalist social division of labor and circumscribes it.

A fully fledged P2P society is not compatible with money and commodity. The commodity form inherently circumscribes the freedoms that are guaranteed in the GPL

To sum up, the ITP productive forces combined with the de-centered network-based form of cooperation, the absence of wage labor, voluntary contribution, and the commons form of products constitute the main features of the P2P mode of production

Although the P2P mode of production is still an emerging phenomenon, its logic is clearly different from that of capitalism and has been created as a response to the requirements of the new productive forces. Therefore, its historical significance, urgency and novelty can hardly be exaggerated. The capitalist mode of production is a barrier to the realization of the potentialities of knowledge in the era of Internet. It limits human creativity and the development of knowledge workers in general. Therefore, it is no coincidence that a section of knowledge workers have rebelled against capitalist relations of production by lunching P2P. As Söderberg (2008) argues this is a form of class struggle.

The new social production consists of islands in the sea of the capitalist mode of production. The relation between the two, as pointed to above, is one of mutual dependence and antagonism. The social production depends on capitalism for acquiring some of the means of production and wages of its contributors, whilst capitalism on the other hand uses the commons of social production for free.

The social formation is an integrated socio-economic-ideological/cultural system. It may consist of more than one modes of production. However, one mode of production dominates the others and its imperatives define the overall characteristics of the social formation. In this sense we can speak of feudal and capitalist social formations as distinct from feudal and capitalist modes of production. Although the dominant mode of production dominates other modes of production, it cannot erase their specific logics. The continuous tension and dependency between the dominant mode of production and subordinated ones make social formations dynamic, uneven, and complex phenomena.

The capitalist social formation has gone through three partially overlapping phases: the emerging, the dominant and the declining ones. In the emerging phase (1850-1950) the capitalist mode of production dominated the feudal, domestic and other pre- capitalist modes of production worldwide, extracting labor and value from them (Mandel, 1972: chapter 2 ). In the second phase (1950-1980) the capitalist mode of production eroded the pre-capitalist mode of productions profoundly, and replaced them with the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism expanded both intensively, penetrating new domains of productive activity such as services, and extensively, conquering the whole globe. The third phase (1980- onwards) is characterized by the emergence of the ITP paradigm and the social mode of production within the capitalist social formation. This period has been described in terms such as “Network Society” (Castells, 2010/1997 ), “Empire” (Hardt and Negri, 2000), etc.

Although the P2P mode of production is still under the sway of the capitalist mode of production, its standing vis-à-vis capitalism is different from that of pre-capitalist modes of productions. While in the two first phases capitalism represented the new productive forces, in the third phase P2P is the new and emerging mode of production and capitalism is the declining one.

If P2P dominates capitalism we will have the emerging phase of P2P social formation. I do not want to give the impression that the victory of P2P over capitalism is either a smooth evolutionary process or inevitable. It is fully contingent upon the orientations and consequences of the current social struggle, particularly the struggle of P2P communities.

Automation will be a pillar of this transformation, though automation is not a necessary pre-condition for material P2P. In a fully automated production, the P2P production of cognitive factor (research and development, design and software) will bring material production under the sway of P2P.

The natural limit to raw material will also place a limit on material wealth and will require rules of distribution. But the criterion for distribution in the global community and within each local community cannot be the contribution of labor by individuals and communities, because cognitive work is globally collective, has no exchange value and does not produce exchange value. Only the needs of communities and individuals defined democratically among and within communities can be the criterion for distribution

the success of state and capital in preventing P2P from becoming the dominant mode of production is not guaranteed beforehand. Things can go either way depending on the consequence of social struggles. The P2P movement, if supported by all other social movements of the multitude, may prevail. Social struggle will also determine what type of P2P society we will have.

What then are the possible scenarios for P2P production to become the dominant mode of production? Will it grow parallel with capitalism until it overtakes it? Or, will its path of development be much more complicated, marked by ebbs and flows, and temporary setbacks? Will a social revolution that expropriates strategic means of production from capitalists be a prerequisite for P2P production to become the dominant mode of production? What will be the role of social struggle and human consciousness in advancing P2P production

“the idea of communism” is becoming appealing again. However it is not enough, though really necessary, to say that “another communism is possible” (Harvey, 2010:259) but to imagine the general contours of communist production. Herein lies the historical and political significance of P2P production. It represents, though in embryonic form, a model for communist production and distribution.

What then are the strengths and weaknesses of the P2P production social movement?

Its weakness, as Söderberg (2008) argues, is that most of the participants in the P2P production lack an explicit anti-capitalist consciousness, let alone a communist consciousness

However, the majority’s involvement in production is motivated by personal reasons, such as doing something exciting and creative, and improving their own skills. However participants are aware of, and value the fact, that they are producing commons.

No doubt the formation of a solid collectivist and progressive culture which grows organically around P2P production and other social movements will be essential for the formation of a communist society. Despite the significance of this progressive culture-in-making, it cannot remedy the lack of a clear programmatic communist vision and sustained theoretical critique of capitalism among the participants.

The lack of a clear collectivist vision combined with the dominant capitalist environment makes P2P production vulnerable to invasion by capitalism

No doubt there is a self-conscious communist section among the producers in P2P production. This communist section must carry out an uncompromising theoretical and critical theoretical struggle within the P2P production movement. However, this struggle should be conducted in friendly terms and avoid sectarianism. Communists should not position themselves against non-communist participants in the P2P movement. Actually, as Barbrook (2007) argues, all contributors to P2P production are involved in a communist material practice, regardless of their attitudes to communism.

In addition to the lack of class consciousness among P2P producers, and perhaps as a result of this, the absence of sustained connections/alliances between P2P producers and other progressive social movements is another weakness of the P2P movement. This is also a weakness of other social movements

The very fact the Occupy Wall Street was initiated by Adbusters and Anonymous, and that its de-centered/network form of organization, alongside that of Indignados, is very similar to that of P2P, is indeed very promising.

The academic and the activist left, on the other hand, have not yet grasped the historical novelty and significance of P2P production.

In October 2009, we co-promoted the first Free Culture Forum (FCF)

The FCF released a Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge

The Charter lists a variety of ways of achieving sustainability developed by initiatives based on free culture principles, some more consolidated, some still experimental

The Charter also promotes the principle of combining several sources of finance, as a way of guaranteeing independence of the creators.

What we call the Free Culture Movements comprises a wide range of experiences mainly emerging in the framework of the internet and the digital revolution.

We are still living in a capitalist society; and in the last twenty years, one major change has been the qualitatively new importance of information, communication and knowledge both in the economy and in society at large.

communities of highly individualised members

the potential opened up by the new technologies

This goes together with a second question we have often dealt with, that is, why these ‘networked forms’ are emerging in so many movements and indeed in so many aspects of present-day society.

these forces have one of their fundamental roots in the movements of the 1960s and 70s and specifically in two salient facts: the shake-up of the Fordist, patriarchal, hierarchical institutions of post-war capitalism and the (connected) repercussions of the massive expansion of higher education.

We need to better conceptualise the anthropological transformation which underlies these new patterns of social relationships

Which leads us to a third area of issues: the movements we analyse have been emerging from the very core of societal innovation of the last decades. What do we call this? Post-Fordism? The knowledge economy? Informationalism? Cognitive capitalism?

When we started Networked Politics, we wanted first of all to deepen the comprehension of the problems that had emerged in the innovative forms and principles of organisation in the global movements. It was in this way that we came to discover parallels with the organisational forms that had emerged in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement, as well as with various experiences of web communities of collaborative production

as producing common resources.

logics based on openness to the ‘outside’

First, where knowledge, information and communication play a central role, the processes of production appear intrinsically and more immediately social. They benefit and rely on flows and networks of production which go beyond the formal boundaries of any specific organisation (not to say single individuals).

But there is also another aspect of this social nature of production that needs to be noted: in many senses, the flows of production appeared to shift away from the formal boundaries of what is traditionally considered productive work, to spread into society at large.

the social nature of these processes seems to put pressure on any regulatory, governance and accounting system closed within the boundaries of formally isolated organisations.

this configuration also brings people to questioning the adequacy, legitimacy and efficiency of property regimes as we know them, be they private or state mechanisms.

The increasing rediscovery of the notion of commons by these movements and many beyond them – has its roots here.

When we look at the qualities which need to be mobilised and at the forms of organisation of production in these spheres, we observe an increasing importance of attitudes and capacities

creativity, flexibility, development of information, continuous learning, problem-solving, initiative, communicational and relational skills, decision-making, attention, experiential/practical/”tacit” knowledge.

embedded in individuals and are not easily reproducible and controllable through planned command or automated mechanisms.

depend on motivations which are not easily reducible to the monetary

a blurring of entrepreneurial and managerial functions and of dependent work

another dimension where the experience of the FC-movements is interesting. There are experiments of a different kind around these problems

related to the meshing and mobilisation of different motivations, non-hierarchical division of labour, collaboration and coordination, and so on.

working on the basis of a distributional/sharing

the logic behind the internet itself

a third cluster of problems

The increased immaterial and social nature of the processes of production and of products is creating a series of problems in the systems of measures.

Such problems are evidently further complicated by the digital revolution, which made it possible that a digital product, once created, can be potentially reproduced “easier, faster, ubiquitously and almost free”

In this lies another clue that fundamental difficulties are emerging, which point toward what could be called a crisis of the system of value – which, indeed, has many other roots, well beyond this realm.

Fordist forms of production, to be deployed in a non-destructive way, required the invention of a new institutional framework, which crystallised in the Keynesian revolution; which, in turn, to be effectively deployed required the invention of a new system of (public and private) measures and accounts, which culminated in the famous – and today widely contested concept of – Gross National Product. Doesn’t this resonate with the present?

The software was met with enormous interest

Another crucial factor is the community that coordinates the development of the operating system. The open, decentralized, and seemingly chaotic way of working together pioneered by Torvalds and his collaborators became known as the “bazaar” model of software development (Raymond 2001)

With free software, there is no strict boundary between users and developers. Many participants simply use the software, but some help to improve it, either occasionally or even regularly and intensely. The participants themselves decide whether and how to contribute. Participation is not obligatory, but quite easy if you want to get involved.

Linux and Wikipedia are important examples of two communities – the free software movement (also called open source movement) and the free culture movement

The GNU/Linux story reveals the essential characteristics of peer production. Peer production is based on commons: resources and goods that are jointly developed and maintained by a community and shared according to community-defined rules.

If I modify and distribute a GPL’ed software, I must publish my own version under the GPL. This principle is called “copyleft” since it turns copyright on its head. Instead of granting exclusive rights of control and exploitation to the authors, it ensures that all versions of the software will remain in the commons forever.

While production for the market aims to produce something that can be sold, the usual goal of peer production is to produce something useful.

In contrast to companies and entities in planned economies, peer projects don’t have command structures. That does not mean that they are unstructured; on the contrary, most projects have “maintainers” or “admins” who keep the project on course and decide which contributions to integrate and which to reject.

The success of GNU/Linux is based on the fact that – like all free software – it is a commons that everybody can use, improve and share. The freedoms that make free software a commons were first defined by Richard Stallman in the 1980s. He designed the GNU General Public License (GPL) as an exemplary license to legally protect these freedoms.

Open hardware projects design physical products by freely sharing blueprints, design documents, and bills of materials.

No production is possible without means of production. The RepRap 3D printer has received a lot of attention because it can “print” many of its own parts. Other free 3D printers are the Fab@Home and the MakerBot, around which a large community has formed. Thingiverse is a platform for sharing 3D designs for such printers. Projects such as FurnLab and CubeSpawn design CNC (computer-controlled) machines for processing wood and metals; their aim is to facilitate “personal fabrication.

You cannot create things from designs and blueprints alone – physical resources and means of production are needed as well. Technological advancements have made various production processes less expensive and more accessible.

It makes more sense for productive infrastructures to be community-based, i.e., jointly organized by the inhabitants of a village or neighborhood. There are already examples of this.

Community-organized production places are emerging as well.

Fab Labs are modern open workshops whose goal is to produce “almost anything.” That’s not yet realistic, but they can already produce furniture, clothing, computer equipment (including circuit boards), and other useful things.

Their goal is the creation of an entirely commons-based production infrastructure, a network of free and open facilities that utilize only free software and open hardware.

But can peer production really get that far in the physical world? Won’t it be stopped by the fact that natural resources and the Earth’s carrying capacity are limited?

Digital, Internet-based peer production has produced astonishing amounts of software and contents – a digital plenty that benefits us all. In the physical world, a similar plenty for everyone must seem impossible if one equates plenty with lavishness and wastefulness. But plenty also has another meaning: “getting what I need, when I need it.

Commons-based peer production brings such a needs-driven conception of plenty for everyone into reach.

Physical production is impossible without natural resources. Therefore, peer production won’t be able to realize its full potential unless access to resources is managed according to its principles. Digital peer production treats knowledge and software as a commons. Likewise, physical peer production needs to manage resources and means of production as commons, utilizing them in a fair and sustainable way and preserving or improving their current state.

The challenge is huge

For the future of commons-based peer production it will be very important to bring together the perspectives and experiences of commoners from all areas – whether “digital,” “ecological,” or “traditional.”

As the small crowd marched to Meusa and Wheeler’s new home, for instance, people chanted, “Empty houses and houseless people — match them up!” This was a refrain that echoes the rallying cry commonly used by J.R. Fleming, chairman of Chicago’s Anti-Eviction Campaign. (His wording is to match “homeless people with peopleless houses.”)

Similarly, in Woodland, activists covered Alma Ponce’s lawn with tents — an allusion to the fall 2011 occupations that has also been used in eviction blockades in Alabama and Georgia over the last year.

One important shift evident on the anniversary is that Occupy Homes groups have started rallying more and more behind a rights-based framework to explain why they are pursuing direct action.

“Housing is a human right, not for the banks to hold hostage,” Michelene Meusa said a few days after the action, when, at M&T Bank’s request, the Atlanta Police Department arrested her and three others for criminal trespassing. When she refused to leave, she made an explicit comparison between her civil disobedience and the actions of the civil rights movement.

The shift towards a human-rights framing of the housing movement and away from following the Occupy movement’s focus on economic unfairness — i.e., “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out” — is significant. The human rights framework is often more powerful in movements led by people of color, drawing strength, as Meusa did, from the civil rights era and cutting through the class divisions that plague housing in a way that movements focused only on mortgage loan modifications cannot.

With the continued onslaught of foreclosures across the United States, the question remains: How much will these movements have to scale up to make structural changes, rather than just individual changes?

Housing organizing during the Great Depression provides some instructive parallels. The economic devastation since 2008 has been quite similar to what the nation experienced throughout that period. In 1933, for example, banks foreclosed on an average of 1,000 homes every day. In 2010, the rate of displacement was comparable: The average number of foreclosures was more than 2,500 homes a day, and the population has increased two-and-a-half fold.

The scale of housing organizing during the early 1930s, however, dwarfs what we have seen so far today. Crowds of hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of people, mobilized to stop evictions in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Gary, Youngstown, Toledo and other urban centers, mostly under the direction of the Communist Party. As in much of current housing organizing, women were often on the front lines. Masses of these women filled the streets as others climbed to the roofs and poured buckets of water on the police below. Women beat back the police officers’ horses by sticking them with long hat pins or pouring marbles into the streets. If the police were successful in moving the family’s furniture out to the curb, the crowd simply broke down the door and moved the family’s belongings back inside after the police had left.

Rural communities also formed anti-foreclosure organizations, combining the fight for housing with the fight for fair wages, especially in the sharecropping South. Hundreds of thousands of farmers came together to form anti-eviction and tenants-rights groups

This movement achieved substantial legislative gains. Housing policy became a major part of the New Deal, culminating in the National Housing Act of 1934, which established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to provide affordable loans to spur homeownership, and the Housing Act of 1937, which established public housing authorities across the country.

the establishment of public housing systemically changed the landscape and ideology around housing in the United States and was “one of the most successful federal programs in the 20th century,” according to Damaris Reyes, the executive director of the public housing advocacy group Good Old Lower East Side.

By this measure, the Occupy Homes network and aligned housing movements still have light-years to go — a reality that many organizers acknowledge. Yet the conditions have changed since 1930s, suggesting that what we need are not massive federal construction and lending programs, but rather a shift in the way housing rights are perceived and enacted in the U.S. Rather than coping with the scarcity of the 1930s, the United States now confronts vast, unprecedented wealth and gaping economic inequality — a condition that is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that there are upwards of a dozen empty and unused houses for every homeless person in the nation.

With more than enough wealth and roofs to provide safe and dignified homes for the country’s population, the challenge today is to demonstrate that this situation of desperate need coexisting with wasted excess is not one we need to accept.

The reaction of Stuttgart workers to the destruction of public services and the perversion of co-determination indicates that austerity measures are coming slap-bang up against the legacy of two periods of democratic and egalitarian reform. The first is post-war reconstruction, including the welfare state. The second is the system of co-determination, which was strengthened in response to rebellions in the 60s and 70s. However, the resistance now, in Stuttgart as elsewhere in Europe, is not simply over the erosion of the institutions created in these periods of reform – after all, that erosion has been taking place for at least a decade. It is a profound and uncertain clash of cultures, expectations and increasingly activities, shaped by these periods of reform and rebellion, across generations. People’s expectations, or at least sense of legitimate claims, are for cultural equality as well as moves toward economic equality, and for meaningful and dignified work to match the decades of expansion of higher education.

There are also the spreading networks of autonomous hackers and geeks creating open, non-proprietorial, software and therefore effectively creating a key part of the infrastructure of today’s society as a digital commons

They all involve forms of labour which cannot be understood in the same terms as the conventional wage contract

nd the list also includes trade unionists who are taking on the role of organising for the common good in defence, or for the improvement of public services, or to push their company towards climate jobs.

All kinds of co-ops, cultural and social centres have emerged or been strengthened by these combinations of refusal and creation.

What this variety of activity has in common is that it is based on collaborative forms of creativity

and more recently ‘The coming of the commons’

can the public sector be transformed in a democratic, open and egalitarian direction against the forces of marketisation? If so, it can be a major economic player, especially in urban centres, with considerable bargaining power as contractor, as employer, and as trend-setter and creator of new communicative infrastructure.

The spread of information, knowledge and communication technologies not only enables theoretical expertise and practical knowledge to be shared on a previously unimaginable scale, but also creates tools for co-operation and self-managed co‐ordination of the most complex, multi-actor, transnational processes.

All these developments also illustrate the significance of democracy – transparency, participatory decision- making, the recognition of and means of sharing plural sources of knowledge – as a source of productivity, a base for a new economics.

What would it mean to think about industrial policies not so much in terms of the goal of nudging the private sector to invest, but more in terms of how to release, develop and extend the creativity of labour in its broadest sense?

How to expand and strengthen ‘productive democracy’? How to enhance the capacities of those whose ‘only’ means of production is their creative potential – and the social co-operation through which they can develop and realise this potential?

First, it’s come from the kinds of challenges that the trade union movement is facing in defending jobs in manufacturing as well as public services.

The second sphere for the rethinking of labour has been through the renewal of the co-operative movement. And a third development is the powerful and ambiguous trend opened up by the new technology towards new kinds of collaboration is the peer to peer, distributed productions and the digital commons, as referred to earlier. This ‘sphere’ is not separate: it could expand both the transformative power of workers already rethinking labour in conventional employment, and the scale and reach of co-operatives.

One increasingly significant context of convergence is over ‘climate jobs’. We’ve noted already the growth of co‐operatives creating and distributing renewable energy. The ravages of climate change are leading some trade unionists to demand that workers, whether currently unemployed or employed in high-carbon industries, be allowed to deploy their know-how to manufacture wind turbines, solar water heaters and other parts of the infrastructure of a low-carbon economy.

Another potential focal point for the mutual reinforcement of different forms of productive democracy is cities.

They illustrate ways in which labour could be self-organised, on the basis of social values underlying its purpose, use or context.

The implication of my argument here is that policymakers now need to work on how to support the economic creativity of millions of people, whether in existing workplaces or working precariously outside the formal labour market. At present these capacities are being wasted.

They need specific forms of support, some of it from the state, and some of it from organisations that share or could be persuaded to share their goals. These could include the trade unions, the co-operative movement, some parts of the church, foundations, and the growing experiments in crowdfunding, democratically controlled loan funds and so on.

As far as existing workplaces are concerned, we need states to not only restore and extend rights that protect trade unions in their struggles over wages and conditions, but also to give workers rights to control the purpose of their labour: for example, a legal prohibition on closures or redundancies without alternatives being publicly explored, and in the case of large companies, public inquiries at which alternatives would be presented. Labour is a commons – it should not be wasted. We need a new kind of ‘industrial strategy’ – one designed to support the creation of value that is not only monetary and requires autonomy from the pressures of the labour market. These should include a basic ‘citizen’s income’ (see page 34). Shorter working hours would be another measure that would serve a similar end.

We also need a regional policy that gives real support to cities as hubs of economic development, through direct public employment, and through support for co-ops involving regional banks. These could learn from the operations of the Mondragon bank and become a source of support and co‐ordination to networks of co-ops and other collaborative means of nurturing and realising the creativity of labour, rather than operating as banks of the traditional kind.

These are mere illustrations of industrial policies which recognise the capacities of generations shaped by expectations of cultural as well as political and economic equality. To realise these capacities as a resource for a new model of economic development requires rebuilding the distributional gains of the welfare state – but it also requires going further than that. We need to create not simply full employment, but the conditions by which people can creatively collaborate to meet the needs of a changing society and a precarious planet.

“Intellectual property”

continuous capital accumulation

overuse and depletion of natural resources

Scarcity Engineering

Scarcity engineering is what we call this continuous attempt to undo natural abundance where it occurs.

We could call this pseudo-abundance,

the ability of this privatized knowledge to create profits

A good recent example of this “patent lag” effect is the extraordinary growth of 3D printing, once the technology lost its patents.

Perpetually Increasing Social Injustice

The global open design communities engaging in peer production and mutualization of productive knowledge have no such perverse incentives. These communities design to ensure participation and are “naturally” inclined to design sustainable products and services.

To what degree does the Commons and peer-to-peer production function as a potential solution for these three interrelated structural crises of capitalism?

Digital networks (such as the internet) have recently enabled a new type of Commons where the knowledge required for human action and value creation has been mutualized. This has led to global open design communities, which jointly create open knowledge pools (e.g. Wikipedia), free software (e.g. the Linux Operating System) or open designs to enable physical production

Commons-based peer production emerges when technology enables the creation of open, contributory systems that create Commons.

more and more wealth into fewer hands through compound interest, rent seeking, purchasing legislation, etc.

The privatization and patenting of knowledge and technical solutions hampers the widespread distribution of necessary innovations. No such impediments exist in the open contributory systems of peer production communities, where innovation anywhere in the network is instantly available to the whole.

Peer production, independent of the profit motive, invites and facilitates the creation of solidarity-based forms of economic entities. Being generative towards human communities, these entities are more likely based on socially just forms of value sharing.

The Revolution Is Already Happening

responses take three forms:1. The sustainability and ecological/environmental movements, attempting to find solutions for the planet’s survival;2. The “Open,” “Commons” and “Sharing” movements, stressing the need for shareable knowledge and mutualized physical resources;3. The cooperative and solidarity economy, focusing on fairness.

The good news is that Commons-based peer production is the best way to bring these three necessary aspects together into one coherent system. However, for this to happen, the various movements need enabling tools and capacities. An example is the open source circular economy

Similarly, open and platform cooperativism — the convergence of socially just forms of production with shareable knowledge — allows all contributing citizens to create fair, generative livelihoods around the shared resources they need and co-create.

We’ve seen post-capitalist practices emerging since the late 20th century — for example, the 1983 invention of the universally available browser. Citizens have been empowered to create value through open contributory systems; these create universally available knowledge, which in turn can be used for material production.

emerging globally

Option 1: Euro-reformism

One (fast receding) option is the standard variety of euro-reformism, practised typically by social democrats who argue for ‘more democracy’,

dynamic analyses

The EU’s institutions are incapable of being reformed through the standard process of inter-governmental deliberations and gradual treaty changes.

Option 2: Lexit

This (Lexit) option raises concerns regarding its realism and probity. Is its agenda feasible? In other words, is it a realistic prospect that, by (in Kouvelakis’ words) calling for referenda to leave the EU, the Left can block “the forces of the xenophobic and nationalist Right from winning hegemony and diverting the popular revolt”? And, is such a campaign consistent with the Left’s fundamental principles?

the EU was constructed intentionally as a democracy-free zone designed to keep the demos out of decision-making

Given that the EU has established free movement, Lexit involves acquiescence to (if not actual support for) its ending and for the re-establishment of national border controls

the Left should demand common minimum wages in exchange for its support for the Single Market

xenophobic Right

do they truly believe that the Left will win the discursive and policy war against the fossil fuel industry by supporting the re-nationalisation of environmental policy?

Option 3: DiEM25’s proposal for disobedience

Instead, DiEM25 proposes a pan-European movement of civil and governmental disobedience with which to bring on a surge of democratic opposition to the way European elites do business at the local, national and EU levels.

national parliaments and governments have power

a progressive national government can only use this power if it is prepared for a rupture with the EU troika.

a clash with the EU establishment is inescapable.

wilfully disobeying the unenforceable EU ‘rules’ at the municipal, regional and national levels while making no move whatsoever to leave the EU.

Undoubtedly, the EU institutions will threaten us

Consider the profound difference between the following two situations: The EU establishment threatening progressive Europeanist governments with ‘exit’ when they refuse to obey its authoritarian incompetence, and Progressive national parties or governments campaigning alongside the xenophobic Right for ‘exit’.

It is the difference between: (A) Clashing against the EU establishment in a manner that preserves the spirit of internationalism, demands pan-European action, and sets us fully apart from the xenophobic Right, and (B) Walking hand-in-hand with nationalisms that will, inescapably, reinforce the xenophobic Right while allowing the EU to portray the Left as populists insufficiently distinguishable from Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen etc.

The Left’s traditional internationalism is a key ingredient of DiEM25, along with other constituent democratic traditions from a variety of political projects (including progressive liberalism, feminist and ecological movements, the ‘pirate’ parties etc.).

DiEM25 proposes a rebellion to deliver authentic democracy at the levels of local government, national governments and the EU.

This leftwing objection to DiEM25’s call for a pan-European movement is interesting and puzzling. In effect, it argues that democracy is impossible on a supranational scale because a demos must be characterised by national and cultural homogeneity.

The Left, lest we forget, traditionally opposed the bourgeois belief in a one-to-one relationship between a nation and a sovereign parliament. The Left counter-argued that identity is something we create through political struggle (class struggle, the struggle against patriarchy, the struggle for smashing gender and sexual stereotypes, emancipation from Empire etc.).

in order to create the European demos that will bring about Europe’s democracy

Only through this pan-European network of rebel cities, rebel prefectures and rebel governments can a progressive movement become hegemonic in Italy, in Greece, in England, indeed anywhere.

The question for Europe’s Left, for progressive liberals, Greens etc. is, now, whether this struggle, this project, should take the form of a campaign to leave the EU (e.g. Lexit) or, as DiEM25 suggests, of a campaign of civil, civic and governmental disobedience within but in confrontation with the EU

to those who berate DiEM25 and its call for a pan-European democratic movement as utopian, our answer is that a transnational, pan-European democracy remains a legitimate, realistic long-term goal, one that is in concert with the Left’s time honoured internationalism. But this objective must be accompanied by pragmatism and a precise plan for immediate action:

Oppose any talk of ‘more Europe’ now

Present Europeans with a blueprint (a comprehensive set of policies and actions) of how we plan to re-deploy Europe’s existing institutions

ensure that the same blueprint makes provisions for keeping internationalism alive in the event that the EU establishment’s incompetent authoritarianism causes the EU’s disintegration

“The EU will be democratised. Or it will disintegrate!”

We cannot predict which of the two (democratisation or disintegration) will occur. So, we struggle for the former while preparing for the latter.

DiEM25’s Progressive Agenda for Europe will be pragmatic, radical and comprehensive. It will comprise policies that can be implemented immediately to stabilise Europe’s social economy, while:

affording more sovereignty to city councils, prefectures and national parliaments, proposing institutional interventions and designs that will reduce the human cost in case the euro collapses and the EU fragments, and setting up a democratic Constitution Assembly process that enables Europeans to generate a European identity with which to bolster their reinvigorated national cultures, parliaments and local authorities.

Conclusion:

The EU is at an advanced stage of disintegration. There are two prospects. The EU is not past the point of no return (yet) and can, still, be democratised, stabilised, rationalised and humanised The EU is beyond the point of no return and incapable of being democratised. Therefore, its disintegration is certain, as is the clear and present danger of Europe’s descent into a postmodern version of the deflationary 1930s

So, what should progressives do?

Campaign vigorously along internationalist, cross-border, lines all over Europe for a democratic Union – even if we do not believe that the EU can, or ought to, survive in its current form Expose the EU Establishment’s authoritarian incompetence Coordinate civil, civic and governmental disobedience across Europe Illustrate through DiEM25’s own transnational structure how a pan-European democracy can work at all levels and in all jurisdictions Propose a comprehensive Progressive Agenda for Europe which includes sensible, modest, convincing proposals for ‘fixing’ the EU (the euro even) and for managing progressively the EU’s and the euro’s disintegration if and when the Establishment brings it on.

Entrepreneurs could sidestep the VCs by turning to a “swarm” of small investors — and maybe supplant the entire VC system. By the end of the summer, he’d raised more than a million dollars in cryptocurrency. The legality of the model is uncertain,

High hopes for a liberating Internet have devolved into the dominance of a few mega-companies and the NSA’s watchful algorithms. Platforms entice users to draw their communities into an apparently free and open commons, only to gradually enclose it by tweaking terms of service, diluting privacy, or charging fees for essential features.

Facebook started flocking to Ello

The line between workers and customers has never been so blurry. Online platforms depend on their users

looking for ways to build platforms of their own.

VC-backed sharing economy companies like Airbnb and Uber have caused trouble for legacy industries, but gone is the illusion that they are doing it with actual sharing.

OuiShare, which connects sharing-economy entrepreneurs around the world

it’s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever.

Loomio is now being used by governments, organizations, and schools; a significant portion of the current usage comes from Spain’s ascendant political party, Podemos.

new kinds of ownership the new norm. There are cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and countless hacks in between.

aspire toward an economy, and an Internet, that is more fully ours.

Jeremy Rifkin, a futurist to CEOs and governments, contends that the Internet-of-things and 3-D printers are ushering in a “zero marginal cost society” in which the “collaborative commons” will be more competitive than extractive corporations.

People are recognizing that doing business differently will require changing who gets to own what.

form of ownership

Cooperative intelligence

Occupy’s kind of direct democracy and made it available to the world in the form of an app — Loomio

It’s a worker-owned cooperative that produces open-source software to help people practice consensus — though they prefer the term “collaboration” — about decisions that affect their lives.

Rather than giving up on ownership, people are looking for a different way of practicing it.

Enspiral, an “open value network” of freelancers and social enterprises devoted to mutual support and the common good.

The worker cooperative is an old model that’s attracting new interest among the swelling precariat masses

Co-ops help ensure that the people who contribute to and depend on an enterprise keep control and keep profits

multi-stakeholder cooperative — one in which not just workers or consumers are voting members, but several such groups at once

“It’s more about hacking an existing legal status and making these hacks work.”

Sensorica pays workers for their contributions to the product. Unlike Sovolve, they participate in the company democratically. Everything from revenues to internal criticism is out in the open, wiki-style, for insiders and outsiders alike to see.

Only one device has been sold

Bitcoin

makes possible decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs,

The most ambitious successor to Bitcoin, Ethereum,

to develop decentralized social networks,

even an entirely new Internet

Swarm’s competition makes it hard not to notice the inequalities built into the models vying to disrupt the status quo. Bitcoin’s micro-economy holds the dubious distinction of being more unequal than the global economy as a whole. On a sharing platform, who owns, and who just rents? In an economy of cooperatives, who gets to be a member, and who gets left out?

Sooner or later, transforming a system of gross inequality and concentrated wealth will require more than isolated experiments at the fringes — it will require capturing that wealth and redirecting its flows. This recognition has been built into some of the most significant efforts under the banner of the so-called “new economy” movement. They’re often offline, but that makes them no less innovative.

connecting them to large anchor institutions in their communities; hospitals and universities with deep pockets can help a new enterprise become viable much more quickly than it can on its own

Government is an important source of support, too. Perhaps more than some go-it-aloners in tech culture might like to admit, a new economy will need new public policies

The early followers Francis of Assisi at first sought to do away with property altogether

There are many ways to own. Simply giving up on ownership, however, will mean that those who actually do own the tools that we rely on to share will control them.

changing what owning means altogether.

In Turkey, protesters have been taking to the streets and clashing with riot police for over two weeks in response to government attempts to tear down the trees and resurrect an old Ottoman-era barracks at the location of Istanbul’s beloved Gezi Park.

Now, protests over similar seemingly “trivial” local grievances are sparking mass demonstrations elsewhere. In Brazil, small-scale protests against a hike in transportation fees in Sao Paulo revealed the extreme brutality of the police force

After four nights of violent repression this week, the protests now appear to be gaining momentum.

Fed up with increasing inflation, crumbling infrastructure and stubbornly high inequality and crime rates, many Brazilians are simply outraged that the government is willing to invest billions into pharaonic projects that do not only ignore the people’s plight but actively undermine it.

Meanwhile, in Sarajevo, the inability of a family to obtain travel ID for their sick baby — who needs urgent medical attention that she cannot receive in Bosnia-Herzegovina — exposed the fundamental flaws at the heart of the nominally democratic post-Yugoslavian state. On June 5, while the government was busy negotiating with foreign bankers to attract new investment, thousands of people occupied parliament square, temporarily locking the nation’s politicians up inside and forcing the prime minister to escape through a window.

On Friday, Bulgaria joined the budding wave of struggles that began in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 and that was recently revived through the Turkish uprising. After the appointment of media (and mafia) mogul Delyan Peevski as head of the State Agency for National Security, tens of thousands took to the streets of Sofia and other cities throughout the country to protest his appointment, which was approved by parliament without any debate and with a mere 15 minutes between his nomination and his (pre-guaranteed) election.

Greece, in the meantime, finally appears to have been waken up from its austerity-induced slumber. Following the decision of the Troika’s neoliberal handmaiden, Antonis Samaras, to shut down the state’s public broadcaster ERT overnight and to fire its 2,700 workers without any warning whatsoever, the workers of ERT simply occupied the TV and radio stations and continued to emit their programs through livestreaming, making ERT the first worker-run public broadercaster in Europe.

At first sight, it may seem like these protests are all simply responses to local grievances and should be read as such. But while each context has its own specificities that must be taken into account, it would be naive to discard the common themes uniting them.

If we take a closer look at each of the protests, we find that they are not so local after all. In fact, each of them in one way or another deals with the increasing encroachment of financial interests and business power on traditional democratic processes, and the profound crisis of representation that this has wrought.

In a word, what we are witnessing is what Leonidas Oikonomakis and I have called the resonance of resistance: social struggles in one place in the world transcending their local boundaries and inspiring protesters elsewhere to take matters into their own hands and defy their governments in order to bring about genuine freedom, social justice and real democracy.

Now that has come to an end. A new Left has risen, inspired by a fresh autonomous spirit that has long since cleansed itself of the stale ideological legacies and collective self-delusions that animated the political conflicts of the Cold War and beyond. One chant of the protesters in Sao Paulo revealed it all: “Peace is over, Turkey is here!”

Among Colau’s commitments to the people of Barcelona was a local tax cut for small businesses and households, assistance to the poor, and the construction of housing for 15,000 refugees

All of this could be achieved while keeping the city’s books in the black, simply by reducing the municipal budget surplus.

Spain’s central government, citing the state’s obligations to the EU’s austerity directives, had enacted legislation effectively banning any municipality from reducing its surplus.

At the same time, the central government barred entry to the 15,000 refugees for whom Colau had built excellent housing facilities.

To this day, the budget surplus prevails, the services and local tax cuts promised have not been delivered, and the social housing for refugees remains empty. The path from this sorry state of affairs to the reinvigoration of Catalan separatism could not be clearer.

In any systemic crisis, the combination of austerity for the many, socialism for bankers, and strangulation of local democracy creates the hopelessness and discontent that are nationalism’s oxygen

Progressive, anti-nationalist Catalans, like Colau, find themselves squeezed from both sides: the state’s authoritarian establishment, which uses the EU’s directives as a cover for its behavior, and a renaissance of radical parochialism, isolationism, and atavistic nativism. Both reflect the failure to fulfill the promise of shared, pan-European prosperity.3

The duty of progressive Europeans is to reject both: the deep establishment at the EU level and the competing nationalisms ravaging solidarity and common sense in member states like Spain.

The EU treaties could be amended to enshrine the right of regional governments and city councils, like Catalonia’s and Barcelona’s, to fiscal autonomy and even to their own fiscal money

They could also be allowed to implement their own policies on refugees and migration.

EU could invoke a code of conduct for secession

As for the new state, it should be obligated to maintain at least the same level of fiscal transfers as before.

the new state should be prohibited from erecting new borders and be compelled to guarantee its residents the right to triple citizenship (new state, old state, and European).

Europe needs to develop a new type of sovereignty