Group items tagged

everything that needs to be made, has to be designed through collaborative innovation in the first place

continuous interchange and dialogue of citizens as they determine their collective life

Both civil society and the notion of citizenship can be criticized for being insufficiently inclusionary, and therefore as ‘mechanisms of exclusion’.

consisting of shared depositories of knowledge, code and design; the communities of contributors and users of such commons

infrastructures of collaboration, which are managed by a new type of ‘for-benefit associations’

democratically governed by all participants and stakeholders in such commons

which are not derived or secondary from either the private or state forms.

civil society is the locus of the shared abundance of value creation, and the place for the continual dialogue regarding the necessities of common life.

democratically decide

the ‘common good’ of society as a whole

The difference is that the commons where the immaterial value is created are positioned in a field of abundance characteristic for non-rival or anti-rival goods; while the for-benefit associations are responsible for the sometimes contentious allocation of rival infrastructures.

Whereas the commons themselves are plurarchies based on permissionless contribution, forking and other rights guaranteeing the diversity of contributions and contributors; the for-benefit associations are democratically governed.

true reform of the private sector and the corporate form.

Under conditions of the rule of capital, for-profit corporations are beholden to work for the interests of the shareholders. This format allows for the accumulation of capital, but also indirectly of political power, through the power of money to influence politics and politicians. For-profit corporations are part of a system of infinite growth and compound interest, must continuously compete with other corporations, and therefore, also minimize costs. For-profit corporations are designed to ignore negative environmental externalities by avoiding to pay the costs associated with them; and to ignore positive social externalities, also by avoiding to pay for them. In terms of sustainability, corporations practice planned obsolescence as a rule, because while the market is a scarcity allocation mechanism, capitalism itself is a scarcity maintenance and creation mechanism. Anti-sustainable practices are systemic and part of the DNA of the for-profit corporation.

Under conditions of peer production, design and innovation moves to commons-based communitiies, which lack the incentive for unsustainable design; products are inherently design for sustainability, and the production process itself is designed for openness and distribution.

designed to make the commoners and the commons themselves sustainable, by not ‘leaking’ surplus value to external shareholders

mission-oriented, community supportive, sustainability-oriented corporate forms, that operate in the marketplace but do not themselves reproduce capitalism.

surplus value stays within the commons, allows its autonomous social reproduction, and sustains the commoners

ethical mechanism that subsumes profit making under the social goal of strengthening the commons.

because commons and their communities are themselves specific, and do not automatically take into account the common good of society as a whole .

A Partner State functions center around enabling and empowering social production and abandons some of the paternalistic aspects of the welfare state by focusing on strengthening the possibilities of autonomy.

mobilization of social forces to obtain a new social contract