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Whoever owns the platforms that help us share decides who accumulates wealth from them, and how

Léonard and his collaborators are part of a widespread effort to make new kinds of ownership the new norm. There are cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and countless hacks in between. Plans are being made for a driver-owned Lyft, a cooperative version of eBay, and Amazon Mechanical Turk workers are scheming to build a crowdsourcing platform they can run themselves. Each idea has its prospects and shortcomings, but together they 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

once the VC-backed sharing companies clear away regulatory hurdles, local co-ops will be poised to swoop in and spread the wealth

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

“We’re moving into a new economic age,” says Marjorie Kelly, who spent two decades at the helm of Business Ethics magazine and now advises social entrepreneurs. “It needs to be sustainable. It needs to be inclusive. And the foundation of what defines an economic age is its form of ownership.”

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.

From the start Loomio was part of Enspiral, an “open value network“ of freelancers and social enterprises devoted to mutual support and the common good.

a companion tool, CoBudget, to help them allocate resources together

The team members recently had to come to terms with the fact that, for the time being, only some of them could be paid for full-time work They called the process “participatory downsizing.”

And they can take many forms. Loomio and other tech companies, for instance, are aspiring toward the model of a multi-stakeholder cooperative—one in which not just workers or consumers are voting members, but several such groups at once.

Loconomics is a San Francisco-based startup designed, like TaskRabbit, to manage short-term freelance jobs

“People who have been without for a long time,” she says, “often operate with a mindset that they can’t share what they have, because they don’t know when that resource will come along again.”

As Loconomics prepares to begin operations this winter, it’s running out of the pocket of the founder, Josh Danielson

The ambition of a cooperative Facebook or Uber—competitive, widespread, and owned by its community—still seems out of reach for enterprises not willing to sell large parts of themselves to investors. Organizations like 

His fellow OuiShare founder Benjamin Tincq is concerned that too much fixation on a particular model will make it hard for well-meaning ventures to be successful. “I like the idea that we don’t need to have a specific legal status,” he says. “It’s more about hacking an existing legal status and making these hacks work.”

Fenton’s new undertaking, Sovolve, proposes to “create innovative solutions to accelerate social change,” much as CouchSurfing did, but it’s doing the innovating cautiously. All work is done by worker-owners located around the world. Sovolve uses an internal platform—soon to become a product in its own right—through which contributors decide how much they want to be paid in cash and how much in equity. They can see how much others are earning. Their virtual workplace is gamified, with everyone working to nudge their first product, WonderApp, into virality

Loomio’s members use a similar system, which they call Loomio Points. But Sovolve is no cooperative; contributors are not in charge.

Open-source software and share-alike licenses have revived the ancient idea of the commons for an Internet age. But the “ commons-based peer production“ that Sensorica seeks to practice doesn’t arise overnight. Just as today’s business culture rests on generations of accumulated law, habit, and training, learning to manage a commons successfully takes time

It makes possible decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, which exist entirely on a shared network

The most ambitious successor to Bitcoin, Ethereum, has raised more than $15 million in crowdfunding on the promise of creating such a network.

all with technology that makes collective ownership a lot easier than a conventional legal structure

A project called Eris is developing a collective decision-making tool designed to govern DAOs on Ethereum, though the platform may still be months from release.

For now, the burden of reinventing every wheel at once makes it hard for companies like Sensorica and Loomio to compete

For instance, Cutting Edge Capital specializes in helping companies raise money through a long-standing mechanism called the direct public investment, or DPO, which allows for small, non-accredited investors.

Venture funding may be in competition with Dietz’s cryptoequity vision, but it provides a fearsome head start

Co-ops help ensure that the people who contribute to and depend on an enterprise keep control and keep profits, so they’re a possible remedy for worsening economic inequality

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

A less consensual strategy was employed to fund the Catalan Integral Cooperative in Spain; over the course of a few years, one activist borrowed around $600,000 from Spanish banks without paying any of it back.

In Jackson, Mississippi, Chokwe Lumumba was elected mayor in 2013 on a platform of fostering worker-owned cooperatives, although much of the momentum was lost when Lumumba died just a few months later.

We now have a technology which allows us to globally scale small group dynamics, and to create huge productive communities, self-organized around the collaborative production of knowledge, code, and design. But the key issue is that we are not able to live from that, right

A lot of co-ops have been neo-liberalizing, as it were, have become competitive enterprises competing against other companies but also against other co-ops, and they don’t share their knowledge

We cannot create our own livelihood within that sphere

instead of having a totally open commons, which allows multinationals to use our commons and reinforce the system of capital, the idea is to keep the accumulation within the sphere of the commons.

The result would be a type of open cooperative-ism, a kind of synthesis or convergence between peer production and cooperative modes of production

then the material work, the work of working for clients and making a livelihood, would be done through co-ops

But it hasn’t had much of a direct connection to this emerging commons movement, which shares so many of the values and  principles of the traditional cooperative movement.

There’s also a lot of peer-to-peer work going on, but it’s not very well versed around issues like cooperative organization, formal or legal forms of ownership, which are based on reciprocity and cooperation, and how to interpret the commons vision with a structure, an organizational structure and a legal structure that actually gives it economic power, market influence, and a means of connecting it to organizational forms that have durability over the long-term.

The young people, the developers in open source or free software, the people who are in co-working centers, hacker spaces, maker spaces. When they are thinking of making a living, they think startups

They have a kind of generic reaction, “oh, let’s do a startup”, and then they look for venture funds. But this is a very dangerous path to take

Typically, the venture capital will ask for a controlling stake, they have the right to close down your start up whenever they feel like it, when they feel that they’re not going to make enough money

Don’t forget that with venture capital, only 1 out of 10 companies will actually make it, and they may be very rich, but it’s a winner-take-all system

we don’t have what Marx used to call social reproduction

I would like John to talk about the solidarity co-ops, and how that integrates the notion of the commons or the common good in the very structure of the co-op

They don’t have a commons of design or code, they privatize and patent, just like private competitive enterprise, their knowledge

Cooperatives, which are basically a democratic and collective form of enterprise where members have control rights and democratically direct the operations of the co-op, have been the primary stakeholders in any given co-op – whether it’s a consumer co-op, or a credit union, or a worker co-op.

Primarily, the co-op is in the service of its immediate members

What was really fascinating about the social co-ops was that, although they had members, their mission was not only to serve the members but also to provide service to the broader community

In the city of Bologna, for example, over 87% of the social services provided in that city are provided through contract with social co-ops

democratically run

much more participatory, and a much more engaged model

The difference, however, is that the structure of social co-ops is still very much around control rights, in other words, members have rights of control and decision-making within how that organization operates

And it is an incorporated legal structure that has formal recognition by the legislation of government of the state, and it has the power, through this incorporated power, to negotiate with and contract with government for the provision of these public services

In Québec they’re called Solidarity co-ops

So, the social economy, meaning organizations that have a mutual aim in their purpose, based on the principles of reciprocity, collective benefit, social benefit, is emerging as an important player for the design and delivery of public services

This, too, is in reaction to the failure of the public market for provision of services like affordable housing or health care or education services

This is a crisis in the role of the state as a provider of public services. So the question has emerged: what happens when the state fails to provide or fulfill its mandate as a provider or steward of public goods and services, and what’s the role of civil society and the social economy in response?

we have commonses of knowledge, code and design. They’re more easily created, because as a knowledge worker, if you have access to the network and some means, however meager, of subsistence, through effort and connection you can actually create knowledge. However, this is not the case if you move to direct physical production, like the open hardware movement

I originally encountered Michel after seeing some talks by Benkler and Lessig at the Wizard of OS 4, in 2006, and I wrote an essay criticizing that from a materialist perspective, it was called “The creative anti-commons and the poverty of networks”, playing on the terms that both those people used.

In hardware, we don’t see that, because you need to buy material, machines, plastic, metal.

Some people have called the open hardware community a “candy” economy, because if you’re not part of these open hardware startups, you’re basically not getting anything for your efforts

democratic foundations like the Apache foundation

They conceive of peer production, especially Benkler, as being something inherently immaterial, a form of production that can only exist in the production of immaterial wealth

From my materialist point of view, that’s not a mode of production, because a mode of production must, in the first place, reproduce its productive inputs, its capital, its labor, and whatever natural wealth it consumes

From a materialist point of view, it becomes  obvious that the entire exchange value produced in these immaterial forms would be captured by the same old owners of materialist wealth

different definition of peer production

independent producers collectively sharing a commons of productive assets

I wanted to create something like a protocol for the formation and allocation of physical goods, the same way we have TCP/IP and so forth, as a way to allocate immaterial goods

share and distribute and collectively create immaterial wealth, and become independent producers based on this collective commons.

One was the Georgist idea of using rent, economic rent, as a fundamental mutualizing source of wealth

Mutualizing unearned income

So, the unearned income, the portion of income derived from ownership of productive assets is evenly distributed

This protocol would seek to normalize that, but in a way that doesn’t require administration

typical statist communist reaction to the cooperative movement is saying that cooperatives can exclude and exploit one another

But then, as we’ve seen in history, there’s something that develops called an administrative class,  which governs over the collective of cooperatives or the socialist state, and can become just as counterproductive and often exploitive as capitalist class

So, how do we create cooperation among cooperatives, and distribution of wealth among cooperatives, without creating this administrative class?

This is why I borrowed from the work of Henry George and Silvio Gesell in created this idea of rent sharing.

This is not done administratively, this is simply done as a protocol

The idea is that if a cooperative wants an asset, like, an example is if one of the communes would like to have a tractor, then essentially the central commune is like a bond market. They float a bond, they say I want a tractor, I am willing to pay $200 a month for this tractor in rent, and other members of the cooperative can say, hey, yeah, that’s a good idea,we think that’s a really good allocation of these productive assets, so we are going to buy these bonds. The bond sale clears, the person gets the tractor, the money from the rent of the tractor goes back to clear the bonds, and  after that, whatever further money is collected through the rent on this tractor – and I don’t only mean tractors, same would be applied to buildings, to land, to any other productive assets – all this rent that’s collected is then distributed equally among all of the workers.

The idea is that people earn income not only by producing things, but by owning the means of production, owning productive assets, and our society is unequal because the distribution of productive assets is unequal

This means that if you use your exact per capita share of property, no more no less than what you pay in rent and what you received in social dividend, will be equal

But if you’re not working at that time, because you’re old, or otherwise unemployed, then obviously the the productive assets that you will be using will be much less than the mean and the median, so what you’ll receive as dividend will be much more than what you pay in rent, essentially providing a basic income

venture communism doesn’t seek to control the product of the cooperatives

It doesn’t seek to limit, control, or even tell them how they should distribute it, or under what means; what they produce is entirely theirs, it’s only the collective management of the commons of productive assets

On paper this would seem to work, but the problem is that this assumes that we have capital to allocate in this way, and that is not the case for most of the world workers

how do we get to that stage?

other two being counter politics and insurrectionary finance

do we express our activism through the state, or do we try to achieve our goals by creating the alternative society outside

pre-figurative politics, versus statist politics

My materialist background tells me that when you sell your labor on the market, you have nothing more than your subsistence costs at the end of it, so where is this wealth meant to come from

I believe that the only reason that we have any extra wealth beyond subsistence is because of organized social political struggle; because we have organized in labor movements, in the co-op movement, and in other social forms

To create the space for prefiguring presupposes engagement with the state, and struggle within parliaments, and struggle within the public social forum

Instead, we should think that no, we must engage in the state in order to protect our ability to have alternative societies

We can only get rid of the state in these areas once we have alternative, distributed, cooperative means to provide those same functions

We can only eliminate the state from these areas once they actually exist, which means we actually have to build them

What I mean by insurrectionary finance is that we have to acknowledge that it’s not only forming capital and distributing capital, it’s also important how intensively we use capital

I’m not proposing that the cooperative movement needs to engage in the kind of derivative speculative madness that led to the financial crisis, but at the same time we can’t… it can’t be earn a dollar, spend a dollar

We have to find ways to create liquidity

to deal with economic cycles

they did things the organized left hasn’t been able to do, which is takeover industrial means of production

if they can take over these industrial facilities, just in order to shut them down and asset strip them, why can’t we take them over and mutualize them?

more ironic once you understand that the source of investment that Milken and his colleagues were working with were largely workers pension funds

idea of venture communism

pooling, based on the capture of unearned income

in Québec, there is a particular form of co-op that’s been developed that allows small or medium producers to pool their capital to purchase machinery and to use it jointly

The other idea I liked was trying to minimize a management class

much more lean and accountable because they are accountable to boards of directors that represent the interests of the members

I’ve run into this repeatedly among social change activists who immediately recoil at the notion of thinking about markets and capital, as part of their change agenda

I had thought previously, like so many, that economics is basically a bought discipline, and that it serves the interests of existing elites. I really had a kind of reaction against that

complete rethinking of economics

recapture the initiative around vocabulary, and vision, with respect to economics

reimagining and reinterpreting, for a popular and common good, the notion of market and capital

advocating for a vision of social change that isn’t just about politics, and isn’t just about protest, it has to be around how do we reimagine and reclaim economics

markets actually belong to communities and people

capital wasn’t just an accumulated wealth for the rich

I think what we’re potentially  talking about here is to make the social economy hyper-productive, hyper-competitive, hyper-cooperative

The paradox is that capital already knows this. Capital is investing in these peer production projects

Part of the proposal of the FLOK society project in Ecuador will be to get that strategic reorganization to make the social economy strategic