Commons.fi

When the announcement to close the plant was made, the workers were told that their jobs would be terminated immediately, and that they would not be given their contractually obligated backpay or severance

The workers decided to occupy the factory in protest, and the community came out in extraordinary numbers to support them. See the Michael Moore Short about it.

The workers and the community won enough of this struggle to get the money that was owed to them. A new green construction company, Serious Energy, took control of the factory and partially reopened it.

Serious Energy's business plan, which only involved the windows factory in a tertiary role, never functioned

The plan to start a new worker owned cooperative business began.

In 2008, after many decades of operation, Republic Windows and Doors went bankrupt and was shut down. This seemed odd as the windows business appeared profitable

we have decided to call it New Era, as we hope it will be an inspiration

Everyone can participate in building the economy we all want

no one should be treated as temporary or just raw material for someone else's business.

We have built the highest quality windows ever made in Chicago, ones that are soundproof and extremely energy efficient, meaning they are both green and save money. Our windows will be the best on the market at prices no one can beat.

More resources on the formation of New Era Windows Cooperative   New Era Windows, The Working World  Grand Opening of Worker-Owned Factory, As Former Republic Windows Workers Launch New Era Windows Cooperative, United Electrical Workers Worker Co-op New Era Windows Opens For Business, CommunityWealth.org Republic Windows Opens New Era for Coops in Chicago, Race, Poverty, and the Environment New Era Windows Cooperative Is Open for Business in Chicago,The Nation Chicago Workers Open New Cooperatively Owned Factory Five Years After Republic Windows Occupation, Democracy Now Window makers start manufacturing cooperative in Chicago, ABC News Former Republic Windows Employees Start Their Own Factory, CBS News

Video and Radio

While HTML5 has already brought many new capabilities to the web, it is WebRTC that will spark the most innovation. The ability to directly connect to other web browser opens a new world of possibilities for web developers, enabling new types of applications in telecommunications, gaming, and any other field involving direct user-to-user interaction.

WebRTC will also provide new challenges for government censorship and controlling regimes; the peer-to-peer streams will be very difficult to monitor and shut down.

WebRTC will cause major disruption to the billion dollar markets of video conferencing and Internet telephony. You will no longer need Skype on your desktop or smartphone, nor will you need a complex Webex or a Telepresence system.

The Internet is about to undergo a new wave of innovation. We’re moving to a world of seamless communication, directly between peers and across all devices.

the long term replacement of capitalism--an economy which socializes costs and privatizes benefits--with an economy of democratic cooperation

n economy is an ecosystem, a cyclical whole that includes processes of creation (the "original production" of natural resources by geological, biological, and energetic forces), production (human transformation of resources into goods and services), exchange, consumption (perhaps more appropriately called "use"), the processing of waste, and the recycling of surplus (sometimes called "investment").

The worker coop movement must work to build broader alliances, holistic economic and social visions, and contribute to the creation of not only more worker coops, but a transformative social movement capable of changing the culture and economy--the "social ecosystem"--in which worker coops struggle to exist.

Operating successfully in a capitalist market, worker coops can support movements for social and economic transformation

a cooperative solidarity economy

Worker cooperatives are a particular--and effective--structure for democratically organizing the production of goods and the provision of services.

link these interventions together--at every point of the economic cycle

But even a solidarity economy movement cannot succeed without being intimately linked to broader social change work. It is our connections with the work of anti-racism, feminism, queer liberation, environmental justice, ecological sustainablility, immigrant's rights, counter-recruitment and peace advocacy, labor organizing, grassroots community development, and other movements for cultural and insitutional change that will generate the collective power and momentum needed to effect long-term transformation and generate widespread, committed support for worker cooperatives as economic and social-change insitutions.

Indeed, to create conditions under which their success is increasingly possible, worker cooperatives must work to generate, sustain and support institutions at all other points of the economic cycle.

constructing reliable markets

for goods and services produced by worker cooperatives.

from a passive place of "entering markets" to an active place of constructing them

What does this "movement building" look like?

the creation of a shared story and through this, the development of long-term solidarity between worker cooperatives and other groups working for democratic, community-based economies such as local currencies, consumer cooperatives, housing coops and intentional communities, economic justice advocacy groups, neighborhood associations, local food system projects and more

solidarity economy

Further examples from the solidarity economy movement outside of the U.S. abound. I delve into some of these more deeply in GEO's recent collaborative issue with Dollars and Sense (see Ethan Miller, "Other Economies Are Possible".)

We must, instead, work to transform the very terms of the economic game.

Green Worker Cooperatives

Red Emma's

Wooden Shoe Books

Electric Embers

Riseup

Gaiahost Collective

Brattleboro Tech Collective

pioneers of cross-sector movement-building

it is the work that we as cooperators must embrace if we choose to believe that another economy, and another world, is possible

wasteful overuse is a tragedy of the unmanaged commons

creating private property

If cooperation fails, nobody can use the resource.

Each one can block the others’ use

Commons property refers to shared resources, resources for which there is no single decision maker.

a brief overview of the anticommons lexicon

three basic types: private, commons, and state property

private property

private property is about an individual decision maker who directs resource use.

a hidden tragedy of the anti­commons.

open access

open access

group access

differs from open access: an anticommons is often invisible

process that is, in principle, responsive to the needs of the public

Privatizing a commons may cure the tragedy of wasteful overuse, but it may inadvertently spark the opposite.

too many people can block each other from creating or using a valuable resource. Rightly understood, the opposite of overuse in a commons is underuse in an anticommons.

clear rights and ordinary markets are not enough

Wasteful underuse can arise when ownership rights and regulatory controls are too fragmented.

The anticommons parallel to open access is full exclusion in which an unlimited number of people may block each other.

With full exclusion, states must expropriate fragmented rights or create hybrid property regimes so people can bundle their ownership

State propert

group exclusion in which a limited number of owners can block each other. For both group access and group exclusion, the full array of market-based, cooperative, and regulatory solutions is available.

For group exclusion resources, the regulatory focus should be support for markets to assemble ownership and removal of roadblocks to cooperation.

Much of the modern economy – corporations, partnerships, trusts, condominiums, even marriages – can be understood as legally structured group property forms for resolving access and exclusion dilemmas

drug patents

“if commons leads to ‘tragedy,’ anticommons may well lead to ‘disaster’”

underuse caused by multiple owners is unfamiliar

we need to name the phenomenon: the tragedy of the anticommons should join our lexicon.

Heller, M. 1998. “The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets.” Harvard Law Review. 111:621.

in Brazil today. CoopHab is a major housing federation of co-operative savings societies.

During the industrial revolution English working people were excluded from bank lending though pawnbroking was rife. Mutual aid savings clubs developed interest-free lending systems for housing. The most successful were the Terminating Building Societies for buying land and building houses.

Sweden

Operationally, JAK is very similar to a credit union, except that members do not earn any interest on their savings or dividends on their shares.

The total cost of a JAK loan covers four things:(12)loan appraisal and set-up cost at a fee that is 2-3% of the approved loan value.an annual administration fee equal to 1% of the loan.an annual fee of approximately $30 to support the JAK educational system and volunteer services.(13)an equity deposit equal to a 6% of loan value to cover risk on any loan in the portfolio.

Members are strongly encouraged to pre-save in order to qualify for a loan.(15) Members also contract to continue saving while they are repaying their loans.

The Greenbacks would not be backed by gold, but by the farmers’ crops, which would be stored in sub-Treasury warehouses paid for by the government.

Swiss WiR

President Lincoln

free Greenback dollars

Lincoln

he had led the introduction of a paper money not backed by gold or silver, and had shown that the government could create, issue, and circulate by fiat the currency and credit needed to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of consumers.

the privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of government, but it is the government’s greatest creative opportunity.

National Farmers Alliance and Co-operative Union, led by Charles Macune, developed the Sub-Treasury Plan.

JAK banking, CoopHab and Community Land Trusts work well but are below national policy radar. This is not entirely the case for co-operative commonwealth systems.

So this was not simply a co-operative currency. It was a new national currency under a co-operative and state partnership to expunge the debt peonage imposed by merchants and bankers.

Infuriated, farmers and workers created their own party in 1891 to carry forwardmonetary reform and a co-operative economy. The new Populist party won some local, state and Congressional elections before falling into decline after 1895.

A.C. Townley launched the Non-partisan League (NPL)

Bank of North Dakota

Henry Ford and Thomas Edison suggested a novel solution.

proposed that new money be created by issuing interest-free government bonds

Frederick Soddy

made the first case for an ecological economics free of debt

“100% money.”

100% reserve requirement.

Clifford H Douglas

He argued that a clear-cut and labour-saving solution would be for Government to create new money, interest-free as “Social Credit.”

First all citizens would receive a National Dividend.

Second, Douglas proposed that publicly-owned producer banks be set up in each region of the UK to provide finance debt-free to industry and enterprises.

From 1929 monetary reform attracted a wide audience In the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the USA and Canada with growing grassroots calls ranging from public banking to universal basic income.(34) The New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt took inspiration from John Maynard Keynes.

b) to artificially inflate the price and profitability of labour inputs

Things that in all previous eras of capitalism the elite desired to be as cheap as possible—to ease wage pressures—are now made as expensive as possible

capital migrates away from production and from private-sector services towards public sector services.

capitalism being replaced by a stagnant neo-feudalism

central bank, pumping money into the system

the state, propping up effectively insolvent banks

the migrant labour exploiter

the innovator someone who invents a way of extracting rent from low-wage people

But as soon as technology allowed it, we started to create organisations where the positive effects of networked collaboration were not captured by the market.

Wikipedia

Fortunately there is a third impact of info-tech. It has begun to create organisational and business models where collaboration is more important than price or value.

Linux

the platform co-operatives

The technology itself is in revolt against the monopolised ownership of intellectual property, and the private capture of externalities.

We must promote the transition to a non-capitalist form of economy which unleashes all the suppressed potential of information technology, for productivity, well.being and culture.

The strategic aim is: to reduce the amount of work done to the minimum; to move as much as possible of human activity out of the market and state sectors into the collaborative sector; to produce more stuff for free.

If the aim is for humanity to do as little work as possible, you can do it through three mechanisms. One is to automate. The other is to reduce the input costs to labour, so that we can survive on less wages and less work. The third is to push forward rapidly the de-linking of work and wages.

The city is where the networked individual wants to live

First—be overt. Help people to conceptualise the transition by actually talking about it.

Next—switch off the great neoliberal privatisation machine.

We know what it’s there for—to hand public assets to the private sector so that the profits of decaying businesses are temporarily boosted

The next proposal is more radical: model reality as a complex system.

Next—promote the basic income.

The basic income is an idea whose time is coming, because there won’t be enough work to go around. For me the basic income is a one-off subsidy for automation—to un-hook humanity from bullshit job creation and promote the delinking of work and wages.

However, it’s a transitional measure.

Next—actively promote the collaborative sector over the market and the state.

You have to understand the benefits of these entities are not completely measurable in GDP terms.

The building block is the co-op, the credit union, the NGO, the non-profit company, the peer-to-peer lender and the purely voluntary or social enterprise.

You have to promote new ways of measuring activity and progress.

Finally, understand and fight the battle over the externalities.

the state and eventually the commons should have first rights to all the data just the same as in a republic it owns all the land

Ultimately, however, the greatest good comes from the common ownership and exploitation of data, because it establishes the principle that this vast new information resource—which is our collaborative behaviour captured as data—is part of the commons.

Would capitalism collapse?

But you would attract the most innovative capitalists on earth, and you would make the city vastly more livable for the million-plus people who call it home.

No. The desperate, frantic “survival capitalists” would go away—the rip-off consultancies; the low-wage businesses; the rent-extractors.

All the other challenges would remain: the environmental challenge—not just low carbon but the preservation of quality living environments in a city sometimes deluged with visitors. Also the ageing challenge and the debt challenge.

a common platform for the left, for social democracy and for liberal capitalism

I could be completely wrong. But if I am right, it makes sense for all cities to ask themselves: could we become the first city to begin a demonstrable and tangible transition away from neoliberal capitalism, towards a society of high equality, high well-being, high collaboration?

the collaborative city, the city of participatory democracy, the networked city