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Indeed, the native Americans whom Captain John Smith encountered in 1606 only worked four hours a week. The origin of May Day is to be found in the Woodland Epoch of History.

people honored the woods

Trees were planted. Maypoles were erected. Dances were danced. Music was played. Drinks were drunk, and love was made. Winter was over, spring had sprung.

the key moment of class struggle is the struggle over property rights.  Those who want an economy that works should focus on property rights.

 The agenda is to use debt to privatise more of the economy so education, health care, water provision are owned by distant owners and swopped around to make profit.  A commons based economy puts these and other resources into the hands of local people to manage not for short term greed and the whims of bond markets but for long term need.  Politics is essentially about property rights and the often invisible battles must be made visible and won

There is an intellectual task to show that commons, perhaps termed communism, or democratic ownership of society by communities, works

‘Fearless Cities’, a gathering of over 700 people, representing dozens of experiments in taking power at city level, to empower citizens’ movements worldwide. More than a coming together of a series of local experiments, it marked the ‘coming out’ party for a new global social movement.

A wave of new municipalist movements has been experimenting with how to take – and transform – power in cities large and small.

it became necessary to change who the movement made demands of.

1. Conventional Incubators are not viable in themselves.  Instead they act as a business development tool for “side-car” investors trying to pick winners.  We think you need an incubator that exists to serve its incubatees.2. Conventional Incubators look for a 1-in-1000 unicorn to repay their many wrong bets.  We think you need an incubator that creates businesses of value that go the distance.3. Conventional Incubators looks for exceptional talent.  We think you need an incubator for collective endeavours4. Conventional Incubators function with a top-down approach.  We think you need an incubator that harnesses the wisdom of the crowd.5. Conventional Incubators promote returns for the 1%.  We think you need an incubator where 1 Member = 1 Vote6. Conventional Incubators run for 6-months.  We think you need an incubator that supports the whole period of development from formation through to operation.

We help any type of Cooperative to ‘Form, Organise, Fund and Operate‘.  The exciting areas of new CoOp formation include:– Community Owned Enterprises – anything from a pub to a post-office, school to satellite, house to hospital– Platform or Online CoOperatives – these are being created by online communities in place of Venture Capital backed 2-sided marketplaces

Collaborative ventures employ a variety of tools (web apps, social media, wikis etc.) and strategies (regular group meetings, webinars etc.) to make working as a group functional.There are some challenges with working as a group that aren’t solved by todays technology and they include1. Reaching a timely and productive consensus that in turn creates “collaboration paralysis“.  2. Groups try to be decentralised, but often most have a bottleneck around finance related decisions.3. Collectives need a way to track and incentivise efforts with non-financial and / or financial rewards and4. Groups need a way to create agreement contingent on future outcomes on the blockchain to improve trust within commerce

Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler.[1] It describes a new model of socio-economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the Internet) into large, meaningful projects mostly without traditional hierarchical organization.

Yochai Benkler contrasts commons-based peer production with firm production (in which tasks are delegated based on a central decision-making process) and market-based production (in which tagging different prices to different tasks serves as an incentive to anyone interested in performing a task).

The term was first introduced and described in Yochai Benkler's seminal paper "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm".[2] Yochai Benkler's 2006 book, The Wealth of Networks, expands significantly on these ideas.

Flashpoints—those unexpected events that movements gather around, when everything is accelerated, exciting, and energizing—fizzle.

The cooperative movement is experiencing a string of these moments now, and is burgeoning with renewed activity. I see this first­hand as a co­-owner of the Toolbox for Education and Social Action (TESA), a worker­-owned cooperative

It’s our philosophy that cooperatives enable direct democracy and local control over the economy. As participants in the co­op movement, we help to turn flashpoints into lasting social change.

It is commonly acknowledged that there is a legislative gap concerning the protection and recognition of the sphere of Commons (1). The consequence of these inadequate legal guarantees is the extreme vulnerability of Commons, which remain without protection from processes of “enclosure”, due both to the market and to public policies in favour of privatization, in their various forms. (2)

A first preliminary step is the drafting of a catalogue of Commons (3), both at the national and European level, albeit in the knowledge that it must remain a potentially open and updatable catalogue

A catalogue which forms the basis for a Charter

Move beyond the superficial public discussions about Bitcoin, and you’ll discover a software breakthrough that could be of enormous importance to the future of commoning on open network platforms.

Blockchain technology

can validate the authenticity of an individual bitcoin without the need for a third-party guarantor such as a bank or government body

Decentralised topologies and non-discriminatory protocols have been all but replaced by a recentralisation of infrastructure, as powerful corporations now gatekeep our networks. Everything might be accessible, but this access is mediated by a centralised entity. Whoever controls the data centre exercises political and economic control over communications. It’s difficult to see how we can counteract these recentralising tendencies in order to build a common core infrastructure.

These centralising tendencies have also reared their head in cryptocurrencies.

powerful mining pools now control much of the infrastructure and rent-seeking individuals control a lion’s share of Bitcoin’s value.

Usury is little discussed today but it is crucial in policy terms.

in Germany, Christian Christiansen championed the founding of a number of rural savings and loan co-operatives that went by the acronym JAK, short for Jord Arbete Kapital (“Land Labour Capital”)

There were other models that flourished. Dr. Thomas Bowkett introduced a mutual organization in the 1840s to provide housing and smaller loans interest-free.(7) Twenty years later, Richard Starr made some adjustments to the system, and the “Starr-Bowkett” societies spread fast.

Experiments with cooperatively owned online platforms are demonstrating that democratic business models can be a dynamic force in building a more equitable economy for people across various income, race and class strata, starting with the most vulnerable populations.

Since the first platform cooperativism event at The New School two years ago, an ecosystem of people, knowledge, and tools has developed around this model.

To think and act our way out of the current crisis, we need to understand the roots of these extractive business models. With such insight, we will be able to build alternatives that best meet the needs of workers, consumers, and citizens.